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McDonalds to go Wireless?
crayongod writes "The AP, by way of AOL *yipe*, is reporting a pilot program by McDonalds to provide inhouse WiFi with the purchase of a combo meal. This sure will make roadtrips a lot easier." An hour of access per combo meal. Additional hours can be purchased for $3... or another zillion calorie combo meal. Mmmm. Healthy.
There goes another customer. :P
:(
We're rolling out wifi all over the place, and McDonald's was going to be one of our targets.
Starbucks around here already said 'no' because they have an exclusive agreement with MSN to do it.
A year later not a single Starbucks around here has wifi.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
It was my understanding that MacDonalds like to get their customers out as quick as possible, so they don't take up the seating for too long. I have heard stories here in England of people being asked to leave during busy hours because they were taking too long finishing their drink or something similarly ridiculous.
I'm not sure how offering an hour of Wi-Fi access would help this, unless they expect us to stand outside and use it.
One thing this will be good for is coverage. There are a lot of mcdonalds out there, all of us dont want to admit it, but there's one too many mcdonalds out there. And if all are hooked up into wifi then thats just going to bring more internet to the masses, and bring internet to the masses who want to be able to read the news with their meal.
So this is not necessarily a bad thing, but I wish they'd bring it to some other fast food places with some better meals.
Who cares if it benefits you.
The point is about a major chain offering Wi-Fi.
Let's think, if McDonalds is offering it and it does well then maybe others will follow suit.
Wi-Fi could become very common. To most people this is news.
Sorry neither the world nor slashdot revolves you and your ego.
Heh, I'm eating fat free yogurt and a granola bar (outta milk, no raisin bran for me) while I'm web surfing. And sometimes I use my stationary bike while I surf.
:P
Who says a geek can't be healthy?
In any case, WiFi in a fast food restaurant? Doesn't make sense. Airport - sure. Coffee Shop - cool. McDonalds - uh, why would I be stupid enough to pull my laptop out there and watch some kid spill ice-cream or coke on it? And since when did a fast food restaurant want you to hang around?
It's a publicity gimmick, and a stupid one at that.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Every McDonalds i've ever been to has at least a half dozen microwaves to heat/reheat food. I have a problem with one at my house -- how are they going to shield them?
Right -- Starbucks and Borders are all about a business model that went out of its way NOT to push people in and out of the door as fast as possible. Borders, and the Barnes and Noble "superstores," were very much reactions to B Dalton's buy-your-Stephen-King-and-get-out-of-the-cashier's -way approach.
B Daltons is still around, though, just serving a different audience. Makes you wonder how well Mickey-D's knows its own business model -- or how seriously they're looking to change it.
(This'd maybe make sense in McDonalds' franchises at highway stops, for traveling types?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd like to know how McD's plans to enforce the 1-hour rule. Set the DHCP lease time for 1 hour? Since the average McDonald's employee may/may not be knowledgeable in renewing leases, I'd imagine an app would need to be written to automate the process.
Or maybe I've got it all wrong. Could someone briefly elaborate?
Just like any other resteraunt, McDonalds has busy times and slow times. If you linger in a slow time they don't care anyway, and if you linger to/through a busy time your going to need more food anyway.
Your incorrect that people don't linger. Most people don't true, but a few do. McDonalds is used as a meeting place by some groups. I once walked into someone presenting a buisness plan at 10:30 at night in a McDonalds. The restaruant was perfect, open that late, free, and provided coffee. (It was none of my business so I didn't linger but it seemed to be a potential startup that didn't yet have investers)
Access is provided one hour at a time, so it seems like they are trying to provide for the [business] crowd that comes in for lunch and needs to get some work done. This is the perfect way to target salesmen, they tend to spend most of their time behind customer firewalls that won't let them check email at the office. Run to McDonalds for lunch/supper (when you are not buying the customer lunch...) and catch up on the office news.
If you have kids and have ever taken them to a McD's with a playplace, you could see how nice this really would be. My kids can easily spend an hour playing in McDonalds. I'd love to be able to bring my laptop along and surf while they play.
Yep, soft drinks are a huge money maker for food places.
You can usally get the dispensers for free or a cheap price, and then purchasing large quantities of syrup and CO2 is relativly cheap. For my parents stores we paid more for the cup and lid then the soda.
That is one of the nice things about the "combo meals" you get a huge increase of the number of people who were not purchasing sodas or who where purchasing smaller sizes, So you do the combos with the large drink but give no discount(some places give a small discount, most don't check the next time at a fast food joint) and is a really nice increase in the money flow.
Over the past few years McDonald's has tried one failed product/campaign after another, trying to lure adults back.
WiFi seems like a good attempt along those lines, although paying per-hour seems overly complicated. They don't sell the playland per hour, do they?
We all know that spammers live in trailer parks and flips burgers at McDonalds to make money to buy new accounts when the old ones are nuked. Now, if you can get one our of IP for the price of a burger I expect all of McDonalds IP range to end up in SPEWS faster than you can say "do you want fries with that?" Any ideas how to avoid this?
Here's the real kicker....McD's in Tokyo has already been providing WiFi. Except not with the retarded marketing scheme being pushed in the US. In Tokyo, you have an account with a major provider and McD's just provides the connection. The provider kicks back a percentage to McD's who now can compete directly with starbucks as a place where people can go for a coffee break and take work with them. No one really stays all that long; just long enough to tweak a spreadsheet while sipping a cup of coffee in a less crowded and possibly more convenient place than the local starbucks. I've noticed a lot of people coming in around the 9 to 11 mark when business is traditionally slow to read email and watch news on the 42in Plasma TV's thay have.
The idea works in Tokyo because McD's is really not doing anything outside of their core business. Network support is contracted out, so they just have to keep making cofee and food. The US side is trying to add sysadmin tasks to the McDonald's worker as well as bank on folks using a computer while they eat a big mac. The only reason why I go to McD's over here is because they still have the fried apple pies, not that baked crap the US stores have served for the last 10 years. I'm not going to buy a value meal just to get on the net when I can do it at work for free, or home for what I'm already paying my ISP.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
If you put all the "McD is fat/incompetent/dangerous for laptops" comments aside, it's a really neat idea.
Imagine this is distributed worldwide: Internet access for everybody! About time!
You have to buy a bigmac (you don't have to eat it though), and you get one hour of surf. It's cheaper than most European cybercafes...
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Actually, you might be suprised. One of the fastest growing segments of private computer users is the retired set. This suprises a lot of people but once you look at it it starts to make sense.
Most people retiring today have at least a basic familiarity with computers from their workplace. The retired set as a group also tend to have more disposable income that they can spend on computers. Yeah, the teenager might be all excited about technology, and know all about it, but can he afford it?. Lastly they have the free time to spend on the computer engaged in lesiure activities. They may not buy the latest and greatest games, but they e-mail, surf the web, etc.
Retirement communities are now having to take into consideration things such as computer labs, high speed access for their residents, and a generally more tech savy population than ever before. I think you would be suprised by the number of older people who would seriously consider taking advantage of this if McDonalds offered it.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
At night (after 8 or so) on the other hand, the place is packed, so the last thing she wants is for the place to turn into an anti-social everyone behind a screen type of place. She is trying to find a balance between making technology convienent and having it completely change the character of her establishment.
The software by the way runs under the Tclhttpd, MySQL, and a few watchdog scripts in the crontab.
The webserver modifies the MySQL database, and the changes are picked up by a monitor daemon that passes commands to iptables. Everyone in the store gets an RFC1918 address, and (if they are paid up) they can route to the internet using IP Masquerading. Since the software runs as a website, the counter person just logs onto the "gateway", and sees a list of who is plugged into the network (information I sift from the dhcp leases.) From there he/she can activate or deactivate connections manually. By default an activated connection will be programmed to time out after a set period of time, enforced by a cron job that checks every 5 minutes or so.
Patrons can look at the same website and see how long they have left, and the menu.
I'm playing with the new(er) toys in the kernel that let you filter by MAC number. Failing that I'll just pull the mac numbers out of the DHCP leases, pair them with an IP address, and filter on that.
Naturally, since I'm building on GPL code, I will be releasing the source when it's finished on my website (http://www.etoyoc.com).
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
um... we don't. Really, we don't care. I have no idea who those people in the commercials are. They've never worked at a McDonalds before I swear. Oh, and to dispel a myth. the guy cleaning the restrooms or sweeping the parking lot is often the highest paid non salary person in the store and gets better benefits and actually works less. most days I just do the crossword then go home.
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