You’re on your way home from work, you told your friend you would study with them at 5:00 and its already 4:53, you’re starving and in a rush, so you decide to stop at McDonalds for a quick meal to get you through the rest of the day. Normally this would be fine, you’ve done it before, except now your stuck in line behind a mother with her 6 year old son who just can’t seem to choose between an Oreo and a Smartie McFlurry (which has been happening quite often now that you think about it), the clock is ticking down, and all you want to do is scream at this child to make up his damn mind, well McDonalds has come up with a solution. Two, actually.

With increasing wait times at fast food restaurants and people progressively becoming lazier, McDonalds has created an online application called “My McDs” that allows customers to order their meals before they actually reach the restaurant location (Bishop, R), and has begun offering a delivery service called “McDelivery” that “whips Chicken McNuggets straight to your door” (Kopun and Reporter). Now if someone is about to shove a 1,000 calorie burger down their throat and top it off with couple apple pies measuring in at 500 calories a piece you’d think they could stand in line for 5 minutes to burn off some of that fat, but I get it, people have busy lives, sometimes they don’t have the time to wait around for their ground up chicken parts that are thrown in a frier and called “Chicken McNuggets.” This is where these two new additions to McDonalds come into play.

This was a smart business decision for McDonalds because they are directly catering to their customer’s wants and needs, creating a point of difference for themselves in an industry filled with other franchises that have many points of parity to them, and saving their customers time – something they value greatly. Would you rather wait in line at an A&W for your food, or be able to simply go on your smart phone, choose your meal, and have it already waiting for you when you enter McDonalds? Because I would probably choose McDonalds.

Convenience is something that is very important to people nowadays, and offering services that provide that will increase customer loyalty and positive word of mouth, which is a very powerful    form of advertising. The waiting is “the slow bit of fast food”(Kopun and Reporter), and McDonalds is virtually eliminating this customer pain. With the implementation of these two services, McDonalds can expect a sales increase and will effectively gain a competitive advantage over the other franchises in the market. I mean, who doesn’t want a Big Mac delivered right to their doorstep?

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Bibliography:

• Bishop, Rachel. “McDonald’s Launching Smartphone Order-And-Pay – And Its Coming to UK”. mirror. N.p., 2016. Web. 9 Nov. 2016
• Kopun, Francine and Business Reporter. “McDonald’s Canada Introduces Self-Serve Ordering | Toronto Star”. the star.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 9 Nov. 2016.
• “Mcdonalds”. Mcdonalds.com.ph. N.p., 2016. Web. 9 Nov. 2016.