Fast food is a popularity contest, with every store having a direct financial interest in driving and retaining customer loyalty. But I've never gotten an email from In n Out saying they need to sell 549 more burgers before midnight to beat Five Guys in quarterly sales rankings.

Lots of them will give you free food in return for installing their smart phone app though.

Anyone offering me free anything (but especially food) to install software immediately goes on my creepy list.

Eh, pretty much every other app on smartphones these days is harvesting my metadata already. I might as well get a cheeseburger out of it.

I'm fine with a fast food place giving me food in exchange for me giving them anonymised data on how to sell more food. That seems like a pretty equitable deal to me. The problem comes when shadier companies start, for example, keylogging your device and sending all of that to a foreign government.

> But I've never gotten an email from In n Out saying they need to sell 549 more burgers before midnight to beat Five Guys in quarterly sales rankings.

I'm pretty sure their staff do, though.

> Fast food is a popularity contest, with every store having a direct financial interest in driving and retaining customer loyalty.

Yes.

> But I've never gotten an email from In n Out saying they need to sell 549 more burgers before midnight to beat Five Guys in quarterly sales rankings.

You didn't get such an email because it wouldn't retain your loyalty. If it did, you would get those emails.

People generally don't spend money so that one brand can beat another. They spend money to be part of the brand, or to consume it. However, they do spend money to have their guy beat the other guy.

Would you care if In n Out beats Five Guys?

Would you care who wins your mayoral election?

Voting is a popularity contest, electing representatives via sortition is perfectly valid and imo more closer to the idea of democracy.

It doesn't strike me that these e-mails are making anyone popular?