First on the list

Open a restaurant on a delivery app and read the order of the dishes before you read anything else.

Nobody chose that order. It is the order the kitchen wrote the dishes down in, carried straight across into the app. It is not the margin order. It is not the strength order. It has no relationship at all to what the place is actually good at.

Then watch what the order does. The dish sitting at the top is seen by everyone who opens the page, including the majority who never scroll past the first screen. It sells more than the others. Selling more moves it into the row the app builds for popular items, which sits above the menu, so now it is seen twice. A year on, it is the best-seller by a distance, it is on the table tent and the sign by the door, and the owner will tell you with real confidence that this is what the customers want.

He may be right. There is no way to know it from his own numbers, because his numbers were produced by the order of a list.

The operators I have sat with who moved one dish to the top found out inside a fortnight. The number followed the position. The old favourite, now fourth, went quiet. The thing they had believed about their own customer for a year turned out to be a fact about the sequence somebody wrote a menu in.

So I read a best-seller list the way I read a survey, by asking who wrote the questions, and in what order.

On the apps the popular dish is the first dish. The menu is not measuring taste. It is measuring itself.