So, I guess its cheaper to pay any long distance fees and an employee in India to take your order than it is to pay an employee minimum wage to take your order at that location. 
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Call Centers May Handle McDonald's Orders
- Thread starter craigdawg
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PixelFactory said:
Sheetz, the local Gas Station/Quikie Mart chain has touch screens inside to order the food. You pick exactly what's going to go onto your burger, sub, death dogs. If you have something really bizarre you hit a special request button. They are going to start moving them out to the Gas pumps so when your done pumping gas the food would be ready.
yg17 said:So, I guess its cheaper to pay any long distance fees and an employee in India to take your order than it is to pay an employee minimum wage to take your order at that location.
The only places people make minimum wage is in economically depressed areas. I've seen McDonalds hiring at 7.50 around here. One place I saw them hiring at $10.
When people look to outsourcing they should try outsourcing to Appalachia.
What Mcdonalds is doing is nothing interesting nor is it a novel idea. Pizza Hut has been using and or experimenting with dedicated Call centers for at least the past 5 years.
All these ideas are just ways for the Fast Food/Quickserve Franchise industry to cut costs to prepare for the inevetible. What is that inevitable? Well at the current rate of the economy most of these Franchised Quickserve Restauraunts will find it very diffucult to survive. Diffucult as in the labor pool of reliable and competent employees that they can pay at minimum wage will shrink and continue shrinking.
The Quickserve Franchise Industry knows very well that they cannot compete in wages and still provide low prices to customers. So they are left with two options raise prices dramatically across the board or cut labor costs. The later is more likely as I doubt Americans are willing to pay $10 for an extra Value meal or have their 99cent menus taken away from them.
For a long time the industry has found and treated it's employees as expendable but it is soon becoming the other way around where Franchises are faced with treating employees better or loosing them in conjunction with an overall diminishing labor pool. The key here is the buying power of minimum wage is diminishing rapidly and the industry is faced with either paying people much more than minimum wage which would mean raise prices dramatically or find ways to eliminate labor.
Too put it simply every year the percentage of College graduates increases and inflation is far out running even the incomes of well educated professionals so imagine what it's like on the minimum wage end of the spectrum? Mcdonalds and the rest of the Franchised restauraunt industry has been paying pretty much the same amount for the past 20 years. Adjusting wages to the CPI is ludicrous when calculating wages at the low end of the spectrum.
All these ideas are just ways for the Fast Food/Quickserve Franchise industry to cut costs to prepare for the inevetible. What is that inevitable? Well at the current rate of the economy most of these Franchised Quickserve Restauraunts will find it very diffucult to survive. Diffucult as in the labor pool of reliable and competent employees that they can pay at minimum wage will shrink and continue shrinking.
The Quickserve Franchise Industry knows very well that they cannot compete in wages and still provide low prices to customers. So they are left with two options raise prices dramatically across the board or cut labor costs. The later is more likely as I doubt Americans are willing to pay $10 for an extra Value meal or have their 99cent menus taken away from them.
For a long time the industry has found and treated it's employees as expendable but it is soon becoming the other way around where Franchises are faced with treating employees better or loosing them in conjunction with an overall diminishing labor pool. The key here is the buying power of minimum wage is diminishing rapidly and the industry is faced with either paying people much more than minimum wage which would mean raise prices dramatically or find ways to eliminate labor.
Too put it simply every year the percentage of College graduates increases and inflation is far out running even the incomes of well educated professionals so imagine what it's like on the minimum wage end of the spectrum? Mcdonalds and the rest of the Franchised restauraunt industry has been paying pretty much the same amount for the past 20 years. Adjusting wages to the CPI is ludicrous when calculating wages at the low end of the spectrum.
MongoTheGeek said:
Exactly, that is the trend we are seeing. Mcdonalds and it's likes are being forced into a position to pay people signifigantly higher than minimum wage. The Fast Food industry knows they can't sustain that and still sell their food at prices people expect. Many people don't quite understand how hard it is to find good people to work in places like Fast Food. Heck if you think about it 90% + of the working American Population would still not even consider a job at a place like McDonalds even if the starting pay were well above $10/hour.
yg17 said:So, I guess its cheaper to pay any long distance fees and an employee in India to take your order than it is to pay an employee minimum wage to take your order at that location.
From what I've read, the call centers are in metro US locations. One of the primary benefits for using call centers has been the opportunity to hire people with better-than-average language skills.
Too bad some of the high-tech firms don't adopt this principal. One of the [many] reasons I finally decided to switch from PCs to Mac was the horrible quality of DELL's overseas call center.
craigdawg said:
One of the McDonald's in my town already has been using this for the past year.
You place your order at the drive thru, and someone in Colorado answers and takes your order. You then pay and pick up per usual.
Inside, you sit down and place your order over the telephone to the same call center, and then someone from the "restaurant" brings your order and takes your money.
It's not any better or worse. It's McDonalds, so my expectations are pretty low to begin with.
PixelFactory said:
The minimum wage here in oregon is one of the highest in the nation; that is probably the motivation for this program. A friend told me a few weeks ago that he went to a Portland-area Mickey-Ds and the person taking the order had deep southern accent but the cashier didn't. I didn't believe him that companies are outsourcing to this extent, but maybe I should have...
Maybe they should outsource managerial jobs overseas too and see how they like it and while we're at it hire somebody overseas to be the CEO and CFO too.
noel4r said:
These jobs are probably going to Americans. Just ones in different places.
Wasn't there a prison that ran a phone bank?