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| Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s chief executive, demonstrating how ordering is done at a self-service kiosk in New York. CreditShannon Stapleton/Reuters |
Welcome to McDonald’s! May I take your order — and bring it to your table?
McDonald’s changes could reshape the diner’s experience: it will expand its digital self-serve ordering stations and table service to all of its 14,000 American restaurants.
Once people order at one of the stations — sleek, vertical touchscreens — they get a digital location device and can take a seat. When their burgers and fries are ready, a server will go to their table to deliver the food with a big smile and a thank you.
Customers will still be able to order food the old-fashioned way, at the counter. But the move to self-order systems and table service is one way to address one of the biggest problems the company’s restaurants have faced in recent years: slower food delivery to customers, caused by more items on the menu. The thinking is that customers will be more willing to wait if they are sitting at a table instead of waiting at a counter.
But it also raises some questions for the company: What does it mean for workers, and is the chain up for a change this big?
According to Steve Easterbrook, chief executive of McDonald’s, the new system will not reduce costs. But it will mean that workers might have slightly different jobs.
“We’ve not cutting crew; we’re redeploying them,” he said.
McDonald’s has tested the order system in 500 revamped restaurants, or what it calls its “just-for-you experience,” in New York, Florida and Southern California and is now introducing them in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, Boston and Chicago. Around the globe, the new program is in some 2,600 McDonald’s restaurants.
The company will roll out a mobile order-and-pay system that will also change the way customers get their orders, including customers ordering from their cars.
Much of what is coming to the United States has already been tried in markets like Canada, Australia and Britain, where roughly one-quarter of transactions are done on in-store screens.
How quickly will the restaurants change? The vast majority of McDonald’s locations are owned by franchisees, and they will have to pay for the changes. Equipment and installation of eight order screens at a location in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan cost $56,000. The costs for a store with lower sales volume will probably be about $28,000.
Many of the company’s stores in Britain have already undergone such a reboot, and in a video, Paul Pomroy, the chief executive of the business in Britain, said the investment was worth it.
“The customer’s perception of the quality of the food has changed,” Mr. Pomroy said. “A Big Mac tastes better in a reimaged restaurant, it just does.”
