Does McDonald's really care about sustainability?

At the drive-thru at McDonald's yesterday, the cashier handing me a small flyer with my receipt. The flyer elaborates on the redesign of packaging away from foam to more sustainable materials. I don't have a problem with that per se (although I am a big fan of the styrofoam cup). What I question is whether the marketing effort in this flyer really aligns with their commitment given that the technical challenges are significant from a usability perspective.

First, look at the URL. You handed this to be in my car where my only internet access is my phone, and you want me to type in this URL: http://corporate.mcdonalds.com/mcd/sustainability/sourcing/priority-products.html. You gotta be kidding me. Can you not take the time to make a vanity URL? Does McDonald's not own a short domain name already? This URL should ideally be something like mcd.com/sustainable (without the http since almost all browsers add it automatically). Even without a short hostname, at least use mcdonalds.com/sustainability (at the worst).

Next, the html extension on the URL. No web page on any modern site ends their pages with the html extension. This just makes the URL look like a GeoCities site.

Then I actually went to the site and found that the ridiculously long URL you made me type is a 301 redirect to another URL that is actually shorter than the URL you made me type. The new URL (http://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/scale-for-good/our-food.html) is 67 characters, compared to the 81 characters in the URL you made me type. That's just stupid. But you still need to lose the html extension. The browser already knows. If the URL you gave me already is just a redirect, why on earth did you not make it a short vanity URL redirect?

Finally, chances are that if I bother to open this, it will be on my phone. For the love of thumbs, put the URL in a QR code so I can scan it. There are apps for this. Your staff can handle it. That way you can type the URL and I can just scan it. Sure, put the shortened vanity URL there too just in case I need to type it in.

There, I did it for you. If you have more that you need to do in the future, just fire me a note. I'd be happy to contract for your QR code generation.

Since this is all about technical flaws with the flyer, you may be wondering why I asked the provocative question, "Does McDonald's really care about sustainability?" Here's why: these technical challenges create usability problems for people ever reading more. This type of usability challenge introduces friction in the interaction that means that you have greatly reduced the audience that will ever read what may be a very important message on that web page. In the traffic funnel, you have just made the spout of the funnel so small that you have destroyed much of the value of ever handing out this flyer in the first place.

Marshall McLuhan proposed that the medium is the message. In this case, the medium is so flawed that the message I received is that McDonald's must not really care if anyone reads about their sustainability efforts or they would have made it easier to do. Therefore, this must just be propaganda. If that's not the message you wanted me to receive, then you should do better next time.

Ice Bucket Drought Propaganda

Image of low water levels at Lake Oroville.

Today (August 24, 2014) I have seen a couple of articles posted to Facebook claiming that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been contributing to the California drought. The comments to these articles express outrage that people are blatantly ignoring the damage to California. The images of Lake Oroville and statistics about the dire nature of the drought are dramatic and certainly show the bad situation that California's drought has caused.

As serious as the drought is (and I'm not trying to minimize it), my gut reaction to the insinuation (if not outright statement) that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a large contributor to the California drought is that this is a bunch of reactionary propaganda with no real basis in fact. With a little internet data and some back-of-napkin calculations, I verified that it is mostly fear mongering.

I'd like to start with the most extreme estimate to make my point. Let's assume that every single person in California participated in the ice bucket challenge. That is nearly 40 million people. I would be surprised if the total participant count in the entire US reaches that number, so we should be safe that this is a high estimate. Let's assume they all fill a 5-gallon bucket completely with ice/water (although I think the average is probably closer to 2 gallons), and let's assume it takes everyone 2 attempts to get the video right. That is 10 gallons per person. That is a total of 400 million gallons of water. That sounds like a lot at first glance.

The state of California was kind enough to document the capacity and current water levels of their reservoirs, including the Lake Oroville reservoir on their Department of Water Resources page. They measure the water in acre feet, so I used the conversion that 1 acre-foot is 325,853 gallons. That means the challenge used 1228 acre-feet of water. It turns out that Lake Oroville has a capacity of 3,537,577 acre-feet, and a current water storage of 1,123,093 acre-feet. Then the amount of water used by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is approximately 0.035% of its total capacity and 0.11% of its current capacity.

The total current storage of California's reservoirs, according to the same site, is 7,659,526 acre-feet of a total capacity of 27,254,482 acre-feet, which corresponds to a challenge use of 0.016% and 0.0045%, respectively.

That amount of water does not sound like a huge amount. For comparison, a low-flow toilet flush uses about 1.6 gallons of water, so the ice bucket challenge is about the same as flushing the toilet about 6 times.

Also, many participants are performing the challenge in their yard, so some fraction of the water is going back into the ground.

Conclusion: The impact of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to the California drought is an outrageous overstatement.

I captured the reservoir data from today, August 24, 2014, for reference.

Preventative Mastectomy Madness

As a big fan of boobies, I may be a little bit biased, but I think Angelina Jolie having her breasts and ovaries preemptively removed is just about the dumbest thing I've heard of. She is being praised as a hero, but I think it is stupid and cowardly.

To put it in perspective, try applying the same logic to any other medical procedure. If you found out you had diabetes, would you get your feet amputated to prevent circulation problems in the future? If your family had a history of cholesterol and clogged arteries, would you go ahead and get a heart bypass at age 40 just in case your arteries are starting to clog?

Just because breasts are beautiful and a part of a woman's self-image doesn't make it brave to mutilate them. Take the gender issue out of the argument and all you have left is stupidity.

Ichiro and the Dark Side

They should have known that inviting a Sith Lord to a baseball game would have consequences.

Sunday (July 22, 2012) was Star Wars Day at Tropicana Field for the Rays' third and final game of the series against the Seattle Mariners. There was a great promo video for the day featuring Rays' DH Luke Scott and Darth Vader (watch). There was also an exclusive t-shirt giveaway if you bought your tickets through a special promo link.

And of course, there were Star Wars characters wandering around for some great photo ops.

What we did not know was the this game would be the last game Ichiro played for the Mariners since he was traded to the Yankees (aka "The Dark Side") on Monday. I snapped a couple photos of him from our great seats behind the Mariners' dugout.

Sadly, it wasn't Ichiro's best game.

Despite that, Ichiro was a class act. I hope Ichiro does well, but not at the expense of the Rays.

Michelle was also ecstatic to get John Jaso's autograph on her jersey. He was her favorite player when he was with the Rays last year, so it worked out really well to get his autograph now that he is on the Mariners.

The rules don't apply to me

Apparently, as was reinforced to me today, rules don't really matter. They are just relics from the past when people used to consider other people worthy of respect and when people believed that society was a better place when everyone knew what to expect from each other. However, our society has evidently developed to the point where that is no longer helpful.

Let me admit right up front that this is a bit of a rant. I'm assuming that if you know me, you already picked up the sarcasm. (The sarcasm is a healthy thing at this point because it means I'm past the completely frustrated phase I was in earlier.)

The scene started out as expected at Walmart: too many people and not enough open checkout lanes. Surprisingly, I got in lane 29--which is convenient labeled "Speedy Checkout: 20 items or less"--and was lucky enough to be third in line.

Side note: Do you remember when Walmart used to advertise there fast checkout policy which said that they would open a new lane if there were more than 3 people in any line? Did I dream this? I don't think I've been to Walmart in the past 5 years when there was a line with 3 or less people. I'm guessing that the average line length is at least 5 customers overall.

Back to the story: The first customer in line finished up almost immediately, so I became number 2 in line. Yes! As the 50-something woman and her 20-something daughter began putting their items on the counter, I noticed that they seemed to have a lot of items for a 20-or-less line. I counted 27 items, but there were about 10 items before I began counting, so I'm guessing there were nearly 40 items.

This started me thinking that 20-or-less is a really high threshold for a speedy checkout line. The number 20 is high enough that it's not easy to eyeball the number of items in your cart and be reasonably close. I really couldn't blame someone for thinking they probably had 20 items when they really had 30. In that sense, I can chalk part of the problem up to honest estimation error. What bugs me is that the difference between my 2 items and 20 items is significantly different than the difference between 2 and 10 items. I would argue that for the checkout to be speedy, the threshold really needs to be lowered to 10.

I also noticed as I looked at other non-speedy lanes that the people in the speedy lanes appeared to actually have more items than the people in the non-speedy lanes. Is that because the people in the non-speedy lanes were honest enough to count their items and realize they should not go in the speedy lanes? If I can't visually realize the difference in item count, then the number is too high.

I would think that lowering the number would also increase customer satisfaction with the speedy lanes because they would have a chance to be speedy. However, since the store does not enforce the item limit at 20, there is no reason to believe they would be willing to enforce it at 10. And this is where my title comes from. People have reached a point that they do not believe that the rules apply to them. Having 40 items in a 20-item lane does not matter to people who think they are above the rules. Also, the store is not willing to enforce the rules, which creates a degrading spiral of lack of enforcement and lack of compliance which result in the item limit being completely useless.

Due to another issue (which I won't cover here), I ended up switching lanes, where I got behind a couple who had more than 45 items (a partial count again) in a 20-item lane. Their cart was actually full--not overflowing, but full.

How are we supposed to teach children to follow the rules if everyone around us is not following the rules?

What's the big deal about Halloween?

It's Halloween night. My family is not participating in the events because Michelle and both boys have Swine Flu. As I'm sitting here at 8:00 surfing the 'net, some Facebook friends have made a few comments that got me thinking that the way people think about Halloween is a pervasive attitude in other areas of life.

One commenter wrote that her children, including a 9-year-old boy, do not want to trick-or-treat for the 2nd year in a row. I wonder why that is. Are today's kids so privileged every day of the year to the point that a little candy is not worth the trouble? Or are they just so apathetic that they don't get excited about the event?

Another Facebook commenter mentioned that she has not had any trick-or-treaters yet but has a bunch of candy. Another responded that they had tons of kids in their neighborhood. This made me think that parents target the prime neighborhoods and completely skips their own neighborhoods. This led to two theories:

1. Nobody stays in their own neighborhoods because nobody knows their neighbors.
2. People pick the best trick-or-treat locations the same way they pick the best schools.

It used to be that people actually knew their neighbors, so trick-or-treating was a social event. It was a chance to get out and be cordial with the neighbors, to let everyone see the family. When you don't even know your neighbors, it's just a good to go to another neighborhood where you can get better candy.

This also aligns with the demise of neighborhood schools (at least in Polk County, Florida). So many school assignment zones result in children being transported past half-a-dozen schools to get to their school. The school assignments are so gerrymandered that students who live in the same neighborhood sometimes do not attend the same school. This applies at every school level. And then we wonder why kids have no school spirit! A lack of community identity in a school will result in a lack of a sense of ownership in a school every time.

Just like shopping for the neighborhood with the best candy experience, parents today shop around for the best educational experience. In concept I support the choice of parents to get the best education for their children. However, parents would be much less likely to shop around so freely if the benefits of community-based schools existed in our schools.

Maybe this is just mental rambling, but it seems to me that there must be some similar underlying behavior at work here.

A Magical Day in Richfield

Seeing this article about the new NBA record for points scored by a single team in regulation by the Nuggets made me think about a historic basketball game I saw as a kid.

It was January 29, 1980. I was 8 years old. A bunch of guys--old guys, young guys, dads, and kids--from my church in Shelby, Ohio, crowded into cars to go see the Cleveland Cavaliers face the Los Angeles Lakers at Richfield Colisseum, the home court of the Cavs back in those days.

I don't really remember much about the records of the teams going into the game, or what the playoff implications might have been. I don't think I followed records or stats at that age. But I was a Cavs fan (and a Browns fan and an Indians fan), so going to the game was a big deal.

Ironically, I don't remember too many of the Cavs players. Sure, I recognize some of the names from the roster, but I don't really remember their playing very much. Except for Bingo Smith, who was my favorite at the time. I actually remember more of the Lakers players from that era than Cavs players.

Going to an NBA game is special enough for an 8-year-old kid, but this day was really over the top. First, I got Michael Cooper's autograph before the game. Amazing.

But the magical part was that this game turned into a quadruple overtime win for the Cavs, 154-153. It was like two games in one, and the Cavs came out on top in the end. The game was special enough in Cavs history to appear as #7 on the list of all-time great Cavs moments.

I wish every kid could have a chance for an experience like that.