It’s harder to see these days, but where I live in Albany, NY, McDonalds was in the New England region, and we would get the lobster roll “a New England favorite!”
Head a few miles away and you’d be in an area supplied out of New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Western NY. This sort of thing is noticeable if you live in a place that’s sort of a Venn diagram from a distribution standpoint.
Oil sounds like the likely culprit to me. About a decade ago a bunch of cities, including Chicago, started regulating the types of oil that could be used for frying in restaurants.
People don't actually believe these are anything more than averages with huge error bars right?
Instead, it's probably being used for an autocomplete widget to help users type in an address.
We used IP to determine regions before there even was Google Maps.
This platform is used by a lot of different QSRs. Or Quick Service Restaurants. Dunkin, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Checkers, etc.
I know this because I built the platform.
The biggest hurdle to the platform was delivering your order to the store “just-in-time” for it to be hot and ready when you get there.
Checkout CardFREE. It’s been a decade but they are still delivering value. The VP of Engineering was a new hire junior engineer when I was there.
Eg, I always block location API access, and sites often have poor fallback UI for entry.
If it'd let me, I'd be setting my browser to always report "Toronto, Ontario" and auto-deny location requests.
I wish it wasn’t like this but until the open web becomes the “transparent” web, the snooping, spying, logging, graph-identity-building, MarTech driven, web will continue to go towards walled gardens and deanonymizing the internet.
Is this an example of "I knew not what I was doing", or what? I eval projects I'll assist by thinking of applications 2 or three times removed from the project prospectus exactly to not unknowingly further the ends of a surveillance state.
You don't need to know which room in my house I'm sitting in to tell me how many calories are in a McChicken.
I specifically order starbucks long before I get there because I prefer their hot food to cool down before I eat. Mcdonalds takes that agency away.
"Yeah but", do you need Google Maps do do the geolocation?
- Have websites in different countries: like if I go to macdonalds.co.jp, I get the nutritional facts in Japanese about the Japanese Big Mac.
Geolocation is rude, lame and broken.
Even if blockers do count as non-standard, random scripts not loading should not be capable of bringing down your site, and this should've been clear even before the npm left-pad debacle.
If you engineer your application correctly with non-critical things outside the critical path you can have the best of both worlds.
Imagine going into the CTO’s office to explain why some vital tool or feature hasn’t been working for 35% of users because of some silly issue with Google Maps. “Why did Google Maps issues break our site?” … “well ackshually our entire app waits for maps.init()…” this is like the worst response imaginable.
I'd say it's not unreasonable. You're giving your third parties the ability to break your business. Third party scripts are blocked or just fail to load all the time, APIs change suddenly, etc.
This case specifically just seems to hit (mandated?) nutritional information that's also printed on the packaging.
What's your strategy for dealing with jquery not getting loaded?
>APIs change suddenly, etc.
That's going to be an issue regardless of you check whether the script is loaded or not.
Host it on your own infrastructure so that it's the same reliability as your site itself?
Right now, Google maps tells me I'm in suburban Atlanta. It's off by more than a thousand miles.
Occasionally, I will get French language automatically picked because of the assumption that I am “in” Montreal.
1. you don't need google maps script to request location
2. the site needs to ask the user before it can get their location. the average user doesn't even know whether google maps is involved or not, so it's totally irrelevant.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-...
Requires a map? On my phone, there’s no map widget nor distance to a restaurant nor anything else distance related.
There’s zero reason for the current functionality to require giving google my location.
Sure, you can argue that one day they might add something that uses the map, but that day ain’t today nor does it seem a reasonable requirement to get the calorie content of some chicken nugs.
I couldn't arrange for gas service before I moved into my home because the gas company's web site would only accept Google-blessed addresses.
I had to actually move in, and then go down to the gas company office with a copy of my lease to prove the address exists.
Strange, since at some time in the past the gas company payed many thousands of dollars to run gas service down my street. But, like in most big organizations, I suspect the web people and the company data people don't talk to one another.
Sounds like you're trying to assume good intentions, but you sound extremely naive as a result.
The issue is privatized utilities. They are an ordained monopoly. Their failure to "talk to one another" is not a failure at all. They have no reason to even consider the problem in the first place. You're still paying them, are you not?
My city uses Google to fill addresses on their tax portal, so for new construction this exact issue arises. My power company (a public utility) uses recaptcha for logins and I frequently struggle with it.
Looking at the law (in Oregon) “Total calories must be posted in a conspicuous place in a font size no smaller than the price, or the least prominent font size of the description of the item. A statement listing the daily nutrient intake amounts of calories, saturated fat, and sodium.”
Seems like any legal requirements imply signage in the physical venue ?
https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/regional-mcdonalds-items/
I have Firefox loaded with all the ad and privacy blockers installed for this reason when I do tests and code reviews. It reveals a lot of inadvertent dependencies and bugs that devs are unaware of.
They are using Google Maps to get your local nutrition facts. They change with location.
