VoIP With Your Burger and Fries

VoIP and the Internet are making possible the use of far away call centers to serve the role of order takers for McDonald's drive thurs.

The claim is that this is all about speed, but I'm suspecting there is another reason. It's the language barrier. It's getting harder and harder for  quick serve restaurants to attract the kind of worker whose English is up to snuff. For many drive through location workers English is the person's second language and the result is a delay.

Since time is obviously money to the fast food operator, and since during peak times the drive up window process usually involves three people-one to take the order, another to take the money and a third to hand you the order (not to mention the expediter who fulfills your order) the concept being tested by McDonalds makes sense.

Comments

[Aswath]

Actually, NYT forgot that they have covered this story much earlier - July 18, 2004 to be exact. Search for it in their archives.

[Tom Keating]

Weird that NY Times is covering this just now. I also heard this on the radio on WABC this morning. This is old news.

eweek and I covered this back in January of 2005. i.e. McDonalds Fries with your VoIP.

They mention "Internet" for the data transmission of the order, but they don't mention VoIP for the voice. Very odd the reporter neglected to mention it.