The Dark Side Of The McDonald's Monopoly Contest
This week we cover the often overlooked practice of scammy loyalty programs. They come in many shapes and sizes but are all designed to cost consumers much more than they reward.
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Today on the show, Matt and David sit down with Sam Levine and Stephanie Nguyen, formerly of the FTC under Lina Khan, to discuss the dark side of customer loyalty programs like frequent flyer miles, corporate discount cards, and ordering apps from chains like Starbucks and McDonalds. Their new paper, The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices, exposes the lengths these programs go to to get you into their ecosystem in order to harvest your data, exploit it, and manipulate you to spend more, sometimes with surveillance pricing strategies. Together they discuss why these programs have proliferated, why they are so effective, and why they have been so difficult to regulate.
Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Another thing we’re doing this year is providing transcripts and video for every episode. Check your inbox for that soon.
Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.
The survillance pricing angle with McDonald's app is particularly concerning given how much purchase history data they collect. Most consumers dont realize they're trading detailed behavioral data for minor discounts. The paper's findings on loyalty programs manipulating spending patterns through psychological hooks really exposes how these apps are designed around extraction rather than value.