The 10 Most Interesting Things We Learned on Odd Lots in 2024

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

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Tracy Alloway (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:25)

Joe, it's nearly the end of the year, we made it.

Joe Weisenthal (0:28)

This is like year nine, isn't it? No, for real.

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

No, it's true. Next year is gonna be our 10 year anniversary, so we'll have to throw some sort of Odd Lots event.

Joe Weisenthal (0:38)

Yeah, nothing big right now for nine, but another year, another fascinating year, another year of learning new stuff. I'm really enjoying it. I hope we keep doing it for a while.

Tracy Alloway (0:49)

Yeah, and I think we both did learn quite a lot. And in fact, that is what we are going to talk about today. So we have compiled a list of the 10 most interesting things that we learned over the past year. So you want to dive into it?

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

Let's do it. Let's let's revisit them, because, you know, we do so many episodes in a year and I forget about some. And in the compilation of this episode, they're like, Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that particular episode. So let's use this time to sort of revisit the Odd Lots in 2024

Tracy Alloway (1:19)

This will sear at least 10 factoids into your mind forever, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (1:23)

That's correct.

Tracy Alloway (1:24)

All right. So first on the list, we wanted to do an episode on price pack architecture for a long time. This idea that companies are getting more sophisticated in the prices that they're charging for, you know, different people and different things. From our episode with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, and David Dian, the executive editor of the American Prospect, we learned that McDonald's knows when you get paid.

David Dian (1:49)

So the McDonald's app is put together by a company called Plexure. And Plexure works with IKEA, they work with 7-Eleven, they work with White Castle. And the reason, as you correctly said, Tracy, that McDonald's gives discounts on the app is because they want to get on your phone. They want to get on your phone and be able to figure out what you're doing on that phone, where you are at particular times of day, what your food preferences are, what your ordering habits are, potentially what you're using to pay for those things and your financial behaviors through that. They're aggregating a bunch of data about you. And we had one of the slides from this presentation that Plexure put together that shows how they are using this data. And one of the things that they were using to make predictions about what people would be willing to pay was their payday. So you can imagine how you can use this. If the app knows that you get paid every other Friday, it might give you a $3 McMuffin on Thursday. But when Friday, you have some money in your pocket, it might raise it to $4, right? If it knows that it's cold out, it might raise the price of hot coffee. If it knows it's hot out, it might raise the price of a McFlurry. Often, Plexier combines this data that's within the app, like what they call first-party data, with additional data about you through what is called an identity graph that aggregates both stuff you're doing on the app with your email, with your social media, with your browser, with your subscriptions, with your other app downloads, with your travel history, with your retail history, all of these other things. And the predictive power of that is such that you can pinpoint what you're gonna buy maybe before you even know, and therefore, you can target prices accordingly. So I think we're at the beginning of this where they're trying to discount things and get people on the app and get people used to ordering on the app.

Tracy Alloway (4:06)

Joe, has this scared you off the McDonald's app forever?

Joe Weisenthal (4:09)

No, I still feel stupid for not having downloaded the McDonald's app, if I'm being honest, because I do go to McDonald's from time to time, and my kids really like it. You know, it's still a treat. But yes, this reminds me, actually, that I need to download the McDonald's app, because, and just thinking about this episode, I remember there are deals to be had, even with sophisticated pricing, there are deals to be had from a regular person like me that just goes in and pays my credit card.

Tracy Alloway (4:38)

There are definitely deals to be had on the McDonald's app. But I think this kind of taps into a lot of the frustration that people have with inflation, where it feels like companies might be charging different prices for different people, or depending on the specific way you pay. And let's face it, no one wants to do all this homework and all this work just to get a slightly cheaper hamburger.