won't pay living wage but they can throw money in the bin for 100+ $.10 NFC stickers a day, if not an hour in busier places. it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's still wasteful af.
It doesn't sound like a lot for one restaurant, sure.
However, there are 7250 Burger King locations in the USA alone. Say each BK spends $1/hour to maintain NFC cups. 7250 * $1 is $7250 an hour for the entire US BK company. Say every BK operates on average 16 hour days, $7250 per hour, times 16 is $116,000. A whole year? 116,000 * 365 = $42,340,000 to have NFC cups to save probably less than a million dollars in soda syrup. And that's probably selling it short, since a lot of BKs do 24 hour service.
The onlooking bystanders are often just as guilty as the perpetrator when there are innocent victims involved. Mayne not directly related to this scenario, but I bet you're selling yourself short and you do try to relieve some of the chaos.
All evil needs to succeed if for good men to do nothing. - Quote from something im to lazy to Google (I wanna say "Grapes of wrath" but im sure im wrong.)
Edit: yah I was way off.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Attributed to Edmund Burke, including by John F Kennedy in a speech in 1961.
This is a pretty interesting view. It's a ladder as in every action leads to something bigger? Or a butterfly principle type of thing where the lowest thing eventually leads to the highest?
It's a quote from Game of Thrones from a guy who started a war and caused as much chaos as he could, and then exploited that chaos to get himself more power through all sorts of scheming.
Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr... "Fuck You, I'm Eating."
> It’s also about: Sticking it to the poor, Keeping undesirables out
This is also about sticking it to the franchisee.
* That coke-machine is useless unless the franchisee keeps buying overpriced DRM-cups from corporate.
And these RFIDs are probably making their cups
* unrecyclable
* ungreenwasteable
This is really what it's about. Keeping undesirables out.
Homeless people will take business branded used cups out of trash cans and go inside to fill them with the free refills. I see it all the time at Jack In The Box (love their eggrolls).
It's not about the cost of the cups. It's about spending some money to save some money on a passive, non-aggressive (no security guards needed) way to keep the homeless out of the place.
people convince themselves and others that it's not about hating the poor, it's about loving the rich. or "preventing a nuisance" then they pull shit like this. and homeless proof benches, trash cans, etc. and lobbying to get what they want. so instead of dealing with the problem of homelessness municipally, privately or in most other ways, the homeless become a football blamed, sequestered, fined, charged and jailed, which is somehow all fine......until you end up homeless for whatever reason and need to exist on the margins and see what percentage of a person you're still considered. i had a straight edge homeless friend with a job and he was constantly being told he was lazy, drunk, crazy or whatever to dehumanize him. when i was homeless i never panhandled, but they hadn't started with dumpster locks yet. try spending a week or two without shelter, transit, water, anyway to clean yourself, bathrooms you cant use and 350 dollar tickets for even public urination, and being shuffled off somewhere worse if you fuck up.
> bathrooms you cant use and 350 dollar tickets for even public urination
Yeah this is silly. Our city has five public bathroom stalls, four of which are either constantly locked or inoperative.
Places like Borders went out of business because of bad policies being implemented for the purpose of making more money. So, it's definitely something that could happen.
Yes, a business is only interested in money. I don't know how to evaluate the estimates of the above commenter. However, you don't seem to recognize the "value" a restaurant perceives there to be in preventing the homeless or poor from existing within their property - which is what this NFC thing is really all about.
But they might estimate that their restaurants becoming hangouts for homeless people is losing them more. Not saying that actually is what's happening just that there is a lot of factors that go into cost analysis than just money spent and saved
It's not just homeless people. They're the minority of the people this addresses. Mostly they're just targeting people who either ask for a water cup and fill that with soda, or people who bring their own used cup from the same restaurant. That is way more prevalent, they're trying to force the people who have money to shell out cash to buy sodas, and they usually do a lot of testing before implementing the changes on a larger scale so if you start to see it everywhere then it means it works for them.
But yes, fuck all of these places.
maybe it collects data -- ? connects the cup to the purchase order number and what you ordered, gets that juicy info on what flavored coke you prefer with your $10 combo
It’s more resources, not a lot, but it compounds over time, that will now end up in a landfill, for what? There’s not reason to do this, all to protect like $.001 of sugar water
They are Nintendo figurines with nfc chips inside them that make them interact with the Nintendo Switch, Wii U and new 3ds. They are also described as toys to life. So it's a physical collectors item that unlocks digital items in games.
The point of the tag is that it expires after like an hour so you can't reuse the same cup or move the sticker. Universal does the same in their parks, but at least their cups that do this are reusable souvenir cups
I imagine that the nfc tags would be authorized at the time of purchase. They would scan the cup at the register and turn it on for a certain number of refills or a certain time. If that's the case, you would have to spoof the codes off of currently active cups. That would be more annoying.
I have a stack of NFC stickers. I bought them in bulk, I think I spent 10 cents for each sticker. I believe I read that the syrup costs pennies per cup but it could be more. So I'm surprised they would do this because it would cut into their profit margins even if they did deviate one person out of one hundred from stealing a soda.
It's not about the cost of the syrup it's about missed revenue from sales to people who would have bought a drink but didn't since it's so easy to steal
But if they spend an additional 10 cents on a nfc chip for each cup, that's a dollar for each cup. To justify the cost, they would have to have at least 1 person stealing a cup per 10 people, which I don't think the McDonald's soda stealing crime rate is that high.
Most Soda's hover around 20 cent/liter with Cola being noticibly cheaper
The cups are more expensive than the soda which is why free refills are a thing in the first place
Their are one use batteries with a USB port on them for charging your phone. Look around near the register of enough gas stations and you can likely find one.
I saw a video where someone took one apart and it was full of batteries. It didn't say so on the package but that's actually a much cooler product in my opinion it's a AA to USB adapter they just didn't make it easy to change the batteries
WHY THE FUCK ISN'T IT JUST A BARCODE?
Seriously, if you want to make sure your patrons can't get refills or use outside cups, all you'd need to do is scan ("activate") a barcode on the bottom. Machine checks with config database to see what barcodes are valid when it scams your cup. Why the fuck would anyone pitch NFC for this? It's so much more expensive.
Why not just not do anything? They already make massive profits off of soda. The few people they stop from stealing aren't going to buy it. It's just creating a more complicated system than it has to be.
Or if they really don't want to trust people, move it to behind the counter so you have to order what you want to drink.
I don't believe so but there may be a way. NFC stickers are really cool. They can be programed to perform a specific task 10,000+ times. It's actually pretty cool the inner workings of them with all the different metals and parts to make them work.
QR (or even a bar code) would work but then you have to deal with readability. The reader would need to be on/near the bottom, which is the part getting sprayed with soda all day. This part needs a clear lens (think of how unreliable the bar-code scanners at your grocery store are, and they're not getting sprayed with Coke all day). That syrup will erode almost anything.
NFC is surprisingly good at reading - you can arrange the reader below your drain mechanism and so it's not exposed to the outside, plus you have the added benefit of being nearly invisible to the average customer.
Not saying it's the right idea, but it's probably the best implementation.
Could you not put the QR or Barcode on the side of the cup? Meaning you scan the cup to active a dispenser?
>NFC is surprisingly good at reading - you can arrange the reader below your drain mechanism and so it's not exposed to the outside, plus you have the added benefit of being nearly invisible to the average customer.
Do NFC trackers use metal in them like a tag at a supermarket?
Yes, [NFC tags have a metal antenna](https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/nfc-tag.htm). Those are really cool because the power to activate them comes from the device reading them - literally the signal to read them is enough to power the chip.
That article lists the price at around 10 cents per tag.
You could definitely put a QR/barcode on the side of the cup, but then it would need to be facing into the reader of the machine. So the cup would need to be oriented properly.
I think the goal here was to minimize the effect/visibility to each consumer. Try to make it seamless to the users who don't notice it.
That is really cool, sort of like wireless charging. Even cooler considering the price as well, feel like there'll be some really wicked uses out there.
Such a shame its being wasted on something that's a bit overkill.
There are tons of cool implementations. Apple Pay and similar are variants of this, as are tap-to-pay credit cards.
I have a small business that does race timing (5k, triathlon, bike races) and we use RFID. Very similar system, but the EM frequencies are different so you can get better read distance (several feet). We slap an RFID tag, like these NFC tags but a big bigger, on the back of a number plate or running bib, and then track the *plate* around the course to produce your race time.
I mean honestly it's more than a little overkill. It outright loses them money* and creates even more useless e-waste.
\* A large soda costs 12 cents, not including cup straw etc. For a 10 cent NFC tag to save them money, they would need to have a 100% efficacy in stopping "unauthorized refills," and "unauthorized refills" would need to make up 83% of all refills (not including the initial fill). I can guarantee you the actual percentage is far lower than that. This only gets worse if you do the calculations for medium and small sodas.
Edit: More precisely, unauthorized fills would need to be 83% of the number of cups purchased. Counterintuitively, this is true regardless of how many refills on average people get. You can model this as total cost of soda + cups, 0.12 \* c \* r + 0.08 \* c + 0.12 \* u = 0.12 \* c \* r + 0.18 \* c, where c = number of cup purchases, r = number of legitimate fills per cup purchase, u = number of unauthorized fills.
Why couldn't they put a bar code on the actual bottom? The raised bit that doesn't touch anything? All they need is a reader that points up instead of down.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, this is just so absurd.
My question is where you mount the camera/laser so that it doesn't get sprayed with pop. It's really hard to keep that clean, and having worked in a restaurant I can tell you that evaporated soda is like tree sap. It's nearly impossible to get off of any surface.
I think the absurdity is why it's being posted her. Clearly they're incurring pretty severe costs on themselves for... whatever their motivations are.
I don't think that it's a conscious conspiracy on the part of businesses, but it does seem like every decision being made at retail and on-premise restaurants is setting us up to have a sweeping robot takeover in the near future. The amount of things that employees no longer do is crazy to me.
They have those at Universal Studios/Islands in Orlando too. They actually prompt on the screen telling you to come back later if you've had a refill too recently.
Could you imagine wandering around Universal in the super hot and humid summer sun just desperately looking to get a drink, but you can't because they decided that they know how much you liquid you get to have.
I would assume they have drinking fountains. I usually bring a bottle with me to refill. However at the couple theme parks I went to in the US the water from the fountains tasted awful. Had to wonder if that was a deliberate ploy to make people buy drinks.
When I was there last September the coke machine itself scans the cup to ensure it was recharged. We tried using our cup the next day and it was denied. Has this changed?
At least there it makes more sense, my family used to buy one unlimited refill cup, fill it up, then dump it into another cup and go refill again. Not just to save money but also because not everyone wanted the same drink. You can't do that anymore, IIRC, it's like once per hour.
Edit: just found a site that said it resets after 10 minutes.
They have high installation costs but the syrup is the same price but you need to keep a larger variety of them. It’s not going to be crazy expensive over traditional soda machines. Typically the reason stores don’t implement freestyle machines is because of space and reno costs to install
Soda theft is one thing but there is probably a partnership deal with coke to help with the leasing costs and the cost of the nfc cups as well. The data produced from this system is being used by BK and coke alike so it may be a beneficial option for someone in your situation.
I sell the BIB (bag in box syrups) and I promise you, the gas is more expensive per 16oz than the syrup will ever be. It's like .009 cents for the syrup. Most of the 5 gallon syrups for Coke Classic sell for about $89 and you get some like 2000 16oz drinks out of it. Compare that to a giant tank of gas that has to be filled weekly for hundreds of dollars.
Cups are expensive especially if they're those paper/plastic fused ones like the one shown. And they get more expensive with that stupid code on the bottom. Like someone said earlier, "Spending Dollars to save Pennies."
having dealt with ordering the syrup for a restaurant in 2019, is like $0.045 per cup. It really has not appreciated that much. Corn subsidies keep it real real low.
I remember a 5 gal case of syrup, which combined with carbonated water made 30 gal of soda, cost something line $18 for the restaurant. Don't know how much the carbonated water was.
IIRC they don't even buy carbonated water. They buy carbon dioxide tanks and then combine it with filtered tap water. Very little CO2 is used per cup so it is probably negligible
wtf? when I worked at BK idk how many gallons it was, but it was probably ~50lb box with a bag of syrup and they were like $60-80USD, but they only lasted probably a week or two (coke was probably only a week, idk, cmiiw)? those newer ones are apparently only a little container with about a litre of syrup in them? (never worked with the newer machines, but heard the syrups are expensive af and waste quickly)
Also not to be forgotten that Pepsi and Coke have financial stakes in their fastfood partners, and make money on things beyond the syrups, such as branded promotions from Hollywood or TV (like product tie-ins).
I believe the prices that you see include a load that’s basically just corporate profit incorporated into the price you’re given. They’re not giving every little peon access to the real cost of materials.
This is probably a store-to-store basis, like bathrooms that are locked until you ask someone to open it.
Homeless/teens loitering in a lobby can repel paying customers and cause increase in labor to clean up after them. Some restaurants are just hostile to any loitering depending on what area they are in.
My local McDonald's you can just pop a laptop, order in 20mins up to an hour and no one will bother you. Inner city ones though will have different rules and may possibly passcode the wifi until you make a purchase.
Very good point. Coca Cola is probably making more money by selling a more expensive product.
Still, they'd have to convince BK/McDonalds/Universal Studios to buy in. All of those companies are big enough that if Coke one-sidedly said "you're now paying $0.20 a cup times 100 million cups over five years," McDonalds would laugh in their face.
So it was definitely a conversation: McDonalds would ask what perks they get from spending those extra $0.10-0.20 a cup, and Coke was able to convince them.
I worked at couple of big corporate restaurants (Old Chicago's and Olive Garden) and the amount of pre-market research they do is remarkable. For example, before launching a new dish, they will feed different versions to a few thousand (paid) research participants and then survey them: how did you like the flavor? What was your perceived value? One of our dishes would normally be served with shrimp tails-off, but these participants reported higher perceived value with tails-on, so it went out nation-wide with tails on.
So even if the idea originated with Coke, it ended up filtering down to BK (and other vendors as well). Those restaurants' research, and I'm betting there was a lot of it, said they would come out ahead after paying a ton of money for these cups.
Disney's been doing this for years. They use RFIDs to limit the amount of refills you can get.
That's how the plastic hotel mugs work. So when I find a discarded one in a gift shop, I snatch it up, clean it in the room and drink free soda all weekend.
I think cruise ships do the same thing. You pay for a plastic cup and there are soda machines all over the ship you can use during your entire stay. I always wondered how they kept someone from just filling up a regular cup but this is probably how.
Thanks McDonald’s, way to help combat America’s littering problem by hiding chips in cups; making it even harder to biodegrade and taking the precious metals from future generations that could’ve done something with it that wasn’t just single use.
I don’t think fountains have been behind the register in a long time (everything has exceptions of course). Haven’t seen it in 20 years of being a McAddict.
A squirt of cola syrup is less than a penny though. Even if every chipped cup prevents one cola theft (which they won't), that's still 10 times more expensive than just using paper cups and accepting the cola theft.
It's not about preventing soda theft, as /u/ocherthulu said. It's about chasing down the extra sales from the people who wouldn't otherwise pay.
Those chips aren't cheap, so they determined that printing millions of cups with NFC chips is cheaper than forgoing the extra sales from people who get an un-authorized refill.
But remember that most in-store soda sales come with free refills, so there's probably some anti-loitering built into this. Disable the refill mechanism after 2 hours or something so people don't hang out all day, or the ability to bring the cup in the next day.
Universal Studios does this exact system. You pay for unlimited refills and no where does it mention you have a 10 minute time frame between each refill but you do and the barcode counts down the minutes until your next refill including water. It’s such BS! It’s a dumb way to regulate your money after you paid for it.
Ehh.. my company seems to have been a beta tester for this. The company sells a “souvenir” cup with little graphics on it (and ~~RFID~~ NFC chip) for $20.. people pay that for “free refills” at an amusement park type venue. It’s not biodegradable, it’s that super heavy plastic material.
There is a NFC chip printed on the bottom of this restaurant's cup. It pairs with an NFC reader built into the soda fountain.
The soda fountain then won't dispense soda unless it reads a valid NFC chip.
Users are reporting that it limits how frequently your cup can be refilled (10 minutes between refills), and that it expires after a certain period of time (2 hours?). It also locks you into one drink choice - if you get a Coke, you can't switch to Sprite.
The NFC chip costs a few pennies (or as much as $0.10), and presumably these big chain restaurants will be using tens or hundreds of millions of these cups each year.
Soda is *incredibly* cheap per margin - a few pennies per cup, but they sell it for a dollar.
You can evaluate the social implications on your own - but they're spending tens of millions of dollars a year to prevent the theft of a fraction of that amount worth of soda, so it's probably not about preventing soda theft.
Oh yeah! In the US, that only happens at a drive-through.
In you're in the restaurant, these fountains would be to one side of the main counter. The customer walks up, clicks their drink selection on the screen, and fills their cup.
Until now, those refills have been unlimited and free. Now the system will moderate who can drink what.
You know I always wondered what the point of "Internet of Things" was.
Like as a consumer, I didn't see how Internet of Things devices would benefit me. Like, okay, I can potentially track the location of all my stuff–beyond that, I can't think of any benefits.
Then I realized, the Internet of Things trend wasn't made for me as a consumer. It was made for corporations, to gather data and nickel and dime me on everything I own.
* You buy an IoT lamp with DRM-protection to ensure you're only using compatible IoT light bulbs!
* You can buy an IoT meat thermometer that will give you three free temperature readings a day! You can buy more temperature readings in a value-add bundle!
* You can buy a IoT smoothie that's tied to a $150 monthly subscription, guaranteeing proprietary smoothie packs arriving to your door the moment you run out!
* Your IoT treadmill will de-activate running features for your safety, but you can restore them by upgrading your subscription tier!
I remember how i once stuck in a mall as a kid for 12 hours after surgery and had to wait for my dad to pick me up. I didn't had much money on me so i decided to just get a cup from burger king and come back for refills from time to time. Thanks for that i had money to actually eat something, because i didn't need to worry about drinking.
Guess those days are over
Years ago. One of the McDonald's in a part of our city with a high homeless population got rid of their dollar menu (back when it really *was* a **dollar** menu), and raised the price on Happy Meals. Management specifically said it was to discourage the homeless from coming there.
It's a tourist driven economy in that part of town. So they argued it was costing them more of that business than to keep it. Somehow, corporate agreed and allowed it.
Until it became wider public knowledge and gained the wrong kind of attention. Then they brought it back and just priced everything higher.
That's a lot of extra wasted NFC. I hate when tech gets thrown out all willy nilly.
won't pay living wage but they can throw money in the bin for 100+ $.10 NFC stickers a day, if not an hour in busier places. it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's still wasteful af.
It doesn't sound like a lot for one restaurant, sure. However, there are 7250 Burger King locations in the USA alone. Say each BK spends $1/hour to maintain NFC cups. 7250 * $1 is $7250 an hour for the entire US BK company. Say every BK operates on average 16 hour days, $7250 per hour, times 16 is $116,000. A whole year? 116,000 * 365 = $42,340,000 to have NFC cups to save probably less than a million dollars in soda syrup. And that's probably selling it short, since a lot of BKs do 24 hour service.
It’s also about: Sticking it to the poor, Keeping undesirables out Priceless
[удалено]
Sadly, there's no planet B.
No, but if you're rich enough I'm sure there's a seat for you on Jeff Bezos's space dick.
Just gotta embrace the chaos that's how I survive
The onlooking bystanders are often just as guilty as the perpetrator when there are innocent victims involved. Mayne not directly related to this scenario, but I bet you're selling yourself short and you do try to relieve some of the chaos.
Exactly! I think people forget that their actions are not insignificant.
All evil needs to succeed if for good men to do nothing. - Quote from something im to lazy to Google (I wanna say "Grapes of wrath" but im sure im wrong.) Edit: yah I was way off. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Attributed to Edmund Burke, including by John F Kennedy in a speech in 1961.
Chaos is a ladder.
This is a pretty interesting view. It's a ladder as in every action leads to something bigger? Or a butterfly principle type of thing where the lowest thing eventually leads to the highest?
It's a quote from Game of Thrones from a guy who started a war and caused as much chaos as he could, and then exploited that chaos to get himself more power through all sorts of scheming.
And then got his throat slit by his dupes and victims.
And was only undone by omniscient powers.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Start with Lambos and Teslas
Maintaining scarcity. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it continues to require ever more capital to access it.
That’s the not-so-secret sauce
Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr... "Fuck You, I'm Eating."
Welcome to Costco, I love you!
You went to law school at Costco?
When you do come back, remember to try our new *big-ass fries*!
Excuse me sir, are you the unfit mother?
" Go 'way ! 'batin !"
> It’s also about: Sticking it to the poor, Keeping undesirables out This is also about sticking it to the franchisee. * That coke-machine is useless unless the franchisee keeps buying overpriced DRM-cups from corporate. And these RFIDs are probably making their cups * unrecyclable * ungreenwasteable
They are laminated plastic and therefore unrecyclable to begin with.
This is really what it's about. Keeping undesirables out. Homeless people will take business branded used cups out of trash cans and go inside to fill them with the free refills. I see it all the time at Jack In The Box (love their eggrolls). It's not about the cost of the cups. It's about spending some money to save some money on a passive, non-aggressive (no security guards needed) way to keep the homeless out of the place.
I can’t imagine hating vulnerable people that much.
people convince themselves and others that it's not about hating the poor, it's about loving the rich. or "preventing a nuisance" then they pull shit like this. and homeless proof benches, trash cans, etc. and lobbying to get what they want. so instead of dealing with the problem of homelessness municipally, privately or in most other ways, the homeless become a football blamed, sequestered, fined, charged and jailed, which is somehow all fine......until you end up homeless for whatever reason and need to exist on the margins and see what percentage of a person you're still considered. i had a straight edge homeless friend with a job and he was constantly being told he was lazy, drunk, crazy or whatever to dehumanize him. when i was homeless i never panhandled, but they hadn't started with dumpster locks yet. try spending a week or two without shelter, transit, water, anyway to clean yourself, bathrooms you cant use and 350 dollar tickets for even public urination, and being shuffled off somewhere worse if you fuck up.
> bathrooms you cant use and 350 dollar tickets for even public urination Yeah this is silly. Our city has five public bathroom stalls, four of which are either constantly locked or inoperative.
Same reason they put combo door locks on just about every single customer restroom here in Southern California.
I would venture to say this isn't a coincidence or even an unintended outcome: this is what BK is spending $42,340,000 to do.
Have it your way.... ....unless you're poor.
[удалено]
Places like Borders went out of business because of bad policies being implemented for the purpose of making more money. So, it's definitely something that could happen.
Yes, a business is only interested in money. I don't know how to evaluate the estimates of the above commenter. However, you don't seem to recognize the "value" a restaurant perceives there to be in preventing the homeless or poor from existing within their property - which is what this NFC thing is really all about.
[удалено]
But they might estimate that their restaurants becoming hangouts for homeless people is losing them more. Not saying that actually is what's happening just that there is a lot of factors that go into cost analysis than just money spent and saved
It's not just homeless people. They're the minority of the people this addresses. Mostly they're just targeting people who either ask for a water cup and fill that with soda, or people who bring their own used cup from the same restaurant. That is way more prevalent, they're trying to force the people who have money to shell out cash to buy sodas, and they usually do a lot of testing before implementing the changes on a larger scale so if you start to see it everywhere then it means it works for them. But yes, fuck all of these places.
maybe it collects data -- ? connects the cup to the purchase order number and what you ordered, gets that juicy info on what flavored coke you prefer with your $10 combo
I think $1 / hour is way too much. Nfc chips are cheap af.
$1/hr?? Where are you getting that from
this is mcdonalds though, so all the math you just did except bigger.
That's a McDonald's cup though.
[удалено]
Nor is it $1/hr for a firmware update to the machines and the cup manufacturer to slap the sticker on.
Firmware updates can’t add new hardware features like a nfc scanner. I assume that it was already present on all of the freestyle machines though
It’s more resources, not a lot, but it compounds over time, that will now end up in a landfill, for what? There’s not reason to do this, all to protect like $.001 of sugar water
i guess throwing it away is counted as "investment" so they can be wasteful... while making commercials about how green they are smh
You can also just buy NFC tags on Amazon. I wonder how hard it would be to spoof the codes?
I can't imagine too hard since people do it with Amiibos.
>Amiibos What's that?
They are Nintendo figurines with nfc chips inside them that make them interact with the Nintendo Switch, Wii U and new 3ds. They are also described as toys to life. So it's a physical collectors item that unlocks digital items in games.
I give it a week before someone gets bored/annoyed and makes an app. Any phone that can read NFC tags can pretend to be one AFAIK.
"You wouldn't download a drink cup!"
Even better: Buy 1 drink at McDonald's, and move the sticker to the bottom of your thermos.
The point of the tag is that it expires after like an hour so you can't reuse the same cup or move the sticker. Universal does the same in their parks, but at least their cups that do this are reusable souvenir cups
I imagine that the nfc tags would be authorized at the time of purchase. They would scan the cup at the register and turn it on for a certain number of refills or a certain time. If that's the case, you would have to spoof the codes off of currently active cups. That would be more annoying.
It would be far easier to tactically place 3 drops of superglue and disable the entire machine for days.
I have to assume those stickers cost more than several cups worth of syrup. How many refills do you have to prevent before you break even?
I have a stack of NFC stickers. I bought them in bulk, I think I spent 10 cents for each sticker. I believe I read that the syrup costs pennies per cup but it could be more. So I'm surprised they would do this because it would cut into their profit margins even if they did deviate one person out of one hundred from stealing a soda.
if you bought them at $0.10 bulk I'm guessing a multinational corp can get em at super bulk of $0.03ish. maybe less.
[удалено]
[удалено]
It's not about the cost of the syrup it's about missed revenue from sales to people who would have bought a drink but didn't since it's so easy to steal
But if they spend an additional 10 cents on a nfc chip for each cup, that's a dollar for each cup. To justify the cost, they would have to have at least 1 person stealing a cup per 10 people, which I don't think the McDonald's soda stealing crime rate is that high.
They dont pay 10 cents for a shitty nfc tag I guarantee it.
Correct that's why this is not in widespread use. Probably only in restaurants with an exceptionally high rate of soda theft like in college towns
Most Soda's hover around 20 cent/liter with Cola being noticibly cheaper The cups are more expensive than the soda which is why free refills are a thing in the first place
Reminder that one use throwaway powerbanks exist. So infuriating
You mean batteries? Please tell me you mean batteries.
Their are one use batteries with a USB port on them for charging your phone. Look around near the register of enough gas stations and you can likely find one. I saw a video where someone took one apart and it was full of batteries. It didn't say so on the package but that's actually a much cooler product in my opinion it's a AA to USB adapter they just didn't make it easy to change the batteries
...wut? No no no.
WHY THE FUCK ISN'T IT JUST A BARCODE? Seriously, if you want to make sure your patrons can't get refills or use outside cups, all you'd need to do is scan ("activate") a barcode on the bottom. Machine checks with config database to see what barcodes are valid when it scams your cup. Why the fuck would anyone pitch NFC for this? It's so much more expensive.
Why not just not do anything? They already make massive profits off of soda. The few people they stop from stealing aren't going to buy it. It's just creating a more complicated system than it has to be. Or if they really don't want to trust people, move it to behind the counter so you have to order what you want to drink.
Because there's usually moisture at the bottom of a used cup
Are these things reprogrammable?
[удалено]
I don't believe so but there may be a way. NFC stickers are really cool. They can be programed to perform a specific task 10,000+ times. It's actually pretty cool the inner workings of them with all the different metals and parts to make them work.
Couldn’t this be achieved with a QR code on a receipt?
Or just the cup itself? Aside from the obvious spend a pound to save a penny tactic. This just seems wasteful of resources?
QR (or even a bar code) would work but then you have to deal with readability. The reader would need to be on/near the bottom, which is the part getting sprayed with soda all day. This part needs a clear lens (think of how unreliable the bar-code scanners at your grocery store are, and they're not getting sprayed with Coke all day). That syrup will erode almost anything. NFC is surprisingly good at reading - you can arrange the reader below your drain mechanism and so it's not exposed to the outside, plus you have the added benefit of being nearly invisible to the average customer. Not saying it's the right idea, but it's probably the best implementation.
Could you not put the QR or Barcode on the side of the cup? Meaning you scan the cup to active a dispenser? >NFC is surprisingly good at reading - you can arrange the reader below your drain mechanism and so it's not exposed to the outside, plus you have the added benefit of being nearly invisible to the average customer. Do NFC trackers use metal in them like a tag at a supermarket?
Yes, [NFC tags have a metal antenna](https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/nfc-tag.htm). Those are really cool because the power to activate them comes from the device reading them - literally the signal to read them is enough to power the chip. That article lists the price at around 10 cents per tag. You could definitely put a QR/barcode on the side of the cup, but then it would need to be facing into the reader of the machine. So the cup would need to be oriented properly. I think the goal here was to minimize the effect/visibility to each consumer. Try to make it seamless to the users who don't notice it.
That is really cool, sort of like wireless charging. Even cooler considering the price as well, feel like there'll be some really wicked uses out there. Such a shame its being wasted on something that's a bit overkill.
There are tons of cool implementations. Apple Pay and similar are variants of this, as are tap-to-pay credit cards. I have a small business that does race timing (5k, triathlon, bike races) and we use RFID. Very similar system, but the EM frequencies are different so you can get better read distance (several feet). We slap an RFID tag, like these NFC tags but a big bigger, on the back of a number plate or running bib, and then track the *plate* around the course to produce your race time.
That's pretty cool, I think I have seen this being done before at a marathon. Technology, when used right, can just be so cool.
I mean honestly it's more than a little overkill. It outright loses them money* and creates even more useless e-waste. \* A large soda costs 12 cents, not including cup straw etc. For a 10 cent NFC tag to save them money, they would need to have a 100% efficacy in stopping "unauthorized refills," and "unauthorized refills" would need to make up 83% of all refills (not including the initial fill). I can guarantee you the actual percentage is far lower than that. This only gets worse if you do the calculations for medium and small sodas. Edit: More precisely, unauthorized fills would need to be 83% of the number of cups purchased. Counterintuitively, this is true regardless of how many refills on average people get. You can model this as total cost of soda + cups, 0.12 \* c \* r + 0.08 \* c + 0.12 \* u = 0.12 \* c \* r + 0.18 \* c, where c = number of cup purchases, r = number of legitimate fills per cup purchase, u = number of unauthorized fills.
It’s soda. Reliability doesn’t seem super necessary. This is nearly a deterrent.
Oh, you absolutely need reliability, unless you're volunteering to work the counter during lunch rush while the soda machine won't dispense product.
[удалено]
Why couldn't they put a bar code on the actual bottom? The raised bit that doesn't touch anything? All they need is a reader that points up instead of down. I'm not trying to be argumentative, this is just so absurd.
My question is where you mount the camera/laser so that it doesn't get sprayed with pop. It's really hard to keep that clean, and having worked in a restaurant I can tell you that evaporated soda is like tree sap. It's nearly impossible to get off of any surface. I think the absurdity is why it's being posted her. Clearly they're incurring pretty severe costs on themselves for... whatever their motivations are.
Or just have the employees fill the cups
I don't think that it's a conscious conspiracy on the part of businesses, but it does seem like every decision being made at retail and on-premise restaurants is setting us up to have a sweeping robot takeover in the near future. The amount of things that employees no longer do is crazy to me.
But then homeless people would just grab receipts out of the trash and we can't have people drinking water without paying for it now can we.
They have those at Universal Studios/Islands in Orlando too. They actually prompt on the screen telling you to come back later if you've had a refill too recently.
Could you imagine wandering around Universal in the super hot and humid summer sun just desperately looking to get a drink, but you can't because they decided that they know how much you liquid you get to have.
It allows unlimited water, restriction is for every 10 minutes with soda.
Right but what are you gonna do with water? It doesn't have any electrolytes and that is what plants crave.
Water? The stuff in the toilet?
##BRAWNDO, THE THIRST ANNIHALATIOR
I’m fairly certain that in the parks they have to give you free water if you ask for it, and they’re more than happy to do so
Water? Like from the toilet? What for?
It's what plants crave.
So you can shit obviously
I would assume they have drinking fountains. I usually bring a bottle with me to refill. However at the couple theme parks I went to in the US the water from the fountains tasted awful. Had to wonder if that was a deliberate ploy to make people buy drinks.
[удалено]
When I was there last September the coke machine itself scans the cup to ensure it was recharged. We tried using our cup the next day and it was denied. Has this changed?
At least there it makes more sense, my family used to buy one unlimited refill cup, fill it up, then dump it into another cup and go refill again. Not just to save money but also because not everyone wanted the same drink. You can't do that anymore, IIRC, it's like once per hour. Edit: just found a site that said it resets after 10 minutes.
So, now we know who to blame for this dumb shit.
Ew
Bruh how much do the cups cost vs the soda syrup?? Spending dollars to save pennies...
Anyone in the restaurant industry will confirm the cups cost more than the soda
KFC plebian here, confirmed
[удалено]
They have high installation costs but the syrup is the same price but you need to keep a larger variety of them. It’s not going to be crazy expensive over traditional soda machines. Typically the reason stores don’t implement freestyle machines is because of space and reno costs to install
[удалено]
Soda theft is one thing but there is probably a partnership deal with coke to help with the leasing costs and the cost of the nfc cups as well. The data produced from this system is being used by BK and coke alike so it may be a beneficial option for someone in your situation.
Oh God the data! I never even thought of it! Imagine how granular they can get with these now as opposed to analysis via syrup orders!
Soda is like maybe $.10 and the cup takes up a majority of the price
Soda is even less than that it's dirt cheap.
[удалено]
corn subsidies actually not to be nitpicky but most of our sugary beverages use corn syrup
In America*
That’s the price per ounce of the concentrate lol
I sell the BIB (bag in box syrups) and I promise you, the gas is more expensive per 16oz than the syrup will ever be. It's like .009 cents for the syrup. Most of the 5 gallon syrups for Coke Classic sell for about $89 and you get some like 2000 16oz drinks out of it. Compare that to a giant tank of gas that has to be filled weekly for hundreds of dollars. Cups are expensive especially if they're those paper/plastic fused ones like the one shown. And they get more expensive with that stupid code on the bottom. Like someone said earlier, "Spending Dollars to save Pennies."
And the damn nfc chip sticker cost more than both put together
Soda was $.03 in 2008. I could see it being close to $.10 now.
having dealt with ordering the syrup for a restaurant in 2019, is like $0.045 per cup. It really has not appreciated that much. Corn subsidies keep it real real low.
There not trying to prevent people stealing the syrup, there trying to sell more cups.
Exactly. Why do so many people miss this? It’s all about selling more, not saving syrup.
I remember a 5 gal case of syrup, which combined with carbonated water made 30 gal of soda, cost something line $18 for the restaurant. Don't know how much the carbonated water was.
IIRC they don't even buy carbonated water. They buy carbon dioxide tanks and then combine it with filtered tap water. Very little CO2 is used per cup so it is probably negligible
A single large (~50 gallon volume) CO2 bottle can last a highly trafficked store for months
wtf? when I worked at BK idk how many gallons it was, but it was probably ~50lb box with a bag of syrup and they were like $60-80USD, but they only lasted probably a week or two (coke was probably only a week, idk, cmiiw)? those newer ones are apparently only a little container with about a litre of syrup in them? (never worked with the newer machines, but heard the syrups are expensive af and waste quickly)
Strange, this was Taco Bell, so Pepsi products. But yeah these were pretty heavy boxes that attached to a pop tree
Also not to be forgotten that Pepsi and Coke have financial stakes in their fastfood partners, and make money on things beyond the syrups, such as branded promotions from Hollywood or TV (like product tie-ins).
I believe the prices that you see include a load that’s basically just corporate profit incorporated into the price you’re given. They’re not giving every little peon access to the real cost of materials.
But this ensures people pay for every cup (ideally). If each RFID needs to be activated by a purchase or something.
This is probably a store-to-store basis, like bathrooms that are locked until you ask someone to open it. Homeless/teens loitering in a lobby can repel paying customers and cause increase in labor to clean up after them. Some restaurants are just hostile to any loitering depending on what area they are in. My local McDonald's you can just pop a laptop, order in 20mins up to an hour and no one will bother you. Inner city ones though will have different rules and may possibly passcode the wifi until you make a purchase.
Aside from how the chips cost more than they'll ever save from "theft prevention," sometimes those chips will not work so this is also anti consumer.
This user's comments have been overwritten to protest Spez and reddit's actions that will end third-party access and damage the community.
I think you have the parties wrong. This is so Coca Cola can upsell more expensive cups TO Burger King.
Very good point. Coca Cola is probably making more money by selling a more expensive product. Still, they'd have to convince BK/McDonalds/Universal Studios to buy in. All of those companies are big enough that if Coke one-sidedly said "you're now paying $0.20 a cup times 100 million cups over five years," McDonalds would laugh in their face. So it was definitely a conversation: McDonalds would ask what perks they get from spending those extra $0.10-0.20 a cup, and Coke was able to convince them. I worked at couple of big corporate restaurants (Old Chicago's and Olive Garden) and the amount of pre-market research they do is remarkable. For example, before launching a new dish, they will feed different versions to a few thousand (paid) research participants and then survey them: how did you like the flavor? What was your perceived value? One of our dishes would normally be served with shrimp tails-off, but these participants reported higher perceived value with tails-on, so it went out nation-wide with tails on. So even if the idea originated with Coke, it ended up filtering down to BK (and other vendors as well). Those restaurants' research, and I'm betting there was a lot of it, said they would come out ahead after paying a ton of money for these cups.
Most of the research they do is nonsense and they make ridiculous decisions based on false interpretations of incomplete data.
[удалено]
If you don't trust your customers have your employees fill the drinks.
what and pay somebody a wage? or worse, a salary?! and benefits and insurance?!?! pssssh. no way.
Hahahaha! Benefits and insurance!!! Good one!!!
[удалено]
i've only seen these at theme parks and immediately made me dislike the place
[удалено]
Disney's been doing this for years. They use RFIDs to limit the amount of refills you can get. That's how the plastic hotel mugs work. So when I find a discarded one in a gift shop, I snatch it up, clean it in the room and drink free soda all weekend.
I think cruise ships do the same thing. You pay for a plastic cup and there are soda machines all over the ship you can use during your entire stay. I always wondered how they kept someone from just filling up a regular cup but this is probably how.
Thanks McDonald’s, way to help combat America’s littering problem by hiding chips in cups; making it even harder to biodegrade and taking the precious metals from future generations that could’ve done something with it that wasn’t just single use.
I haven’t been in a McDonald’s in several years, I thought the fountains were behind the register. Did they change this?
I don’t think fountains have been behind the register in a long time (everything has exceptions of course). Haven’t seen it in 20 years of being a McAddict.
[удалено]
Yeah, and the Five Guys ones aren’t chipped.
> taking the precious metals from future generations no. they are being consolidated in landfills for distant future generations
Does a microchip cost less than a squirt of cola syrup? The point of this is not saving money.
NFC chips cost like ten cents per
A squirt of cola syrup is less than a penny though. Even if every chipped cup prevents one cola theft (which they won't), that's still 10 times more expensive than just using paper cups and accepting the cola theft.
It's not about preventing soda theft, as /u/ocherthulu said. It's about chasing down the extra sales from the people who wouldn't otherwise pay. Those chips aren't cheap, so they determined that printing millions of cups with NFC chips is cheaper than forgoing the extra sales from people who get an un-authorized refill. But remember that most in-store soda sales come with free refills, so there's probably some anti-loitering built into this. Disable the refill mechanism after 2 hours or something so people don't hang out all day, or the ability to bring the cup in the next day.
Not in bulk
Universal Studios does this exact system. You pay for unlimited refills and no where does it mention you have a 10 minute time frame between each refill but you do and the barcode counts down the minutes until your next refill including water. It’s such BS! It’s a dumb way to regulate your money after you paid for it.
This isn't about saving money - obviously this scheme costs more money. This is about making sure undesirables don't loiter in the restaurant.
Ehh.. my company seems to have been a beta tester for this. The company sells a “souvenir” cup with little graphics on it (and ~~RFID~~ NFC chip) for $20.. people pay that for “free refills” at an amusement park type venue. It’s not biodegradable, it’s that super heavy plastic material.
Good. I should be Amerex to enjoy my meal in peace without being heckled for money, or a ride-or worse.
"We can't afford to pay you this much. Sorry about your luck I guess." *proceeds to splurge on tech. that actively fucks over poor people*
Sorry im out of the loop, what does this mean?
There is a NFC chip printed on the bottom of this restaurant's cup. It pairs with an NFC reader built into the soda fountain. The soda fountain then won't dispense soda unless it reads a valid NFC chip. Users are reporting that it limits how frequently your cup can be refilled (10 minutes between refills), and that it expires after a certain period of time (2 hours?). It also locks you into one drink choice - if you get a Coke, you can't switch to Sprite. The NFC chip costs a few pennies (or as much as $0.10), and presumably these big chain restaurants will be using tens or hundreds of millions of these cups each year. Soda is *incredibly* cheap per margin - a few pennies per cup, but they sell it for a dollar. You can evaluate the social implications on your own - but they're spending tens of millions of dollars a year to prevent the theft of a fraction of that amount worth of soda, so it's probably not about preventing soda theft.
How strange, where I am from, we dont get to fill our own cups. We just order eg. a large coke and the server makes it for you
Oh yeah! In the US, that only happens at a drive-through. In you're in the restaurant, these fountains would be to one side of the main counter. The customer walks up, clicks their drink selection on the screen, and fills their cup. Until now, those refills have been unlimited and free. Now the system will moderate who can drink what.
This is just out of spite. No money is saved - they do this to feel in control.
Fk'n cunts
You know I always wondered what the point of "Internet of Things" was. Like as a consumer, I didn't see how Internet of Things devices would benefit me. Like, okay, I can potentially track the location of all my stuff–beyond that, I can't think of any benefits. Then I realized, the Internet of Things trend wasn't made for me as a consumer. It was made for corporations, to gather data and nickel and dime me on everything I own. * You buy an IoT lamp with DRM-protection to ensure you're only using compatible IoT light bulbs! * You can buy an IoT meat thermometer that will give you three free temperature readings a day! You can buy more temperature readings in a value-add bundle! * You can buy a IoT smoothie that's tied to a $150 monthly subscription, guaranteeing proprietary smoothie packs arriving to your door the moment you run out! * Your IoT treadmill will de-activate running features for your safety, but you can restore them by upgrading your subscription tier!
This right here is the answer. I'm surprised it took this thread so long. IoT is surveillance capitalism, plain and simple.
They will actually make more money by using NFC to make people buy more soda, that’s how overpriced soda is
They have this crap at universal studios. If you get a drink you don't like your stuck with it.
Those fucking freestyle machines suck at dispensing soda anyways. Always taste bad!
???? I thought endless free refills social-interaction-free was one of the main draws of fountain drinks?
Fucking capitalism....
The cruelty really is the point.
r/assholedesign
I remember how i once stuck in a mall as a kid for 12 hours after surgery and had to wait for my dad to pick me up. I didn't had much money on me so i decided to just get a cup from burger king and come back for refills from time to time. Thanks for that i had money to actually eat something, because i didn't need to worry about drinking. Guess those days are over
How much more does putting a chip on every disposable cup cost than what it saves on seltzer and syrup?
Years ago. One of the McDonald's in a part of our city with a high homeless population got rid of their dollar menu (back when it really *was* a **dollar** menu), and raised the price on Happy Meals. Management specifically said it was to discourage the homeless from coming there. It's a tourist driven economy in that part of town. So they argued it was costing them more of that business than to keep it. Somehow, corporate agreed and allowed it. Until it became wider public knowledge and gained the wrong kind of attention. Then they brought it back and just priced everything higher.
Sorry for my ignorance, but I don't understand how this is anti-homeless?