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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."
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
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.
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.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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.
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.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Yeah, that'll go over really well. "Excuse me, your Internets are broken" 10 times a minute.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
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.
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.