I saw your point.

Your point is entirely about sticking it to the rich guys -- for an entire 30 cents. It is based on the presumption that these can't be stuffed to spend time on an app, and you think that this means that the app is deliberately terrible in order to better-succeed at getting those extra 30 cents.

And I understand that 30 cents represents a lot of money in terms of margins.

But I simply reject that line of thinking. It's simply too conspiratorial to be believable, to me.

This is a company that is so incompetent at this point that when they publish video of their CEO eating a new sandwich (sorry, "product"), they can't even get him to act like he's enjoying any part of that.

But it's not about the CEO. For all I know he's an excellent business guy who is working at the top of a company that is dysfunctional in ways that he can't fix (perhaps nobody can fix it), and he just isn't fond of food at all and was more a bigger fan of math classes in school than the arts.

This company can't get the feels of feels-oriented marketing to hit even close to the mark, but they're masters of making an app deliberately terrible to empower subtle, hidden price discrimination to eek a few more pennies out of people?

And that's a good idea -- somehow -- even though it costs them money (someone has to get paid to stand there and take their order) when people don't use the app? Even though when the app is terrible, it costs them money when people do use it because it's just terrible and affects all customers' overall perception? Am I to believe that people of all income levels aren't driven away when an app is awful?

It's not like McDonald's has a monopoly on fast food. It's a competitive market. People have other options.

My buy-in on the idea of price-discrimination-via-terrible-app [because that's a profit center, somehow] is very close to zero.

The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew