Every major fast-food chain, it seems, now has its own app promising deals, discounts, and a better diner experience overall. But what’s the cost of convenience?
When you pull up to the speaker box in the drive-thru at chains like Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell, the first question you will likely hear is a distinctly modern one: “Will you be using our mobile app today?” If you respond yes to the friendly cashier, you’re asked to provide a code or other signifier, like your name, to help the worker identify your order. By the time you receive your steaming bag of burgers and fries, it’s possible that you haven’t actually spoken to any of the humans involved in preparing or serving the meal you’re about to consume.
Mobile apps have boomed in popularity over the past five years, with tens of millions of downloads. At this point, seemingly every major chain — including Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Chipotle, Burger King, Dunkin’, Starbucks, and Subway — wants you to order from its app. All of them promise a seamless experience to the fast-food customer. Instead of having to scream an order into a speaker as cars honk in the background, you can communicate your preferences for extra pickles and no mustard on your cheeseburger with a few simple taps. There are no language barriers to overcome, no disinterested teenage employees, just an eager-to-please mobile platform that seemingly exists only to make your life a little bit easier. (And arguably, some employees’ lives worse.)
How apps became the modern-day loyalty program
The mobile app trend in fast food kicked off in earnest in 2009, when Starbucks introduced the first ever mobile app to allow customers to pay for coffee with their phones. In 2014, Taco Bell became the first fast-food chain to offer both mobile ordering and payment. A decade later, almost every fast-food chain in the United States offers mobile ordering, payment, and perhaps most importantly, app-exclusive discounts.
Today, fast-food apps are essentially a 21st-century iteration of the loyalty program, a marketing tool that retailers have used for more than 100 years to keep customers coming back.
“It used to be that loyalty programs were occasional, something you would find with a few really proactive brands in food, but apps have really supercharged these customer attraction programs,” says Stephen Zagor, a marketing professor at Columbia Business School and consultant to the restaurant industry.
But unlike adding a loyalty card for your favorite supermarket to your key ring, a mobile app can serve a wide range of purposes. It can remember your favorite order. It can suggest new foods that you might like to try. It can keep track of the points that you earn, and offer you rewards tailored to your preferences.
It can also make restaurant service more efficient. Allowing customers to order in advance can streamline kitchen workflows, make it easier to predict foot traffic patterns to ensure that restaurants are properly staffed, and get food in the hands of hungry diners faster and more efficiently. Industry research shows that many consumers also find using the app more convenient than traditional ordering, and that consumers also feel like their orders are more accurate when they use the apps. This is especially true for younger consumers, many of whom view an app as a must.
“I’m a baby boomer, and to me, hospitality is a smile and good service,” Zagor says. “But for my 29-year-old son, hospitality is a well-designed app that remembers him, that offers him opportunities to buy more easily. He wants the path of least resistance; the human interaction isn’t as important.”
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The costs of convenience
“As the old saying goes, if something is free, you’re the product,” says Frances Fleming-Milici, director of marketing initiatives at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. And when it comes to fast-food apps, the corporations behind them are hungry for data they can use to sell you burgers and fries. “When you download an app, you can see what they collect, and it’s a lot. They can monitor your messages, your app activity, your location, your financial and personal information. It’s all there for the taking.”
Mobile apps can obtain access to your location, even when you’re not using them, to ascertain exactly how far you are from a restaurant. They also, of course, have access to your order history and the times you most frequently swing through the drive-thru, and can use that data to figure out how to market to you. Buried deep in McDonald’s privacy policy, to which all app users must agree before placing an order, the company notes that it may use “inferences drawn from [collected data] to create a profile about a consumer reflecting the consumer’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, or aptitudes.” If you allow the Taco Bell app access to your social media accounts, it could use the data from those platforms to “better understand the demographics of [its] customers and to inform [its] advertising and marketing activities.”
The fast-food industry’s structure also plays a huge role in why companies are so hungry for customer data. That’s especially true for companies like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, in which restaurants are run by local franchisees with varying levels of corporate input. “The mobile app gives them a centralized way of collecting data on customers across different locations of the chain,” says Yuping Liu-Tompkins, the director of the Loyalty Science Lab at Old Dominion University’s Strome College of Business, which studies customer and brand loyalty. “Once you have the data from the app, it’s easier to offer personalized coupons and targeted marketing campaigns based on what people have ordered in the past.”
Many folks may not care whether or not their favorite fast-food chain has their data — for a lot of customers, the trade-off between privacy and convenience is acceptable. But for young people, who are more likely to use fast-food apps than older customers, the consequences are more complicated. Fleming-Milici’s research has shown that adolescents engage with fast-food brands frequently, both on apps and social media, and she says the discounts that the apps offer might be a little too appealing. “What concerns us about these apps and adolescents is that they may be more vulnerable to this kind of marketing because of their still developing cognitive abilities,” Fleming-Milici says. “In adolescents, the brain regions that are involved with processing rewards are hypersensitive, meaning that teens are less likely to resist a rewarding cue like a discount than adults because they lack impulse control.”
Even for grown-ups who believe themselves to be savvy consumers, reward-based marketing can be far more persuasive than we think, especially when we’re on the precipice of earning something for free. “It’s been observed in previous research that as you get closer to getting the reward, it can put pressure on you as the consumer,” Liu-Tompkins says. “You will feel more motivated to buy more, or buy more quickly, in order to get that reward. They’re using these more subtle psychological mechanisms that the consumer may or may not even realize.”
The future of fast-food apps
However you feel about using an app to order at the drive-thru, one thing is clear: They’re not going anywhere. In fact, fast-food brands view mobile apps as an essential part of their future, and they’re putting their money where their mouth is. Chains like Burger King and Wendy’s continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into their mobile apps in an effort to improve the user experience. McDonald’s recently purchased a minority ownership stake in a mobile app development company for exclusive access to its technology.
That’s due in large part to the fact that consumers really like using them. Most people find the idea of getting a deeply discounted order of McNuggets appealing, and don’t necessarily seem to mind that their data may be used to manipulate them into buying more from McDonald’s. The decision of whether or not to use the app at McDonald’s or Taco Bell is personal. Liu-Tompkins is a regular user of the Dunkin’ and Chick-fil-A apps, even though she knows better than most how much data she’s giving away. “The biggest consideration for me in downloading an app is really: How often do I go?” she says. “I think for many consumers, it’s just another cost-benefit analysis. The belief is that it’s worth sacrificing my data a little bit in order to get the deal.”
And for many of us, the deal feels worth it. If I don’t use the McDonald’s app to get $2 off my fries or score a free cheeseburger, it does feel a little bit like getting scammed into paying a few bucks more. But perhaps that’s the future of fast food — if you want the personalized service of ordering from a cashier, maybe you’ll have to pay a little bit extra. If you want a sweet discount and a quick trip through the drive-thru? Well, there’s an app for that.
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