YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Because the big chains effectively force you to, or at minimum actively encourage you to. Because a lot of the Hackernews demographic participate in building these systems, so are complicit, under the guise of "data driven" and "big data".

I'm an infrequent big fast food customer. Last week I'd been out all day, not eaten, it was late afternoon, cafes where shut and I was walking past a food court in a shopping mall. There was a McDonalds, I thought I hadn't had McDonalds in a longtime, I'll get a BigMac as that's my guilty pleasure for the once, twice a year most I eat McDonalds.

Gone were the servers on the counter, not one to be seen, instead a wall of screens. I walk up to one, two buttons displayed, "Sign in" or something similar to get rewards, "Continue as guest", with the UX promoting the sign in option as the active call to action (CTA), "continue as guest" being more discreet.

I press "continue as guest" and the screen freezes. Me being me, i walk off, if they make it hard for me to buy, well i'm not going to buy. I wasn't invested in buying McDonalds I just thought I'd not had one in a while so while there and not eaten all day i'd give it a shot.

I digress, the actual regular customers don't even use the screens. They already signed up for rewards and installed the app on their phone they've been coerced in to installing and registering for, so they get discounts. Maybe that's why the screens are so bad as most of their customers don't use the screen, they use the app.