The Customer Is Expected to Return

1. The deal

I have made worse bargains than a free order of fries.

A little application sits in your phone and says it will remember the points. You buy a coffee or a burger or whatever passes for dinner when the day has beaten the better ideas out of you. A number goes up. The next one is cheaper. The colors are friendly. There is a clown somewhere in the family history, which ought to have warned us all.

You tell yourself they know you bought a sandwich. Big deal. The cashier knew that fifty years ago. The man behind the counter knew whether you wanted onions. The bartender knew when I was lying about having just one. Human beings have always kept little files on one another. Most of them were called memory.

The difference is that the old bartender did not send a copy of my third drink to a room full of mathematicians and ask them to calculate the date of my surrender.

2. The file

A journalist asked McDonald’s what it had kept on him. The answer arrived as 515 pages with the golden arches stamped on top.

Five hundred and fifteen pages.

That is more paper than some men leave behind when they die, unless they have been unlucky enough to meet a divorce lawyer. It recorded purchases, points, offers, locations, scanned codes, and the small repeated rituals by which a hungry person gets through a week without cooking.

Then came the prediction. The company expected him to visit 2.16 times in the next six weeks. It expected him to spend $13.49 each time. It expected a total of $29.15. His chance of leaving, according to a field called attrition, was zero.

Zero.

The company did not merely know he liked a large Diet Coke. It knew what kind of man a large Diet Coke might become when he was late, tired, moving through San Francisco, or trying to turn a bad afternoon into a smaller bad afternoon.

Its categories for him included “Food-Led Afternoon Snack” and “On the Go Lunch in a Rush.”

I have been called worse things. I have called myself worse things. Still, there is something beautiful in the insult. A human being has spent years becoming a wreck of memories, impulses, failures, habits, debts, bad lovers, good songs, bad knees, weather, hunger, and one particular Tuesday he cannot forget.

The computer calls him a food-led afternoon snack.

3. The language

McDonald’s says it takes privacy seriously. Companies say this now the way drunks say they can quit whenever they want.

It says the data helps provide a more engaging, personal experience. Of course it does. A hand on the shoulder can be personal too. So can a hand in your pocket.

The important word is not personal. The important word is predictive.

The old restaurant wanted my money after I walked through the door. The new one wants to know which version of my life will put me in the parking lot before I have decided I am hungry. It wants the heat map of my weakness. It wants to know whether rain means fries, whether loneliness means nuggets, whether a coupon can move me from a reasonable lunch to an unnecessary little feast of salt and grease.

Then it will call the arrangement convenience because convenience is what surveillance becomes when it wears a paper hat.

I do not blame people for taking the deal. Rent is expensive. Time is short. Food is often bought in the narrow ugly corridor between work and whatever private disaster is waiting at home. A discount is not a moral failure. Sometimes a discount is the only kind of policy a person gets.

The rotten part is not that people want cheap fries.

The rotten part is that the price of cheap fries has become a running account of the person who wanted them.

4. The imbalance

The company knows which screens you touch, which offer moves you, where you were, what you ordered, whether you came back. It has people with advanced degrees finding patterns inside those crumbs. You have the little glowing rectangle and a button labeled “accept.”

Maybe, if you live in the right place, you can ask to see the file. Then you receive 515 pages written in the dry dialect of a warehouse inventory, and you are supposed to understand what your life has become to the people making a prediction from it.

That is a fine joke.

They collect intimacy one french fry at a time, then hand it back in a format that requires a lawyer, an accountant, and perhaps a priest to read.

The journalist used a generative AI tool to make sense of the report, then checked the results against the document. I like that detail. The corporation builds the maze. The customer borrows another machine to find the exit signs. Everybody is assisted. Nobody is free.

There are useful things here, perhaps. A person with an allergy might be helped by a record. A restaurant might reduce waste. A regular customer might receive a real discount instead of another advertisement for a product he hates. I have no faith in suffering through a badly designed system merely because it is old enough to smell familiar.

But an offer is not the same thing as consent. And a coupon does not become tender just because it knows your name.

5. Attrition

The reporter asked McDonald’s to delete the record. He wanted, among other things, to prove its prediction wrong.

This is the part I understand.

Not because abandoning fast food will purify a man. We have all tried to improve ourselves by changing lunch. It rarely survives Thursday. And not because every company prediction is a private tyranny. Sometimes a pattern is only a pattern. I buy coffee. You buy gum. The sun rises. Data has not discovered original sin.

But zero is an obscene number to assign another person.

Zero says: we have seen enough of your habits to stop imagining you might change. Zero says: your future has settled into a tray beside the register. Zero says: the part of you that might wake up one morning and walk somewhere else is too small to matter.

Every system that makes money from repetition wants to believe this. The casino. The bottle. The employer that knows you cannot quit yet. The platform that has learned precisely when you will look. They do not need to own your soul. They only need to own the next small decision often enough.

The trick is that the next small decision is where a person still lives.

Maybe the reporter will go back for fries. Maybe he will not. Maybe a machine somewhere will mark the departure as an anomaly and another machine will offer a better deal to bring him home.

I hope, for no grand reason, he leaves the offer unopened.

Let the file sit there with its 515 pages of certainty.

Let the golden arches wait over an empty prediction.

Source: McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There