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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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From: Road Walker4/13/2006 7:24:51 AM
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Fries With That?
Sometimes it's all too easy to lose perspective in the modern world. On Tuesday, The Times reported that McDonald's has begun experimenting with a new way of routing menu orders at the drive-through window. The voice you hear at the squawk box comes not from an employee inside the restaurant but from a call center hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. The order is then relayed to the front of the very restaurant where you are bodily present and filled as usual. A man who wants a Big N' Tasty in Wyoming and a woman who wants an Egg McMuffin in Honolulu may be placing their orders with the same teenager in California. Several customers, told of the fact, seemed taken aback.

And yet where is the surprise? There you sit, perhaps miles from home, idling in a car that was manufactured almost anywhere, burning gasoline refined from a substance pumped out of the ground who knows where and shipped, in all likelihood, across the ocean to be trucked to the station where you last filled up. Meanwhile you're talking to your best friend on your cellphone — and who knows how that works or where those signals go? — or listening to satellite radio beamed down from space. Yet what's really on your mind is the food they're getting together for you inside that McDonald's, made from cattle that once lived anywhere and potatoes that grew someplace else, all of it relayed from some way station in the McDonald's supply chain.

Yes, a long-distance call center for a drive-through window is something to marvel at. The real wonder is that the call center isn't in Bangalore.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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