McDonalds Free Wi-Fi Users Soak Up Seating

bfire writes "McDonalds has earmarked potential changes to seating plans in some restaurants to prevent free Wi-Fi users from monopolizing seating, particularly in peak periods. The availability of Wi-Fi means people are now spending 35 minutes in McDonalds — rather than the average ten minutes that patrons used to spend eating there. But it appears not everyone is happy with the increased 'stickiness' of customers, with some licensees in Australia reporting that Wi-Fi users aren't turning over seats fast enough. The restaurant chain is considering options including space demarcation to deal with the problem."

Comments

Simple Solution

[cashman73]

Go to Panera Bread. They have free wi-fi there, too. The food is quite a bit better, and healthier, than all that fried and preprocessed crap that McDonald's dishes out,...

Re:Simple Solution

[Pinckney]

Go to Panera Bread. They have free wi-fi there, too. The food is quite a bit better, and healthier, than all that fried and preprocessed crap that McDonald's dishes out,...

How do you suggest Panera Bread handle it when their seats start getting filled-up by people using the Wi-Fi?

Your solution has nothing to do with the problem of the article.

Re:Simple Solution

[Planesdragon]

The food is quite a bit better, and healthier, than all that fried and preprocessed crap that McDonald's dishes out,...

"Better" is subjective, but I doubt you'll find it especially healthier. (Go ahead. Ask for their nutritional guidelines -- you know, the kind that are on every @#$!ing McDonald's wall.)

Whether you like fried and preprocessed crap or BAKED and preprocessed crap is a matter of taste.

Re:Simple Solution

[dryeo]

The real question for some of us is, are they kid friendly?
I spent quite a few years going to McDonald's because they were kid friendly. The nice restaurants I went to before becoming a parent were nice, but they weren't the kind of place that you could feel comfortable with a 2 year old. This is the big selling point of McDonald's, you can have a hyper kid there and not feel guilty for disturbing the next table.

Re:Simple Solution

[MichaelSmith]

Of course, uncomfortable seats would not just make me stay as little as possible, but also to not come again if I can avoid it. Yes, that means I won't occupy seats any more, but I'll also not buy food from them any more.

Balance is the key. Not too good, not too bad.

Re:Simple Solution

[wvmarle]

This may actually be a good solution: they say a WiFi customer keeps a seat occupied for 35 mins while other customers do so only 10 mins. So they have less customers, hence less turnover, per seat.

As long as the seats are not all occupied, the extra WiFi users may add to their business, as they only occupy extra seats. However when all seats are occupied other customers may turn around and go to a competitor instead because they can not find an empty seat, and they are losing business.

More prudent in such a case would be to limit free WiFi either in duration (15 mins per connection/MAC address), or to certain periods of time, say not available from 12 to 2 (lunch time).

Re:Simple Solution

[__aarzwb9394]

No sir,

You used the word hippie to imply that Schlosser's concerns are at best misguided, and the rest of your post was intended to discredit his arguments.

Please don't be so disingenuous

IIRC Schlosser does point out the weakness of "natural is always better" thinking, he gives the example of almond flavouring. The natural flavour contains very small amounts of cyanide, the artificial one doesn't. However the natural flavour commands a higher price because it is "natural" and therefore better.

The point about the artificial ingredients in fast food is that they are there to minimise the costs of production, thus allowing companies to drive down prices. They do this because their customers are very, very price sensitive. Many people, including myself, believe that this demand for the lowest possible priced food is misguided and leads us to eat unnecessarily large quantities of unhealthy food. Thus making many of us unhealthy, and probably costing us more in the long run.

Re:Simple Solution

[jahudabudy]

Red Arrow manufactures natural smoke flavor by charring sawdust and capturing the aroma chemicals released into the air.

I especially like this line. Basically, they manufacture natural smoke flavor by burning stuff and capturing the smoke released into the air. And he presents this as a somehow unexpected, contrived method to bottle smoke flavor.

Amazing

[Deadstick]

Let's see...connection time is free, **AA complaints go to McD's IP address, and people stay longer...what are the odds of THAT?

rj

Re:What was the business plan?

[Shadow of Eternity]

A lot of places here in CFL have taken to sticking a second antenna outside and letting all the freeloaders sit outside doing their thing. The heat tends to get rid of them quickly, and those that do stay tend to be more likely to buy things, and the ones that are hell bent on getting just free internet and nothing else still wind up attracting customers without using up too much space.

Idiot business majors

[hellfire]

This is the idiocy of how some businesses deal with networking and the internet. First, they offer free. Then they find out when you offer free, people actually use it, and so the same business turns around and gets upset that people are using what you are offering for free?

Yes, people like free wi-fi, and you offered it in order to drum up traffic and hope those customers would buy stuff, which they did. But you like the business it brings in but you don't like those people freeloading on your network and in your seats when you need more people to be buying stuff?

Yo, McDonalds! Suck it up! You put yourself in this position now you have to deal with it like adults. You either have to limit free to like ten minutes of free, which does reduce the number of people who will come in since they might go to the coffee shop down the road, charge access fees, which also reduces walk ins, or accept that your restaurants don't have enough seats any more. You got greedy and wanted to steal some of the coffee shop crowd to your stores and now you are dealing with the fact that two business ideas are conflicting. Coffee shops work well with wi-fi business models because they have comfy chairs and lounges and expect their clientel to pay a lot for coffee and sit down for a while. It's about atmosphere. You have cheap coffee, no atmosphere, and expect to be selling coffee in volume.

I have a feeling Mickey D's is going to come up with stupid artificial rules that it will expect their employees to enforce and it's going to get ugly and moronic before they end the free wi-fi.

Re:Coffee

[fractoid]

Or a slightly less pathological solution which would nevertheless fix the issue: Simply record MAC addresses and after 15 minutes (or whatever) of use, ban the address for a couple of hours. Sure, a few of us will spoof MAC addresses until we find an unbanned one but the vast majority (and it's the vast majority's asses that are causing the problem) will just mooch off to a different Maccas.

Why does McDonalds need traffic?

[tjstork]

The whole point of McDonalds was to get the people in and get them out, as quickly as possible. IF you go to any decently run McDonalds, there will be several times as many cars as there are in any other food place in the area. Those franchises just print money. Putting in wifi just slows down the presses.

Re:Coffee

[Mr. Freeman]

Yeah, that'll go over really well. "Excuse me, your Internets are broken" 10 times a minute.

Re:Coffee

[fractoid]

They offer wireless internet as an incentive for people to use their stores. People are staying too long. Limiting the time allowed for the wireless internet is the obvious solution. Maybe a full cut-off would be too annoying, but at least cap it at 64kbps after half an hour.

Re:Coffee

[pete6677]

I suggest the United States McDonalds keep doing what they already do: make the store environment resemble that of a public bathroom as much as possible so as to make it miserable to linger around in. Allow creepy and smelly homeless people to linger around the place for added ambiance. Overuse of the wifi will then be the least of their problems.

Re:I still prefer my coffee shop.

[BeaverCleaver]

And there's the rub. In Australia (that place in the summary, I haven't RTFA either!) we don't have ubiquitous hotspots. The woeful state of our broadband has been discussed here many times before so I won't say anything more than that it's fault of those cunts at Telstra, and their douchebag former CEO (who incidentally used to be in charge of USWEST in Colorado, who were so shit they had to change their name to Qwest... OK I'm ranting here but god dammit my country does some retarded shit)

In summary, down here in .au we don't have the option of going next door because next door probably doesn't have wireless. McDonalds is generally the BEST option for public WiFi, and even they meter the usage pretty hard.

And I have to confess to occasionally getting a small coke or ice cream just to sit down and use the web for half an hour...

Re:Panera bread doesn't have chicken nuggets

[tjstork]

I'm selective about what I eat from there

I would be willing to bet that McDonalds and Panera share more than a few suppliers for their products. I think selectivity in food probably doesn't actually buy you too much in the long run. The human body has evolved to eat some genuinely sick stuff, and even the Golden Arches is a damn site better than a few bits of rib meat from a four day dead Zebra. If there's a problem with McDonalds, and other modern foods, medical science seems more to conclude that the food is actually -too good- for us, and so we get fat. I think the only thing one can do is probably fast one day a week, to simulate the conditions for which we are bred.

Re:Wrong headline.

[angryphase]

I hope this isn't indicative of the general opinion that is being bred into today's society.

McDonalds are a business that relies on a appeal to families as well as adult customers. Restricting the service like this promotes their own policies as a kid-friendly establishment (ignoring for now their impact on the growth of obesity and unhealthy lifestyles), one of their major requirements as a business. If they are seen to be promoting the freedom to surf porn within their premises then they lose this reputation as kid-friendly. Gone are the families and in come the nerdverts.

Just because they restrict, monitor and flag material that they, or their customers may find offensive (before possibly even passing it onto local authorities) does not make them evildoers, stealing your freedom and liberty. If you are currently employed then don't you think that this is happening in your workplace? Don't you think if they wanted to, people could (and in some cases do) monitor your usage at home already? Ignorance is bliss.

The question that should be asked is: Are McDonalds making their patrons aware that they must adhere to these policies when using this service (ToS, T&Cs)?

Re:Coffee

[magarity]

There are plenty of off the shelf wifi systems that can print out an access code good for x minutes. Just make EVERY receipt for over an arbitrary amount, say $5, have a code good for 20 minutes. Want more? Buy another $5 worth of stuff (or fish unused receipts out of the trash).

This is a reasonably simple system that most anyone can understand and explain, even the McD employee at the register.

Simplest solution

[91degrees]

Stop offering free Wi-fi.

Seems that it's a net cost. The extra custom doesn't cover the increased cost of requiring more tables. Not quite sure what the point is.

Re:Coffee

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're saying creepy and smelly homeless people are less human than the rest of us, and should be shipped off somewhere where they won't offend our delicate sensibilities?

Homeless and poor people often go to a McDonalds, because it's a a single serving (nowhere to store the leftovers), and it's hot, reasonably good food, cheap. They linger there for warmth, for restroom access, because their pride tells them they paid money, so they're allowed to be there, and a host of other reasons too. Homeless people are people. Most of them have some sort of mental illness and with proper treatment could become productive members of society again, but with no treatment, they end up self medicating with drugs and alcohol, exacerbating the financial and psychological problems that led to them being homeless in the first place.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I never got caught up in self medicating with drugs and alcohol, so when circumstances changed slightly, I was able to leverage that to get out of homelessness, and eventually into running and owning my own business. But I spent enough time homeless to know what it's like. They are people.

Re:Coffee

[Bert64]

Give them longer time during quiet periods too, if noone else wants the seats then keeping them full is better than leaving them empty, and someone who's sitting around trolling slashdot is more likely to want a drink or snack.

Re:Coffee

[PeeAitchPee]

That may be so, but most mentally ill homeless people also refuse the very treatments that would make them "productive members of society again." Also, McDonalds' other paying customers deserve to eat in a place which doesn't smell of unwashed people and urine, or features mentally folks having a deep discussion with the soda fountain. That's just good business sense -- if it happens enough, they'll take their money elsewhere. Yes, the homeless are people, but that doesn't give them the right to inflict their condition on others. If I stunk because I shit myself, or I chose not to use deoderant, are you seriously telling me it wouldn't bother you in the least if I sat immediately behind you on a hot day while you were eating your Big Mac and struck up a loud, spirited conversation with the napkin dispenser? Come on.

Re:Beyond Simple, just apply common sense!

[DrgnDancer]

Qualification: I am childless and likely to remain so, not because of a lack of suitable partner.

I've seen this "ban kids from public places" rant before. It ignores a few points. From a practical point of view, it ignores that fact that parents of small children still need to occasionally go places, and sometimes need to take the child. To use your airliner example: since many places are unreachable or terribly inconvenient to reach without air travel from specific other places, it is more or less impossible to ban children on planes. "I am sorry ma'am, you cannot go to your father's funeral across the country, because we don't allow children on airplanes." Yeah, that's going to go over well. You think the air travel industry is in trouble now, wait till they stop allowing kids.

From a legal point of view, both children and their parent remain citizens and residents of their respective homes. I'm quite certain that there would be discrimination lawsuits in the offing at any legal attempt to bar them from various premise. While certainly it is within a proprietors right to ban children, I think people would have trouble with a government attempting to do so. As it IS within a business's rights to ban children, and very few chose to, it seems that the business case for it probably isn't that good. I'm sure that a decent sized town can support a few, and a larger city many more, restaurants that don't allow children to make for a more elegant dining experience. You can chose to frequent those. I seriously doubt that many low or mid range restaurants could afford the lost revenue though (and probably not even ALL high end restaurants).

In short: Children make noise. At least until they reach kindergarten age (or so) they are often incapable of NOT making noise. They simply haven't learned how to be quiet yet. Businesses that chose not to cater to children do exist, but to make up for excluding a large market, they usually charge more. Often for this reason they are "fancy" places. Most businesses probably cannot or would not want to afford to do this. Trying to ban children legally is almost certainly not possible.