From creator[1]: “I reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine”
It seems the first explanation given wasn’t entirely accurate (or is at least misleading), as they continued roughly 50 minutes later:
> to clarify how this works: mcdonald's keeps track which locations have a broken machine, I'm merely querying for those - no order gets executed, no ice cream is actually wasted
Maybe in reality, the order is created, but not actually “placed” in order to query the above info? Or maybe the first tweet was simply clickbait...
What I’m understanding is that the order is placed, meaning it’s in checkout. But he’s not actually fulfilling it, meaning he didn’t ordered/paid for ice creams for real.
Someone on Twitter also mentioned ice cream orders don't actually get filled until you arrive at the restaurant (which does make sense), providing an extra fail-safe for this.
I’m not sure if it’s a regular request, or so regular that it’s automatic, but in France, if you order an eat-in meal with ice cream, they don’t make the ice cream until you come back to the counter with your receipt and request it.
It's funny that this is possible. An altruist could create an order for "give a cheeseburger to that one guy who hangs around outside every McDonald's".
[1] https://twitter.com/rashiq/status/1319346264992026624