7 ms·

Apparently the prices are scraped from the mobile app. I installed the mobile app and for some reason, and that location can’t be found inside the mobile app. A

Apparently the prices are scraped from the mobile app. I installed the mobile app and for some reason, and that location can’t be found inside the mobile app. Actually, you cannot (I can’t anyway) order from that location from the website either. It just goes to show data cleaning is hard. It’s true for statistics and it’s probably just as true for LLMs.

Loughla 2y ago
Why does Taco Bell have an app? What is its purpose?
- batch12 2y ago
  The purpose of the McDonalds app seems to be to replace cashiers. I assume the Taco Bell app was created for the same reason.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I assume many/most of the people regularly eating at these places are very price sensitive. And, especially with demographic shifts in the West, non-premium places are going to be doing everything in their power to replace employees with automation and self-service. A lot of shoppers may grumble but they'll go with the lower prices.
  - RobRivera 2y ago
    The goal of the mcd app is to generate growth metrics in the tech domain to inflate their ticker value through data mining, and coercion is happening through i flating prices and then offering discounts just by downloading the apps. It's absolutely rubbish short sightedness to price pressure people into using your app. Techno fascism never looked so bland
- nemomarx 2y ago
  lots of fast food have apps that track purchasing and give you coupons or deals that you can't get just ordering in the store now. It's like loyalty cards for McDonald's or tb.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    This is the real answer. Price discrimination used to involve physical coupons, but now the coupons are in the app. Since apps are easier to obtain (and have in your pocket at all times) than physical coupons, the price discrepancy (between full price and discounted price) is wider than ever, to ensure revenue is sustained despite the higher percentage of discounted orders. That means high menu prices making the news, ostensibly due only to costs (inflation, minimum wage, rent, etc.) but actually due in part to app discounting. I installed the Wendy's app a while back, and by optimizing my selections, all of my orders since then have cost less than half of menu prices on average. For example, get a $3 item for $1 with any other purchase (so you tack on a $1 frosty), or buy a $6 item get another free. Taco Bell's app deals aren't quite as deep but you get the point. When tons of people are placing orders this way, menu prices must creep up to compensate.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      I've come to realize I don't want to put that kind of brain energy into ordering fast food. So I just stopped going. I make up some refried beans and some meat (normally chili verde) and freeze them (separately) for when I want 'fast food'. If I have to play (and learn how to maximize) some corporate dark pattern games then nah, I'm good bro.
      - hunter2_ 2y ago
        The friction of playing the game is how price discrimination has always worked, whether clipping coupons or fiddling with apps. You either spend time to pay less (and perhaps brag about it to make smalltalk just like this, which is like volunteer advertising) or you spend more to save time. It's weird, but it's actually an incredible way for the more well-off to subsidize the less well-off (at the risk of enticing some folks, who have the means but love a deal, to be penny-wise pound-foolish at everyone's expense including their own). At the end of the day, more people get fed at the price point they can deal with.
        im3w1l 2y ago
- tialaramex 2y ago
  I would imagine they let you order food and then when you arrive your food is already made?
  - epiccoleman 2y ago
    Essentially yes, except they make it when you arrive (at least if you pick up in the drive through). This is good design, because food from Taco Bell has an expiration date of about 3 minutes after it's cooked. It's good (well, not good, but it's food) right when it comes out, but once it cools down a bit it becomes essentially inedible.
    - tiznow 2y ago
      The craziest thing anyone ever did was reheat a 5-layer beefy burrito.
- jt2190 2y ago
  U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the restaurant profitable. (Land cost is the other big expense.)
  - gowld 2y ago
    None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
    - hunter2_ 2y ago
      For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering). As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        also, there's only so many kiosks available just like there's only so many human staffed registers. This means there's potential for waiting in line. If every one has an app, there's no line. Ever. Well, except for when you show up to pick up your order and have to wait for everyone else. Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
      - vundercind 2y ago
        I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
        2y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Many of their stores don't have cashier's. You have to use a kiosk or the app.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    I stopped at roadside plaza and was completely cultural illiterate on how to order food. 100 miles from my home.
  - gowld 2y ago
    Someone should invent a way to communicate without requiring a a 1:n app for every destination. They should make some kind of n:n web that connects everyone to every destination.
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      The n:n web won’t win unless the destinations make money directly from traffic.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    The weirdest experience I had was a local burger joint I walked into that was completely empty with nobody eating there and nobody working at the counter and it didn't help that the decor was completely "blacked out". My first impression was that it wasn't open but I placed my order on a (ordinary sized) tablet and got my food and the people who came out to serve it were really nice. The other day I was at McD's and an elderly lady was stressin' it because she had no idea what to do. There were two cash registers but nobody staffing them and a disorganized group of people waiting for their food and not even a clear queue for the people behind the counter to see that somebody was waiting. She asked me what to do and I told her she could order at the register but a minute later I realized I was standing in front of the register waiting for my food and that probably the workers wouldn't see her. I stepped out of the way and made sure she was highly visible at the register and when I got my food I told the worker that this woman was waiting for her food and she seemed quite annoyed but I didn't feel I could take it for granted they were paying attention.
- frogpelt 2y ago
  Can’t tell if serious. Everything has an app. And pretty soon everything will have an “AI”.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this, I had my passenger try and place our order. At the end of the process the app let us know we can't order online from that store. So my conclusion it is just a data harvesting scheme.
  - SilasX 2y ago
    >Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this... the app let us know we can't order online from that store. FWIW, as one data point, this is what I've used it for a few times, and it worked without issue. (A co-working space has it next door and that made it a lot more time-efficient, avoiding the line and having to wait in store.) Though I have run into the problem you've described with other services, where it rejects your request much later than it should. Like with AWS letting you configure a server for launch before informing you that you don't have permission to launch servers: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-tech-jokes-with.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...
- astura 2y ago
  To order food. You can also place your order on the website.
- bregma 2y ago
  (1) Studies have shown that patron will make larger and more frequent orders when placed through an app rather than in person. This increases revenues. (2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain. (3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.
  - eldaisfish 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - bregma 2y ago
      It came from someone for whom modern "AI" is indistinguishable from a Potemkin village.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      (1) My advisor in grad school taught me to speak in bulleted lists (2) It's a habit I've been trying to break in the LLM age. (3) I am always telling Copilot to knock it off with those stupid lists and just talk normal.
    - soperj 2y ago
      the LLM was trained on their posts.
    - square_usual 2y ago
      No LLM would make the naloxone joke - they're all too sanitized for that.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    In addition, price discrimination: you can offer deals in the app to price-sensitive consumers that don't cannibalise in-store sales from convenience-sensitive ones. Same concept as couponing.
- yashap 2y ago
  I’ve never used it, but I’ve used the Starbucks app a bunch. Order on the app when I’m 5-10 mins away, and can just roll up and grab my food/drink, vs waiting in line, ordering/paying, then waiting for prep. Useful when you’re tight on time or just don’t feel like waiting. I assume the Taco Bell app is similar.
- Rastonbury 2y ago
  Targeted offers to make you order, think promos they offer through the app instead of blasting it on TV commercials it's much cheaper, loyalty rewards and also order for pick up to save time. I don't have taco bell app, experience is from international McDonald's app
- burningChrome 2y ago
  I liken it to the impulse aisle at the grocery store. In my experience, they will send you discounts (BOGO) or free stuff when you're most likely to buy. One of my teammates and I both installed their mobile app. I would get free coupons for like nachos or a taco on the days that I regularly went, usually in the mornings and the coupons were only good for about 24 hours. Conversely, my hockey teammate used to get his later in the afternoon because he was religious about stopping on the way home from our gams which was usually pretty late at night. They're banking on (and usually right) that if they give you a small carrot for something free, you'll use the app to buy more stuff. In my experience it really took a lot for me to not buy more than I needed. So I would include the freebie along with whatever else I was buying to try and save a buck or two. Whereas my teammate would get his normal order plus whatever freebie they were offering. either way, it worked. Many times instead of going somewhere else, I would go there, and use their mobile app and get my freebies.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Not specific to taco bell but I like to order in person personally, but will seek out an app if I have a large order to put in and want to make sure I get all the adjustments right.
- jldugger 2y ago
  Just to add more comments to this: 0. You can set up favorite orders, and get all the nutrition info you care to. And make fiddly custom orders without worrying someone will screw up typing it in. 1. They don't have to pay a cashier to type in your order if you do it for them. And it's more likely to be correct, and more likely to make upsells (would you like to add a drink to your order?). More cynically, you can't complain that their cashier doesn't understand English since you are now the cashier. 2. Price discrimination. Fast food is an unusual mix of fast and cheap, and not everyone values those two equally. Cheap customers can spend time clipping coupons and browsing app deals while fast customers can make their order via drive through without having to futz around while driving. The app replaces newspaper circulars and mailers, esp now that nobody subscribes to local news anymore. 3. You can order ahead, increasing table turn time, spending less time at their limited seating and limited parking. And you spend less time waiting in line to order, waiting for your order to be prepared. 4. It functions as a loyalty program, buy 10 get one free style (but a bit more complicated). 5. Less fighting over coupons at the counter for the franchisees that don't want to accept them - the app just refuses them. And frankly, some of the penny pincher franchisees may not be savvy enough to set up refusals. 6. If a location runs out of something they can flag it and you won't show up disappointed they can't fill your order. Or they can advertise a per-store menu.
lavishlatern 2y ago
Taking mobile orders usually requires accepting coupons/rewards programs which franchise owners are not always obligated to participate.

Loughla 2y ago

Why does Taco Bell have an app? What is its purpose?

batch12 2y ago
The purpose of the McDonalds app seems to be to replace cashiers. I assume the Taco Bell app was created for the same reason.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I assume many/most of the people regularly eating at these places are very price sensitive. And, especially with demographic shifts in the West, non-premium places are going to be doing everything in their power to replace employees with automation and self-service. A lot of shoppers may grumble but they'll go with the lower prices.
- RobRivera 2y ago
  The goal of the mcd app is to generate growth metrics in the tech domain to inflate their ticker value through data mining, and coercion is happening through i flating prices and then offering discounts just by downloading the apps. It's absolutely rubbish short sightedness to price pressure people into using your app. Techno fascism never looked so bland
nemomarx 2y ago
lots of fast food have apps that track purchasing and give you coupons or deals that you can't get just ordering in the store now. It's like loyalty cards for McDonald's or tb.
- hunter2_ 2y ago
  This is the real answer. Price discrimination used to involve physical coupons, but now the coupons are in the app. Since apps are easier to obtain (and have in your pocket at all times) than physical coupons, the price discrepancy (between full price and discounted price) is wider than ever, to ensure revenue is sustained despite the higher percentage of discounted orders. That means high menu prices making the news, ostensibly due only to costs (inflation, minimum wage, rent, etc.) but actually due in part to app discounting. I installed the Wendy's app a while back, and by optimizing my selections, all of my orders since then have cost less than half of menu prices on average. For example, get a $3 item for $1 with any other purchase (so you tack on a $1 frosty), or buy a $6 item get another free. Taco Bell's app deals aren't quite as deep but you get the point. When tons of people are placing orders this way, menu prices must creep up to compensate.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    I've come to realize I don't want to put that kind of brain energy into ordering fast food. So I just stopped going. I make up some refried beans and some meat (normally chili verde) and freeze them (separately) for when I want 'fast food'. If I have to play (and learn how to maximize) some corporate dark pattern games then nah, I'm good bro.
    - hunter2_ 2y ago
      The friction of playing the game is how price discrimination has always worked, whether clipping coupons or fiddling with apps. You either spend time to pay less (and perhaps brag about it to make smalltalk just like this, which is like volunteer advertising) or you spend more to save time. It's weird, but it's actually an incredible way for the more well-off to subsidize the less well-off (at the risk of enticing some folks, who have the means but love a deal, to be penny-wise pound-foolish at everyone's expense including their own). At the end of the day, more people get fed at the price point they can deal with.
      - im3w1l 2y ago
tialaramex 2y ago
I would imagine they let you order food and then when you arrive your food is already made?
- epiccoleman 2y ago
  Essentially yes, except they make it when you arrive (at least if you pick up in the drive through). This is good design, because food from Taco Bell has an expiration date of about 3 minutes after it's cooked. It's good (well, not good, but it's food) right when it comes out, but once it cools down a bit it becomes essentially inedible.
  - tiznow 2y ago
    The craziest thing anyone ever did was reheat a 5-layer beefy burrito.
jt2190 2y ago
U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the restaurant profitable. (Land cost is the other big expense.)
- gowld 2y ago
  None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering). As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      also, there's only so many kiosks available just like there's only so many human staffed registers. This means there's potential for waiting in line. If every one has an app, there's no line. Ever. Well, except for when you show up to pick up your order and have to wait for everyone else. Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
    - vundercind 2y ago
      I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
      - 2y ago
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Many of their stores don't have cashier's. You have to use a kiosk or the app.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I stopped at roadside plaza and was completely cultural illiterate on how to order food. 100 miles from my home.
- gowld 2y ago
  Someone should invent a way to communicate without requiring a a 1:n app for every destination. They should make some kind of n:n web that connects everyone to every destination.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    The n:n web won’t win unless the destinations make money directly from traffic.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  The weirdest experience I had was a local burger joint I walked into that was completely empty with nobody eating there and nobody working at the counter and it didn't help that the decor was completely "blacked out". My first impression was that it wasn't open but I placed my order on a (ordinary sized) tablet and got my food and the people who came out to serve it were really nice. The other day I was at McD's and an elderly lady was stressin' it because she had no idea what to do. There were two cash registers but nobody staffing them and a disorganized group of people waiting for their food and not even a clear queue for the people behind the counter to see that somebody was waiting. She asked me what to do and I told her she could order at the register but a minute later I realized I was standing in front of the register waiting for my food and that probably the workers wouldn't see her. I stepped out of the way and made sure she was highly visible at the register and when I got my food I told the worker that this woman was waiting for her food and she seemed quite annoyed but I didn't feel I could take it for granted they were paying attention.
frogpelt 2y ago
Can’t tell if serious. Everything has an app. And pretty soon everything will have an “AI”.
sidewndr46 2y ago
Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this, I had my passenger try and place our order. At the end of the process the app let us know we can't order online from that store. So my conclusion it is just a data harvesting scheme.
- SilasX 2y ago
  >Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this... the app let us know we can't order online from that store. FWIW, as one data point, this is what I've used it for a few times, and it worked without issue. (A co-working space has it next door and that made it a lot more time-efficient, avoiding the line and having to wait in store.) Though I have run into the problem you've described with other services, where it rejects your request much later than it should. Like with AWS letting you configure a server for launch before informing you that you don't have permission to launch servers: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-tech-jokes-with.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...
astura 2y ago
To order food. You can also place your order on the website.
bregma 2y ago
(1) Studies have shown that patron will make larger and more frequent orders when placed through an app rather than in person. This increases revenues. (2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain. (3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.
- eldaisfish 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bregma 2y ago
    It came from someone for whom modern "AI" is indistinguishable from a Potemkin village.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    (1) My advisor in grad school taught me to speak in bulleted lists (2) It's a habit I've been trying to break in the LLM age. (3) I am always telling Copilot to knock it off with those stupid lists and just talk normal.
  - soperj 2y ago
    the LLM was trained on their posts.
  - square_usual 2y ago
    No LLM would make the naloxone joke - they're all too sanitized for that.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  In addition, price discrimination: you can offer deals in the app to price-sensitive consumers that don't cannibalise in-store sales from convenience-sensitive ones. Same concept as couponing.
yashap 2y ago
I’ve never used it, but I’ve used the Starbucks app a bunch. Order on the app when I’m 5-10 mins away, and can just roll up and grab my food/drink, vs waiting in line, ordering/paying, then waiting for prep. Useful when you’re tight on time or just don’t feel like waiting. I assume the Taco Bell app is similar.
Rastonbury 2y ago
Targeted offers to make you order, think promos they offer through the app instead of blasting it on TV commercials it's much cheaper, loyalty rewards and also order for pick up to save time. I don't have taco bell app, experience is from international McDonald's app
burningChrome 2y ago
I liken it to the impulse aisle at the grocery store. In my experience, they will send you discounts (BOGO) or free stuff when you're most likely to buy. One of my teammates and I both installed their mobile app. I would get free coupons for like nachos or a taco on the days that I regularly went, usually in the mornings and the coupons were only good for about 24 hours. Conversely, my hockey teammate used to get his later in the afternoon because he was religious about stopping on the way home from our gams which was usually pretty late at night. They're banking on (and usually right) that if they give you a small carrot for something free, you'll use the app to buy more stuff. In my experience it really took a lot for me to not buy more than I needed. So I would include the freebie along with whatever else I was buying to try and save a buck or two. Whereas my teammate would get his normal order plus whatever freebie they were offering. either way, it worked. Many times instead of going somewhere else, I would go there, and use their mobile app and get my freebies.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Not specific to taco bell but I like to order in person personally, but will seek out an app if I have a large order to put in and want to make sure I get all the adjustments right.
jldugger 2y ago
Just to add more comments to this: 0. You can set up favorite orders, and get all the nutrition info you care to. And make fiddly custom orders without worrying someone will screw up typing it in. 1. They don't have to pay a cashier to type in your order if you do it for them. And it's more likely to be correct, and more likely to make upsells (would you like to add a drink to your order?). More cynically, you can't complain that their cashier doesn't understand English since you are now the cashier. 2. Price discrimination. Fast food is an unusual mix of fast and cheap, and not everyone values those two equally. Cheap customers can spend time clipping coupons and browsing app deals while fast customers can make their order via drive through without having to futz around while driving. The app replaces newspaper circulars and mailers, esp now that nobody subscribes to local news anymore. 3. You can order ahead, increasing table turn time, spending less time at their limited seating and limited parking. And you spend less time waiting in line to order, waiting for your order to be prepared. 4. It functions as a loyalty program, buy 10 get one free style (but a bit more complicated). 5. Less fighting over coupons at the counter for the franchisees that don't want to accept them - the app just refuses them. And frankly, some of the penny pincher franchisees may not be savvy enough to set up refusals. 6. If a location runs out of something they can flag it and you won't show up disappointed they can't fill your order. Or they can advertise a per-store menu.

lavishlatern 2y ago

Taking mobile orders usually requires accepting coupons/rewards programs which franchise owners are not always obligated to participate.