Trust me, no communication is happening in either situation. Your complaint is not being run up the corporate ladder. All you're doing is making someone's day a bit worse in order to get some fleeting feeling of self-satisfaction for voicing your opinion. You're of course free to be that person, but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.

In the modern corporate world that leadership has entirely insulated itself from customer feedback - if it was plausible to voice your opinion through more appropriate channels I'd advocate for that but many companies have purposefully shut those channels down.

What is the better option to pass along that message than modestly increasing retraining costs for that position?

I treat service workers with respect, personally, but I am struggling to see what other venues of communication are still available.

1) Stop using the service.

2) Directly email them anyone who might have some say in the matter.

3) Make public posts on social media about your position.

You still may not get heard, but all of these have better odds than complaining to the front-line service workers.

Like I said in my other comment, this is missing the point. This approach won’t be effective. Nothing is actually being communicated to the people making decisions. The difficulty in finding another more effective approach doesn’t change that fact. If you feel passionate about this issue, you should try some of the suggestions by the other commenter.

I do not trust you, because I have been a food service worker and actually know what I'm talking about. A customer expressing a preference has never bothered me if they weren't rude about it. If it happens often enough it does get passed on, even though the individual impact of any counter conversation is low. You are trying to turn normal amicable commercial interactions into some kind of moral purity test.

> I have been a food service worker and actually know what I'm talking about.

Same here.

> A customer expressing a preference has never bothered me if they weren't rude about it.

A lot of people are seemingly skipping over OP describing their behavior as creating a “hostile atmosphere”. That is inherently rude.

> If it happens often enough it does get passed on

But we aren’t talking about just telling your manager. There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy with larger corporations, especially ones with a structure like McDonalds’ franchise model, that these complaints will not make it to the decision makers.

This read to me like a poorly-chosen phrase from a non-native speaker. I had no impression OP intended to communicate hostility, just rejection of the corporate practice.

But we aren’t talking about just telling your manager. There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy with larger corporations, especially ones with a structure like McDonalds’ franchise model, that these complaints will not make it to the decision makers.

They will eventually. Years ago Starbucks used to insist that customers specify 'tall, grande, or venti' for their medium, large, and x-large cups, to the point of arguing with the customer if they just asked for the large. They abandoned the practice some years ago, presumably due to feedback from their counter staff.

>This read to me like a poorly-chosen phrase from a non-native speaker. I had no impression OP intended to communicate hostility, just rejection of the corporate practice.

This is also incredibly weird to me. There is nothing in that post that shows any indication of them not being a native speaker. You just agree with their underlying point so you're giving yourself leeway to ignore the parts of what they said with which you disagree. However, you can't actually admit that bias to yourself or to me, so now you're completely fabricating stories about them being a non-native speaker. It doesn't matter to you that this justification is entirely circular, they didn't mean "hostile" because they're a non-native speaker and they're a non-native speaker because they said "hostile" when they didn't mean it.

Wrong on all accounts: I am indeed a non-native speaker, and reading it again I do see a few indications myself, and my definition "hostility" (and I'm sure I am not alone on this) is a spectrum so you are also giving yourself leeway to interpret things in your preferred way, for example furrowing your brow for a couple of seconds and then looking away is a hostile behavior, if you get on the train and look a stranger like that they would likely describe you as "a bit hostile", maybe I am using it too much as a synonym of "aggressive", which according to the dictionary it is, if instead I were talking about war or politics it would be crystal clear we are talking about the "hard" flavor of hostility but here we are talking about a simple client-customer interaction to get some food.

Well way back in the day, I worked at Radio Shack in college. We were suppose to ask for a phone number and address as part of the payment flow. People complained, I said it was corporate policy. I really didn’t give a shit about their complaints. I got my little minimum wage, sold useless warranties and got a $5 spiff and went on with my day.

Whether it bothered you, it was useless for the customer to complain

No. I call bullshit on your oddly protective stance in favor of how corporations do things.

The pushback has to start somewhere and if it means being mildly rude to some poor cashier for a second, well, that's part of their job and you're not some kind of asshole for making your dislike obvious. You came in there to buy something specific and simple after all, and being pushed on something else is rude too.

You can't be expected to write a strongly worded letter to corporate every one of the many times in an average day that you'll encounter some new, blandly packaged parasitic data harvesting or price gouging practice from some corporation.

On the other hand, if you and enough others create a pattern of responding with a bit of hostility at the customer service end of things, you're nearly guaranteed to fuck up some KPIs somewhere, and raise enough eyebrows to make the executives at X corporation reconsider a few things.

Do you think the cashier even care or will remember at the end of the day

> but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.

FALSE.

In today's economy and politics of normalized and systemic dark pattern enshittification, fomenting discord toward the turtles all the way down is a responsible civic duty of a disgruntled public captured and corralled by corporate monopolies with no exits.