A Drive-Through Lane to the Next Time Zone

[andyjackson1828]

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

Pull off Interstate 55 near Cape Girardeau, Mo., and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant - or even in Missouri.

The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines. Even some restaurant jobs, it seems, are not immune to outsourcing.


The man who owns the Cape Girardeau restaurant, Shannon Y. Davis, has linked it and 3 other of his 12 McDonald's franchises to the Colorado call center, which is run by another McDonald's franchisee, Steven T. Bigari. And he did it for the same reasons that other business owners have embraced call centers: lower costs, greater speed and fewer mistakes.

Cheap, quick and reliable telecommunications lines let the order takers in Colorado Springs converse with customers in Missouri, take an electronic snapshot of them, display their order on a screen to make sure it is right, then forward the order and the photo to the restaurant kitchen. The photo is destroyed as soon as the order is completed, Mr. Bigari said. People picking up their burgers never know that their order traverses two states and bounces back before they can even start driving to the pickup window.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/business/yourmoney/18mac.html

[mermaid]

1. you Aren't Serious?!!?

:wtf:

[aden_nak]

2. I have no doubt it's true.

Which means that on a day when the telecom system is hosed up, no one can get food via the drivethrough. But overall they'll still save money on paper.

[Norquist Nemesis]

3. On to India!

Well, let's see. With a 24 hour operation, let's say 6 hour shifts (to avoid full-time with benefits) that's 4 jobs per day times the 4 stores is 16 jobs.

Where will the profit from this cost-savings go? I can guarantee it won't be toward creating more jobs in this operation.

[mermaid]

4. Of Course Not!!

but they are blind...if no one here has a job, then no one here will have money to buy their goods, and the house of cards comes tumbling down.

they can't REALLY be this stupid, can they??

:wtf:

Or is it that they are this blinded by greed?

[RoyGBiv]

7. Yes...

They can really be this stupid.

A lot of Wal-Mart employees can't afford to shop at Wal-Mart. There are a lot of companies with long-term economic plans that do not take into account the effects of their own company's actions on the economy.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Oh. My. God.

I suppose this won't affect me directly since I refuse to use a drive-thru, but this is one of the more bizarre things I've read in awhile. I would just love to be a fly on the wall the day a line gets cut or when the inevitable network jam clogs up the system a few minutes after a lunch rush starts. At the last company I worked for, we upgraded our credit card approval system to a high-speed network, and that network was down at least a few minutes every day. Normally this didn't cause a problem because we had a backup system in place that was slower, but worked fine. However, on one particularly hellish day, the entire phone system went down when a bulldozer in some other state cut a network trunk line. It was down for six hours. The chaos that ensued, just from not being able to take credit/debit cards, was unimaginable. In this kind of setup in which the network is necessary just to conduct business and no quickly established backup is in place, this could effectively shut everything down.

It's interesting to read the ads for these companies doing things like this when they're recruiting employees. The focus is always on customer service, connecting with customers, friendly disposition when interacting with customers, etc. Yet, management continually decreases the human element of these operations and makes real customer service a joke.

Oh well. I guess they call this progress.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

6. "People picking up their burgers never know"

because if they did, they might buy lunch somewhere else. I would.

[Walt Starr]

8. So they are even outsourcing minimum wage jobs

this is starting to get sick.

[Norquist Nemesis]

9. Yep. To Colorado for now.

Give it a couple of years and Mickey D franchises will all have a tax haven off shore as an added incentive for being a franchisee. Then training on how to be efficient which hands out pens with the 1-800-OUTSRCE number boldly imprinted.