Price discrimination is basically corporate speak for giving discounts to those who wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to pay full price.
And it makes perfect sense in this context - if you make $200k salary you probably don’t care enough about a $0.30 discount to fiddle with an app for 5 minutes. But if you’re living on a few dollars of food budget, you probably care a lot about that 30 cents and would fight for it. So making the app bad allows them to segment the market to get an extra 30 cents out of the person who can afford it without excluding the low-budget person.
The wealthiest person who I know well would absolutely fiddle with an app for 5 minutes to save 30 cents on a sandwich at McDonald's. He's cheap AF.
But even if he weren't that way, making the app deliberately bad to eek a few more clams out of a subset of people is perverse. Deliberately erecting barriers between the products and those who want to buy them is not how business is successfully done at this level. They aren't selling Ferraris here.
"I want to stick it to these rich guys, so I'll make the app terrible!" doesn't make sense. They're neither smart enough to do that, nor dumb enough.
The simplest explanation is that in a world of shitty software, this software is also just shit. :)
Your point is entirely about sticking it to the rich guys -- for an entire 30 cents. It is based on the presumption that these can't be stuffed to spend time on an app, and you think that this means that the app is deliberately terrible in order to better-succeed at getting those extra 30 cents.
And I understand that 30 cents represents a lot of money in terms of margins.
But I simply reject that line of thinking. It's simply too conspiratorial to be believable, to me.
This is a company that is so incompetent at this point that when they publish video of their CEO eating a new sandwich (sorry, "product"), they can't even get him to act like he's enjoying any part of that.
But it's not about the CEO. For all I know he's an excellent business guy who is working at the top of a company that is dysfunctional in ways that he can't fix (perhaps nobody can fix it), and he just isn't fond of food at all and was more a bigger fan of math classes in school than the arts.
This company can't get the feels of feels-oriented marketing to hit even close to the mark, but they're masters of making an app deliberately terrible to empower subtle, hidden price discrimination to eek a few more pennies out of people?
And that's a good idea -- somehow -- even though it costs them money (someone has to get paid to stand there and take their order) when people don't use the app? Even though when the app is terrible, it costs them money when people do use it because it's just terrible and affects all customers' overall perception? Am I to believe that people of all income levels aren't driven away when an app is awful?
It's not like McDonald's has a monopoly on fast food. It's a competitive market. People have other options.
My buy-in on the idea of price-discrimination-via-terrible-app [because that's a profit center, somehow] is very close to zero.
That sounds, to me, less like something discriminatory and more like something that is simply sadistic.