Purchasing a burger at a busy restaurant in a large city will not affect how many burgers they purchase from their distributor.
It will, by exactly 1 burger.
What EricHerboso said wasn't true in general but neither is that. I can well imagine that fast food places just buy a specific number of burgers periodically and discard the surplus. If there's slack from this, buying 1 burger can have a far smaller effect upstream.
Might as well check this line of argument works with a toy example. Suppose the number of would-be burger buyers X at my local McDonald's each day (discounting myself) is Poissonianly distributed with mean 80. The McDonald's buys either 100 or 120 burgers per day: if it had >100 customers the previous day, it buys 120, otherwise just 100. Then, on average, it buys 100 P(X ≤ 100) + 120 P(X > 100) = 100.26 burgers. Now suppose I turn up and buy a burger. Then the expected number of burgers the restaurant buys the next day is 100 P(X+1 ≤ 100) + 120 P(X+1 > 100) = 100.34 burgers. My buying 1 burger makes the restaurant buy only 0.08 burgers more (on average).
This is a common fallacy: saying that if a large change in X produces a large change in Y, then a small change in X will produce no change at all in Y.
There is an analogous fallacy: assuming that if a large change in X causes a large change in Y, a small change in X causes a proportionally small change in Y.
Compare the marketing parable (I don't know if the exact scenario ever happened) of the manager at a burger chain who suggested putting just 5 sesame seeds less on every bun. No-one would notice and they'd save money over millions of buns. Repeat until they have no customers left.
I hadn't heard of that parable before, but I had heard the more upbeat business story of American Airlines saving $40,000 a year by putting one less olive in each salad it served in first class.
You are about to leave home to drive somewhere. There are many junctions with traffic lights on the way, and you will probably have to stop at some of them. If you are delayed by one second leaving home, by how much is your expected arrival time delayed?
Once, when I was younger, I found I could shave 5 minutes off my commute by leaving for the train station 5 minutes later in the morning!
Might as well check this line of argument works with a toy example.
The argument needs to look at the wider situation. How did the burger shop decide on their restocking algorithm? By looking at demand. They will continue to look at demand and review their algorithm from time to time. Buying one burger contributes to that, so the situation is that one more customer may result in them changing the numbers from 100 and 120 to 110 and 130. Ten extra burgers a day until they review the numbers again. The probability that your burger pushes them into ordering...
Just a thought I had the other day; what do you think that the political ideas of conservatism have to do with cognitive bias? I mean, how much are people willing to change naturally, without arguing any points?
I know very little about all of these things, so forgive me if this is a silly thought.