My newspaper column for this week: Mickey D at a Distance

(mods: this is my column and I have reprint permissions from my newspaper, The Sentinel, Carlisle, PA)

Also available online at:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2006/04/13/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis01.txt


They’re outsourcing burger orders
By Rich Lewis, April 13, 2006

I was driving down Walnut Bottom Road in Carlisle the other day when I decided to zip into McDonald’s for a bite.

I stopped at the squawk box and ordered a chicken sandwich, fries and a Coke off the dollar menu.

“That’ll be $3.18,” a female voice advised. “Please drive around to the first window.”

I rolled around the turn and up to the window and handed the girl my money.

But wait.

Was this the same girl who had spoken to me at the order box? You’d think so, since it was only five seconds and 15 feet ago, and it would seem unlikely that another person would have had time to change places with her. You’d also think so because that’s the way the world works — you talk to the person and then you see her.

But an article in this week’s New York Times made me suddenly wary of trusting appearances or expectations at the Golden Arches — or, indeed, anywhere else where I can’t keep an eye at all times on the person I’m talking to.

For, as Matt Richtel explained in his article, “The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order,” McDonald’s has started outsourcing fast-food orders to call centers far from where the food itself is actually ordered and served.

Richtel points to the example of Julissa Vargas, 17. She and about three dozen others work in a building 150 miles north of Los Angeles, taking drive-through orders from 40 McDonald’s restaurants in Hawaii, Mississippi, Wyoming and other places far away from California. They then pass the orders along to the folks working the grills and fryers, and the food is handed to the customers at the local pickup windows.

Richtel says that McDonald’s actually started testing the call centers 18 months ago, though few people had heard about it.

“The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order,” he explains. “But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through.”

Well, maybe, but I know from years of experience that long waits at McDonald’s don’t have anything to do with how quickly my order travels from the squawk box to the food counter — but are caused when someone sits and stares at the menu because they can’t choose between the triple- and quadruple-cheese-deluxe, or when the van in front of me is carrying 16 soccer players who want 300 burgers and 150 shakes, or when the fish sandwich I want is still sizzling in the fat fryer.

If Julissa Vargas can solve any of those problems, well, OK, she can be working out of a yurt in Kazakhstan for all I care. But she can’t, and the two seconds that she might possibly save me at the order box will usually be lost again somewhere down the line. So what’s the point? Unless, of course, my sandwich is going to be e-mailed instantaneously from Grenada to my glove compartment. Now that would be cool.

I always thought the Sheetz system was a little strange — you know, placing an order on a computer while the person who is going to make your tuna sub is standing three feet away waiting for the information you just entered on your screen to pop up on his screen.

But the McDonald’s system is definitely weirder. For one thing, Julissa and her mates have to check their computer screens to figure out if it’s time for breakfast or lunch in the state where the order is being placed. You don’t have that kind of problem when you and your customer are just a few shrubs apart and not a few time zones apart.

Still, it’s just another inevitable step down the road of modern communications. Call centers are now used for everything from buying insurance to getting your TV serviced. In fact, as Richtel reports, Hardees and some other food chains are also eyeballing the call-center approach used by McDonald’s.

And the trend toward inscrutable remoteness has invaded our private lives as well. In the old days, when you called people on the phone, you knew darn well where they were when they answered — because phones had reliably fixed locations. If Joe answered the phone, he was home. Now when I call my son, for example, the first question I ask isn’t “how are you,” but “where are you?” That’s because he has a cell phone, and cell phones, like hobos, don’t have fixed addresses. Every call is a “Where’s Waldo” moment.

It all reminds me of one of my favorite science-fiction movies, “Dune.” In one scene, a fat, wormy creature with a sad face, known as a “navigator,” shows up at the emperor’s palace in what looks like a tipped-over phone booth and tells the emperor he has to kill the duke’s son.

Then the critter mysteriously announces, “I am not here.”

Exactly. Nobody is anywhere any more.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t still ask, “Fries with that?”

Rich Lewis' e-mail address is rlcolumn@comcast.net

realized, with nearly everyone you call, "Where are you?" comes up at some point from one or both ends in the conversation.

and sometimes I'm amazed at the answers I get back

is always a block long..

i mean if people can figure out atms, they can figure out how to order a burger from a touch screen.

sure, julissa works for cheap, and call centers can be outsourced to wherever.
but why have people at all when you can cut them out entirely?

it worked with bank tellers, it should work with mickey d's.

then maybe they can pay julissa to figure out how to keep the burgers from turning into leather by the time they get served.

that hasn't a clue about how SS works nor any ideal on where your check is or what your trying to say. So much for putting disabled americans to work.

But underneath, the entire concept of remote order taking is quite frightenting. Soon as they get those kinks out, you know that McDonalds is going to offshore the entire operation over to India or some other low wage country. This isn't about saving a couple of seconds on an order, this is about saving a few dollars per man-hour. If McD's eliminates one or two positions per shift, it's all profit for them.

So, now that the manufacturing sector has vanished, along with the high tech sector, all we have left are relatively low paying service sector jobs. Now it seems that those are going to be outsourced also, as much as possible. So what does that leave for the US job market? You can't continue to base the largest part of your economy on consumer buying when said consumers aren't earning enough money to buy anything with:shrug:

Just another contributing factor in the impending economic crash that is headed our way.

So now we're going to export more 'manufacturing' jobs?

I always used to bitch that they were shipping all the jobs overseas and that we would become a nation of people serving hamburgers to each other - now it looks like they wont even leave us that.

This one was posted on DU's front page at the time:

http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2004/02/26/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis01.txt

I didn't take on the political/social issues because I wanted a light piece this week.... but if you read the original NYT article, many ominous points are raised (the corporate control over the call-center workers is depressing and frightening, not to say dehumanizing).

comments and other feedback appreciated

I remember that NYT article. I liked your take on it.

and for the nice comment! :)