A ‘McMillionaire’ Shows Us the Dark Side of Loyalty
Welcome to Wednesday, futurists.
In an era where every transaction is gamified and every purchase quantified, we're witnessing the emergence of a peculiar new social hierarchy: the points aristocracy.
A McDonald's customer has amassed over 1.15M loyalty points, creating a new form of digital nobility in our quick-service fiefdom. To break into this exclusive club's top 100, you'd need a mere 422,000 points—roughly equivalent to 70 Big Macs in exchanged value; the caloric equivalent of a small kingdom.
Meanwhile, the status economy is having quite a week. Nike quietly shuttered its RTFKT NFT division, marking the end of pandemic-era digital collectible euphoria. Meanwhile, Anne Helen Petersen astutely observes that we've all become ‘mini-Wirecutters’ as gift guide culture atomizes into an infinite scroll of curated consumption.
What binds these stories is our desperate search for status markers in an increasingly digital world. Whether we're climbing McDonald's leaderboards or mourning the death of expensive JPEGs, we're all just trying to quantify our place in the algorithmic aristocracy.
🔮This Friday on the podcast, we’re excited to welcome Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Metalabel, a release platform for creatives. Future Commerce’s forthcoming 2025 Journal, LORE, is currently available for preorder on Metalabel. Subscribe to the podcast and turn auto-downloads on so you’re the first to hear. Coming this Friday to Apple and Spotify.
— Phillip
P.S. Have a Futurist in your life? Buy them the asparagus chopstick holders they didn’t know they wanted with Future Commerce’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide.
Loyalty Program Kings: The U.S. leader in McDonald’s loyalty points has amassed over 1.15M points. To compete amongst the top 10 competitors, you’d need 671k points, while the top 100 starts at 422k, making these rankings a competitive and multiplayer game.
Our Take: This is the Hawthorne Effect in action. When humans feel they’re being examined or overseen, their behavior changes. This effect is realized when we know algorithms are ‘watching’ us as much as it is observable when we perceive that others are in competition with us, even if we’re not *losing* anything.
This is effective because points-based loyalty programs encourage irrational brand monogamy; by revealing points totals, you can compare yourself to others. By making this data known, McDonald’s employees use a form of subtextual behavior shaping; they’re asking us to rank ourselves against the top performers.
A Theory of the Modern Gift Guide. “We’re all Wirecutter now.” The atomization of journalism and editorial content continues. This analysis by Culture Study’s Anne Helen Petersen explains how gift guides have become de rigueur as lifestyle curation and commerce increasingly intertwine, delivered by ever-smaller creators. Modern consumers resemble Wirecutter editors with wishlists.
Wicked Dumb? Mattel faces backlash after a printing error on “Wicked” doll packaging directed users to adult content, prompting a lawsuit against the toy giant. Bad links and holiday cheer don’t mix.
Amazon Ad Spend Soars: Black Friday saw Amazon ad costs spike, with a 30% spending increase year-over-year and CPC climbing by 9.9%. Holiday marketing battles have never been fiercer. Kiri Masters covers the platform changes in a post-holiday writeup in Forbes and questions the future sustainability of a platform becoming more expensive every year.
Smells Like Crypto Bust. Despite a recent crypto rally, the final nail in the 2020-vintage NFT boom coffin has been struck. No, it wasn’t Starbucks killing its digital collectibles, or even trading olive oil in your coffee for free oat milk; it was Nike shutting down its digital collectibles division. Instead, Nike’s sunset of RTFKT marks the end of a pandemic-era crypto craze amid the slow build of a renewed interest in the technology.
Holiday Uncertainty? Despite a 6% growth prediction, consumer confidence wanes during the 2024 holiday season. Retailers adapt amid spending ambiguity. McKinsey partner and CPG leader Tamara Charm unpacks a new behavior. Some consumer demographics are ‘spending more to buy less,’ opting for more premium products and experiences, while others are ‘value seeking.’
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