News of the Weird: McDonald's Drive-Thru Approach

Once in a blue moon, I check out News of the Weird. It is a funny column that I have been reading for a long time. It was published in a few magazines but I am happy enough to read it online. This month's listing of weird news is disturbing:

McDonald's franchise's in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Brainerd, Minn., and Norwood, Mass., recently began outsourcing their drive-thru order-taking to a call center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thus, a Big Mac order shouted into a microphone in Missouri gets typed into a computer in Colorado (and a digital photograph of the customer's car is taken in order to reduce errors) and then clicked back to the originating restaurant's kitchen, which has the order ready in less time (30 seconds less, on average, with fewer errors) than the average McDonald's takes. [International Herald Tribune-New York Times, 7-19-04]

From a technical point of view the solution is pretty cool. From a social point of view...weird, man.

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about me

Shane Birley is a blogger, huge geeky nerd, web developer, poet, and creative writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a partner at Left Right Minds, a web development, arts management, business blogging and on line marketing company.

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What else do I do? I talk out loud, record it, and post it on line. I chatter about all kinds of things. Some of the things are nerdy, some professional, and some of them are very much NSFW. Why? Because do them for myself and my non-work life. You can be the judge.