Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Bot Orders $18,752 of McSundaes Every 30 Minutes to Find If Machines are Working

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the everyone-loves-ice-cream! dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1188:

Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min. to find if machines are working:

Burgers, fries, and McNuggets are the staples of McDonald's fare. But the chain also offers soft-serve ice cream in most of its 38,000+ locations. Or at least, theoretically it does. In reality, the ice cream machines are infamously prone to breaking down, routinely disappointing anyone trying to satisfy their midnight McFlurry craving.

One enterprising software engineer, Rashiq Zahid, decided it's better to know if the ice cream machine is broken before you go. The solution? A bot to check ahead. Thus was born McBroken, which maps out all the McDonald's near you with a simple color-coded dot system: green if the ice cream machine is working and red if it's broken.

The bot basically works through McDonald's mobile app, which you can use to place an order at any McDonald's location. If you can add an ice cream order to your cart, the theory goes, the machine at that location is working. If you can't, it's not. So Zahid took that idea and scaled up.

[...] "I reverse-engineered McDonald's internal ordering API," he explained when he launched the tool, "and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every McDonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine."

[...] The Verge interviewed Zahid about his project once his tweet announcing it took off.

NB: The bot does not actually place the order. It attempts to set up an order, and if it is allowed to add the item, it is assumed to be available. Taking note of that, it then exits out of the attempt. At no time is money exchanged. Also, he discovered that he had to back off to once every 30 minutes or it got blocked.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Bot Orders $18,752 of McSundaes Every 30 Minutes to Find If Machines are Working | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 34 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday October 27 2020, @08:37PM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday October 27 2020, @08:37PM (#1069488)

    They started getting POS equipment that printed out, on "receipt curly paper" at the window a Pick List of what exact items should be in each order. Whether this was coincidence or due to something I said, it was a genuine change. Orders are wrong far less often.

    That's kind of all it should take to bring the error rate down drastically:

    • management that will rehire people until they find the ones willing to follow a process (catches, say, 95% of the errors), and
    • two independent observations against lists generated from the same source, by the person assembling the order and by the person providing the order to the customer; again, say, 99% of the remaining errors.

    Eliminating *errors* like this requires providing and then following an articulable step-by-step [newyorker.com] process [theatlantic.com], but that shouldn't be a problem for fast food workers. It won't make the food any better, though.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2