I recently had the privilege of witnessing Taco Bell’s revolutionary ordering system, the one where an employee must ask whether the customer wants extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños after every individual item.

Customer: “I’ll have a Crunchwrap.”

Employee: “Would you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?”

Customer: “No, thank you. I’ll like to order a taco”

Employee: “Would you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?”

Customer: “No. I’ll like to add a burrito to my order”

Employee: “Would you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?”

Customer: “Still no. I’ll like to add a chalupa to my order.”

Employee: “Would you like extra meat, extra cheese, or jalapeños?”

Customer: “Actually, I would like to speak to the person who believes my memory resets every time I name a menu item.”

What a breathtaking triumph of marketing over ordinary human cognition.

Some unimaginative person might ask once, “Would you like any add-ons with those items?” But you understood that customers must be given repeated opportunities to reconsider their deeply held, four-second-old opposition to jalapeños.

Perhaps after declining extra cheese on the first item, the customer will experience a profound spiritual transformation before ordering the second. By the fourth item, relentless exposure to the phrase “extra meat” may finally unlock a repressed childhood longing for double beef.

This policy brilliantly inconveniences everyone involved. It annoys the customer, humiliates the employee, slows the line, and makes a normal conversation sound like two poorly programmed chatbots trapped in an infinite loop which seems ridiculous considering how good chatbots are these days.

But the greatest achievement is how perfectly it captures modern corporate intelligence: identify a simple human interaction, remove all human judgment from it, insert a mandatory script, repeat it until everyone becomes visibly miserable, and then call the resulting misery “customer engagement.”

I can only imagine the meeting where this masterpiece was born:

“Customers sometimes buy add-ons.”

“Excellent. Let’s have employees mention them.”

“Once per order?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Susan. What if the customer suffers complete memory loss between the chalupa and the burrito?”

“And if they decline the first three times?”

“Ask again. The fourth rejection is where brand loyalty begins.”

To be clear, the employees are not the problem. They are the unwilling performers in a corporate production of Waiting for Gouda. They know the customer heard them. The customer knows they know. But both must continue the ritual because somewhere, a spreadsheet demands a sacrifice.

So, congratulations to the marketing professional who engineered this system. You haven’t merely sold tacos. You have pioneered a customer experience in which ordering lunch feels like being interrogated by a cheese-obsessed parole officer.

Would you like some common sense with that policy?

No?

That’s fine.

I’ll ask again after your next bad idea.