In my ongoing quest to have teenage fast-food employees replaced by robots, I present another video that makes the case. In this video, a pair of guys pull off a bit of “social engineering” - essentially a scam based on a lie - to get some free food from McDonald’s. They simply go through a drive-through and completely make up a story about how the restaurant screwed up their dad’s order. Check out the video:

As I’ve ranted about before, using low-paid workers is becoming an increasingly bad idea for fast-food chains. The workers, usually minimum-wage-earning teenagers, care very little about their menial, repetitive jobs and therefore do some crazy stuff, like take baths in the restaurants’ sinks or stick boogers in the food, thus doing major image damage to their employer. In this case, it wasn’t the workers themselves doing anything patently wrong, but they allowed themselves to be fooled by a simple scam, which ultimately costs the chain in lost product and revenue.

I’m pleased to report that when I was in high school, my friends and I used to routinely scam McDonald’s with a similar, albeit somewhat gross trick. We would order our food inside the restaurant as usual and then, just before we were finished eating it, one of us would reach down our pants and pluck out a pube, then stick it in the burger or fries. We’d then take the offending food back up to the counter and, with a look of disgust on our face, complain to the counter help that there was hair in our food. It worked like a charm - we’d get a new, free burger or whatever every time!

Needless to say, such tricks wouldn’t work with robot employees. People would have to think of new tricks, like bringing motor oil with them to put in the burgers.