(1) Studies have shown that patron will make larger and more frequent orders when placed through an app rather than in person. This increases revenues.
(2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain.
(3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.
In addition, price discrimination: you can offer deals in the app to price-sensitive consumers that don't cannibalise in-store sales from convenience-sensitive ones. Same concept as couponing.
Which is a roundabout way to say what they actually do, which is to offer "price sensitive" consumers the same prices they used to offer everyone if they are willing to go through stupid hoops worth of "deals" and "coupons" and "engage with our app every day or else your Good Little Consumer (tm) score goes down and we stop giving you discount pricing", and then raise the prices for everyone else.
(1) My advisor in grad school taught me to speak in bulleted lists (2) It's a habit I've been trying to break in the LLM age. (3) I am always telling Copilot to knock it off with those stupid lists and just talk normal.
(2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain.
(3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.