A School of Emergent Priorities paper tracks a quick-service burger chain's staggered rollout of a catalogued secret-menu programme, finding no change in how often the newly coded items get ordered and a governance panel whose caseload keeps expanding regardless.
A nine-month staggered rollout finds a code number doesn't move how often regulars order the items it replaces, though the review panel behind it keeps growing
When a quick-service burger chain’s ordering-app team decided its regulars’ word-of-mouth order names deserved an official record, it didn’t stop at a spreadsheet. Forty-one previously improvised items were assigned four-digit codes, folded into the chain’s app, and handed a standing panel to review whatever customers dream up next. A paper published today by the School of Emergent Priorities finds the record keeping considerably tidier than the ordering habit it was meant to formalise.
The University is proud to extend its long-running account of what happens once an institution decides to notice something it didn’t build. Researchers followed 214 stores across nineteen markets through the chain’s staggered formalisation schedule, tracking how often each catalogued item was ordered before and after its market went live. Order frequency held steady rather than rising, and six months on, most orders for the newly coded items still used the customer’s own name for them rather than the number the app now assigns.
An institution can catalogue a habit without owning it. The panel is real, the code number is real, and neither one is what’s actually happening at the counter.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group
The review panel convened to weigh future additions has, in the meantime, grown its own workload. “The panel got faster without getting any more selective,” says Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Emergent Priorities, describing a review-template change that cut turnaround considerably while leaving the approval rate exactly where it started.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bzta8a.