I recently had the privilege of witnessing Taco Bellâs revolutionary ordering system, the one where an employee must ask whether the customer wants extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños after every individual item.
Customer: âIâll have a Crunchwrap.â
Employee: âWould you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?â
Customer: âNo, thank you. Iâll like to order a tacoâ
Employee: âWould you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?â
Customer: âNo. Iâll like to add a burrito to my orderâ
Employee: âWould you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?â
Customer: âStill no. Iâll like to add a chalupa to my order.â
Employee: âWould you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?â
Customer: âActually, I would like to speak to the person who believes my memory resets every time I name a menu item.â
What a breathtaking triumph of marketing over ordinary human cognition.
Some unimaginative person might ask once, âWould you like any add-ons with those items?â But you understood that customers must be given repeated opportunities to reconsider their deeply held, four-second-old opposition to jalapeños.
Perhaps after declining extra cheese on the first item, the customer will experience a profound spiritual transformation before ordering the second. By the fourth item, relentless exposure to the phrase âextra meatâ may finally unlock a repressed childhood longing for double beef.
This policy brilliantly inconveniences everyone involved. It annoys the customer, humiliates the employee, slows the line, and makes a normal conversation sound like two poorly programmed chatbots trapped in an infinite loop which seems ridiculous considering how good chatbots are these days.
But the greatest achievement is how perfectly it captures modern corporate intelligence: identify a simple human interaction, remove all human judgment from it, insert a mandatory script, repeat it until everyone becomes visibly miserable, and then call the resulting misery âcustomer engagement.â
I can only imagine the meeting where this masterpiece was born:
âCustomers sometimes buy add-ons.â
âExcellent. Letâs have employees mention them.â
âOnce per order?â
âDonât be ridiculous, Susan. What if the customer suffers complete memory loss between the chalupa and the burrito?â
âAnd if they decline the first three times?â
âAsk again. The fourth rejection is where brand loyalty begins.â
To be clear, the employees are not the problem. They are the unwilling performers in a corporate production. They know the customer heard them. The customer knows they know. But both must continue the ritual because somewhere, a spreadsheet demands a sacrifice.
So, congratulations to the marketing professional who engineered this system. You havenât merely sold tacos. You have pioneered a customer experience in which ordering lunch feels like being interrogated by a cheese-obsessed parole officer.