Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

McDonald's Outsourcing (!)

According to Reuters, now, McDonald's Corp. is into outsourcing. The managers of the company are thinking of using remote call centers to take customer orders in an effort to improve service at their drive-through windows.

People concerned about the health of the nation need not worry. I bet this will be the end of McDonald's. As a customer (not McDonald's but I use the term in general here), I try not to buy the products or at least the service contracts of companies that use outsourcing notoriously. This, after I had a major problem with a prominent computer company during the last half year or so, which made me swear off their products. My new computer has only the factory warranties on it and if something goes wrong, I am not going to spend several days on the phone with anybody's support service again. I'll pay a little more and call my friendly local computer expert who has a shop within a mile or two from my home. After all, my mental health is worth the money and I can't risk my blood pressure rushing up again.

Back to Mcdonald's, I can just see this scenario. Someone from the other end of the world gets his store windows mixed and everybody who orders chicken McNuggets gets Big Macs, I bet, with curry on them.

Come to think of it, maybe I too can use oursourcing in some way. I may outsource cooking dinner and my family can eat two days later, since they'd have to spend time on the phone getting instructions on how to boil their own water for soup and make Chana Masala or Dal Curry. If everyone who cooks dinner for her/his family would follow my lead, we might become McDonald's biggest competitor and the fat problem of the nation could be solved since people would have to eat every two days instead of three times a day.

Finally, I see the silver lining.