Hooray for Dumb Surveys!

Doing one of the countless surveys I regularly receive I noticed that the survey program was much more dumb than usual. The first set of questions asked me which fast food restaurants I had visited in the last 4 weeks and how many times I frequented said restaurants. I filled in that I had gone to both Taco Bell and Arby’s once in the past month. Then the survey goes on to ask which of the McDonald’s coffees I had ordered in the last month. There wasn’t an option to say that since I don’t drink coffee I probably wasn’t going to be ordering coffee.

Since I had just told the program that McDonald’s wasn’t one of the two fast food places I’d visited in the previous 4 week, the program should realize that I’m probably not going to be ordering something from a place I haven’t been. Some better programming on their part will allow them to save substantial time in collecting and processing survey data, and save the time of those taking these surveys.