Outsourcing Fast Food Orders

Technocrat

Outsourcing Fast Food Orders

TFG

Thu Dec 27 14:39:39 -0800 2007

Electronics.

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When you roll up to the drive-through squawk box at your favorite fast-food outlet, the person taking your order might be several hundred miles away rather than inside the restaurant.

I was astonished to learn this recently while watching a Modern Marvels episode, "Fast Food Tech," on The History Channel (link entered manually because the editor does not like the ? character) www.history.com/shows.do?episodeId=254811&action=detail. Several chains began outsourcing order-taking to call centers a couple of years ago www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/11fast.html www.foodfacts.info/blog/2006/11/outsourcing-drive-thru-window.html--not to cut costs, but to improve service. Another interesting fact from the TV episode is that fast food became "fast" thanks to technological developments in kitchen equipment, including computer-controlled deep fryers and metered dispensing of menu item components, which made it possible to produce the finished food product on an assembly line.

Indeed

Thomas Lord

Thu Dec 27 17:35:58 -0800 2007
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That is one of the problematic aspects of buying one of the big franchises: they tend to sell you lots of kitchen equipment that is so hyper-specialized that you are locked-in to a particular set of suppliers. "Vertical" doesn't even begin to describe these firms.

-t

Outsourcing Fast Food Orders

Timothy Brownawell

Thu Dec 27 18:51:33 -0800 2007
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I'm wondering when they'll just replace those hard-to-understand speaker boxes with a screen/keypad so people can punch in their order themselves. We already have automated airline check-in, automated bank tellers, automated supermarket check-out, etc, etc, when will this come to fast food? (And when will this fast-food version be packed up into a shipping-container sized vending machine, with no people involved except to dump frozen ingredients into the supply bins?)

Outsourcing Fast Food Orders

Uncle Entity

Thu Dec 27 19:08:23 -0800 2007
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Carls Gee, er... J, already has them on the inside at a store in Tempe, Az. Takes your card and money too IIRC. Drive through is still the old way though. Don't really see an outside touchscreen lasting with all the little hoodlems and amazing popularity of fast food after the bars close.

Not complaining at all about this new development, almost have to know Spanish if you want to order something that isn't a value meal anymore in the Phoenix area. Well, except Taco Hell, there they correct your Spanish.

Not entirely new...

mengel

Fri Dec 28 07:37:35 -0800 2007
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For years, Pizza Hut used to send all delivery orders to a call center/data center in Florida, which took your order and routed it to a neigborhood Pizza Hut. Back when I worked at the Death Star (AT&T) they used to be a frequent caller at the Tier IV support line with networking problems --until one of our guys flew down there and found their data center wasn't actually grounded :-O .