How Fast Food Companies Brainwashes You to Buy

This is a Big Mac. Each year, McDonald's sells over 900 million of these bad boys around the globe. But what you don't see is how these fast food companies are taking advantage of our weaknesses and brainwashing us to consume their products. I'm going to be investigating the dark secrets of the world's most beloved restaurants in real life and exposing the dark tactics that they use to keep you coming back for more. Starting with the first of five dark tactics that McDonald's use. Which brings me to my first question.

Larry Robert, McDonald's with the dog.

There you go. Where the hell is Ronald McDonald? What happened to this dude? Because it feels like not so long ago, he was absolutely everywhere. I had to do some digging and go out into the field to find out what happened to this guy. Do you have any Ronald McDonald? Ronald McDonald. You see, when they rolled out Ronald McDonald as the mascot to their company, clowns were at their all time peak in popularity. But as times change, so did the ethics behind using mascots to sell such unhealthy food to children. And then in 2016, there was the famous clown apocalypse, where creeps were dressing up as clowns and terrorizing children. McDonald's released an official statement explaining that Ronald would be taking a break from the limelight. And then magically and mysteriously, Ronald just disappeared. This forced them to start marketing in entirely new ways, some even more sinister than the clown that left us. One of the sneaky strategies that McDonald's uses is social hacking. They take a huge rapper like Travis Scott that is obviously very current, and then they market his meal as his go to meal. They very strategically pick all of the people that are trending and they cycle them in and out, which allows them to reach all the different customers and all the different demographics. And this is a rinse and repeat strategy because it works. But it's not just celebrities. They've also been able to use their own brand's history and law, launching viral social media campaigns like the 2023 Grimace Shake. So who is this Grimace dude?

Do you remember the big purple dude? They went super viral in Tick Tock. What's up, guys? We just got the grimace shake from McDonald's.

Happy birthday, Grimace. We're gonna give it a try. Oh, just got the new grandma shake. We're gonna give it a try. This is terrible. But I guess, look, any press is good press. Even though these guys are clearly making fun of this, that's got to be good for sale. So everybody knows, do you want fries with that? But when was the Last time that ask you that when you went into McDonald's. So what have McDonald's have done? They have built the perfect upsell engine with their self service kiosk. And when you go in and you use this thing, it's going to ask you every single time. Immediately right on the ux they show you the highest price item. That is called price priming. When you see a Big Mac and it's 722 and then you look at a cheeseburger and it's 199, you're like oh that's like so cheap. I may as well get two of those things. Do you want it in a large, medium, small? Do you want it in a meal? They will have an entire team of data scientists combing through the data split testing if they put this item here. Since they have deployed this, they have increased their average order in store by 20 to 30%. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional profit. This is a genius strategy by McDonald's and they never forget to do it because it's their kiosk that does the asking. But one of the sneakiest tactics that they use comes down to their soft serve machine. I have been going down the rabbit hole to find out why are the soft serve machines at McDonald' always broken. This is a phenomenon that has taken the Internet by storm. Nickbroken.com that tracks broken McFlurry machines. Even as I was ordering at the kiosk in store, the cashier handed me my money back from my ice cream cone because the machine was broken. Why is it, when will it be back? This is one of the sneakiest strategies that McDonald's uses because they get you going out in store hunting and searching for a soft serve. Let's go call up some other McDonald's to see if we can actually go and find a soft serve. Because right now I have been turned down. 9:30 on a Wednesday. Your boys calling McDonald's just to get a soft serve. It's all these kiosks, they don't have no one in there anymore. That makes you want it even more. But heck, I've just driven all the way to McDonald's so I'm not going to leave empty handed. Yeah, I'll get soft serve. The $1 frozen drink, $2 hamburger, the McPop and apple pie, the chicken and cheese, ham and cheese pocket. Did you get me a McPop? Thank you. 18.50. You go in there for their cheapest item and then they upsell you all types of other crazy shit. There's nothing Wrong with two grown men getting a happy Meal and then you still haven't scratched the itch of wanting to get the saucer and you're stuck in the cycle of coming back again and again and again. Could I please get one of each item off your $1 menu? McDonald's spends 4.5 billion dol year on advertising and they push the bulk of that advertising on one type of product and that is their loose change menu. That is a offer that they can go out to the coldest of all cold traffic. And they know that the response from these things is going to be through the roof because it is an offer that nobody can refuse. It's $1 for an item and they are not making money off their $1 offer. That is the slippery slope that gets you into the store you want to pay. Pick an absolute godfather offer that people feel completely stupid in saying no to and then sell them multiple things off the back end. Today I have assigned the help of my trusty videographer to be helping me because I am naturally not going to be putting this poison in this temple of a body. So we're going to load you up with calories.

I weigh 70 kilos and I will weigh myself again at the end of the day. See how much weight I've actually gained from eating from five pass through joint.

But we're just getting started. We'll be investigating five of these brands and the last tactic single handedly has the possibility of 10xing your business. And it's what I use to go from cold calling from my bedroom to generating over $7.8 billion in my agency, Starbucks. These guys do $32 billion per year in sales, spend $500 million in marketing. Let's head on inside and see what are the tactics that they're going to use against me. So to most people, Starbucks is just a coffee shop. Good. How are you? Can I please get a ice Americano? However, under the surface, these guys are operating the biggest unregulated bank in the world thanks to their rewards program. So we fire up the app and of course we want to update our balance here. So we select the top up amount. I can't just put in the exact amount that I want to buy the coffee or the beverage that I want. No, it's 20, 40, 50 or $100. All right, I am going to order Americano. Notice how an average drink costs somewhere around $5, but the minimum option that they let you load into this app is 20 bucks. In this case, that means that they are increasing their average order value by 300%. Confirm and pay insufficient balance. Let's go and top this bad boy up. A couple of hundred bucks. Just like gift cards, a lot of these things go unused and then they sit there and it's free money. This sounds innocent enough, right? But here's where things really get interest. By the end of 2022, $1.7 billion was just sitting in these accounts. That is money that Starbucks gets to hold onto and earn interest on, flip it into commodities and do whatever it is that they like. It's basically like an interest free loan that they get from their customers as they continue to push you to spend more and earn rewards. These guys are masters at the price. LA start you at $5 for a small, but then you can get double the size for just an extra $2. When you're pricing your products, it is very important to have at least three different pricing packages. So if you're only presenting them one offer, you're going to find yourself constantly getting squeezed on, priced and negotiated down. Instead, what you want to do, you want to have three different pricing packages and you want to be pitching to your middle or your higher package. That way when someone's asking hey, is there something better that you can do on price, you've always got a lower package to default on and you' not just squeezing out the profits of your primary product just by presenting three offers to people. You will always get 20% of people that will take the higher package just because you presented it to them. One of the marketing strategies that Starbucks is known to deploy is misspelling your name. So you go in there, you order your coffee, they misspell your name, then you take a photo of it and you share it on social media and it just gives the company more free marketing. Subway, these guys do over $10 billion per year in sales. They spend 355 million dol per year on marketing. And in some countries their bread has to be legally classified as cake because it has so much sugar in it. Their tagline is Subway, eat fresh. And their positioning is all about a healthier alternative. Subway has successfully tricked the masses into believing that if you go there that you're being healthy. And this is far from the case. These guys are literally pushing foot long churros, brownies and 1,400 calorie cookies. What's your most popular Subway? I went in and ordered their most popular sub with all of the add ons. How are you gonna even close that? And you won't believe how many calories this thing is 1700.

1700 calories.

Alright, so you have got more than my daily consumption of calories in this one meal.

I think this is more than both our daily.

But apparently we don't need to worry about the calories. All right, you be the judge. She double cooked the bacon because it's got all the vegetables and shit on it. You feel like it's fresh, I feel like I'm healthy.

And it tastes good.

This sandwich has more calories than three Big Macs combined. We're gonna see how you fare by the end of today. You are gonna be the fast food connoisseur. You tried everything, but nothing is better than how these guys latched on to a big promo. They found this guy called Jared Fogel, who, he lived 10 steps away from a Subway store and he changed his diet to eating two subways per day and lost over 400 pounds or half his body weight. When the brand found out about this, they brought him on as a brand ambassador. But there was one specific event that made their sales explode. It was when he went on live TV and pulled up a pair of his trousers to visually demonstrate how much weight that he had lost by eating two Subway sandwiches a day. After that appearance, their sales soared by 20%. Now, it's worth noting that while having a spokesperson for your brand can do wonders, it can also backfire because you're basically putting all of your eggs in the basket of having that person carry themselves in a way that makes you feel proud to have them endorsing your brand. And that certainly wasn't the case with Subway. And this came back to backfire and big time for the brand. And that's why you see big companies like Nike and Proactive, they use multiple different celebrities and influencers to push their brands because inevitably some controversy is going to come out about these people. They simply drop them and then they push another celebrity that they've got in their lineup. Taco Bell. These guys do over $2.4 billion per year in sales and spend $388 million a year on marketing. I head inside to order their cheesy Gortita taco. I've never been here. What do you recommend? Kind of hungry. A cheesy Jean. It's like a tarpaud, but there's like a flatbread around it and there's like a lot of cheese. Everything's got a lot of cheese in it. These guys manufacture cravings for their food using their Bliss Point marketing strategy. If we give you this, it might be the end of It. Do you like churros? Churros Good, right? The bliss point is a concept from food science that refers to the perfect balance of salt, sugar and fat that makes food irresistible. Oh, my Lord, look at this. There's a cheese explosion. I'm gonna have to try this, but let's see what this is about. They have engineered food to be as addictive as humanly possible. This thing has got so much fucking cheese in it. Look, it's exploded everywhere. All over the ground here. So you keep coming back for more crunch to it. I don't even know how to describe that. It's like a UFO filled with cheese and just Mexican magic. Taco Bell are masters at baking in virality into their product and into their menu. Like their insane Taco Bell waffles or the naked chicken chalupa. So that people, when they order the food or they actually go into location just to see this spectacle, then they're filming it and they're sharing it. This is the digital economy that we're living in. Unless you're baking in these little breadcrumbs within your product, then you're not going to be promoting people to share it when you can do that and you can reach customers for less. Domino's Pizza. These guys do $3.6 billion in sales per year. Over 40% of pizzas that are ordered worldwide go through Domino's. For this one, we're gonna go to a hidden location to a park and use their app to order a pizza and see if they can find us. The company guarantees to get your pizza within 30 minutes or it's free. So I've just confirmed my order and it is in the oven being cooked right now. Let's see if this guy can find us in this nondescript location in the back of this park. Alrighty. The 30 minute timer has begun. What was the calories on Domino's Pizza? It was like 2300. Yeah. Some outrageous. And while we wait for the pizza, let me just say that Domino's isn't really a pizza shop. They are really a technology company masquerading and disguised as a pizza shop. Their tech is insane. Their sales funnel is unlike anything that I've ever seen. From automated robot delivery to AI predictive cooking times, these guys literally innovate at every single touch point in their business. These guys have indexed over 150, 50,000 locations from parks to even beaches to deliver a pizza. All right, so it looks like the guy is here. Let's go grab our pizza. Thank you very much. This is incredible. Look at this. It's piping hot. Have a good one. Oh, thank you, my man. Look at that. Delivered right to the park. This is ridiculous. That took 18 minutes. Minutes to deliver to a location that they have never delivered in. That's incredible. I can't complain. All right, look, it's all intact, and it's hot. It looks like there is at least a liter of oil on that. You probably can't even talk right now because there's so much grease in your mouth.

Yeah, like, I feel like my mouth.

Is now lubed up. All right, so just give us your rating. What is it? Out of 10?

I'll give it 10 out of 10 for the fact that the dude came from a suburb away, it was cooked, and delivered within 18 minutes.

How are these guys able to. To make such claims and deliver on them? They've got the customer front and center. They're not competitive focused like most businesses. Most people that you speak to, they're like, oh, my competitors might copy me or they might do this. These guys are broke bums. What you want to be doing is be customer focused. If you constantly and ruthlessly focus on delivering to your current customer, you're not going to have to worry about competitors because you're going to be so far ahead. And that's exactly what Domino's has done. If you liked this video, you're gonna absolutely love this one. On luxury brands like subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.

And now for the moment of truth. Oh, my God.