Well, close, but not quite. McDonalds started to "outsource" drive through orders to a central call station (in North Dakota, where the minimum wage is fairly low, $5.25). Just imagine if they started to outsource out of country, to say, India. "Would you like fries with your murdered cow, you sacrilegious dog?"

All joking aside, imagine what else can be outsourced. True, it saves money and there is no real good finical reason not to. But still, something seems odd about the whole matter.

Linkage:

http://www.kpvi.com/index.cfm?page=nbcheadlines.cfm&ID=24621

I know that this doesn't apply here, but my general take on outsourcing is that if a company outsources the production of goods or services to save money, then they should be forced to pay a tariff on the things they outsource if its outside the country. If it's still in the country, I say lay an outsourcing tax on them.

Outsourcing only screws the workers, while the good ol' boys get to save a few dollars on minimum wage. It's just not right.

That's very... odd.

When jobs get outsourced, newer types of jobs crop up here. Seems like a long running trend to me.

Aye. Some jobs that get outsourced are jobs that people here don't really want, but in some cases it's not really a great idea (like tech support).

Outsourcing drive-thru order taking seems really dumb to me because it seems like it would cost quite a bt to set something like that up.

I don't get it...

How do they think that doing this is going to speed up orders, and increase the accuracy of the orders?

You would think it'd slow down the order... the person has to drive up, tell the guy the order, who then has to relay it back to the restaraunt they ordered at in the first place... god help them if the wrong place loses its electricity and the order can't be completed.

I don't know about any of you, but there's no way I want to go to McDonalds and have to worry about seeing a sign that says "Drive through out of order" granted I hate McDonald's food, and don't eat there often, but still.

And wouldn't they need some way of being able to tell which order belongs to which car....

It seems to me that the largest reason some orders take so long is because there's too many people inside, and the cooks have plenty of other orders to take, not because some one can't press the buttons on the register fast enough or something.

So you're telling me that you still talk to an actual person at the drive-thru? That's the kind of thing that could easily be replaced by a computer....

The way it usually works is orders are placed in a queue, and you have to hope to god that the queue of orders and the queue of cars match up. For example, if someone drives off between the time their order is taken and the time they're supposed to be at the window, the queue of orders is now incorrect, and the person that was behind you is charged for your order. Considering the fact that there is no way to reconcile this kind of error by outsourced employees, I think this move is dumb.

Also, what happens when the drive through intercom goes offline or the power goes out? Both have happened to me while working a drive-through, and you just have to have people pull up to the window and do everything one at a time. So employees would still need to be familiar with prices and taking orders...

Also, old people. I'd say about 1/3 of old people completely pass the intercom and pull up to the window and order there. This also throws off the queue. It really pisses me off and I was really surprised when I first noticed this happeneing. But they do it all the time. The only way to fix this kind of error is to have a real live breathing employee to add an order to the front of the queue suddenly.

Freelancer is right. I dont see this helping anything. The main solution to this is just to make sure you dont hire complete illiterate morons to run the drive-thru, or make people pass a language proficiency test to work the drive-thru.

I hate going to fast-food around where I live and having to decipher ebonics to place my order.

It's a way for them to decrease the ethnic diversity of drive-through employees (although perhaps increasing the American Indian percentage).

Man, how long before that thing is hacked and screwed with?