In the end he asked: Is there no McDonalds?
We had had one for about 5 years, but I had not considered it a restaurant. It's a different thing :) Right, it's just around the the corner from the train station, 2 minute walk.
I concluded that humans are very conservative when factoring “lunch risk”. The perceived cost of time, money, and disappointment if they don’t find food they like drives them to McDonalds where they know exactly what they are getting and the risk is zero.
A Swiss acquaintance of mine was the first to show me how this works first-hand. Lemongrass chicken? Congee? Pho? Let’s just get “a Mac”.
OTOH, I'm actually somewhat interested in visiting McDonald's once in foreign countries because their menus aren't consistent across the world but rather somewhat adapted to the local tastes.
My kids were part of a group that recently hosted another school group from Europe. As they were leaving, we asked them about the experience. One of the kids said that it was comforting to find out that America also has McDonalds, and many other kids shook their head in agreement.
Counting locations I think compared to other kinds of restaurants their market share is small. Measured in turnover it might be a different story. Few people might enjoy their meal at a McDonald's for 30-60 minutes.
It's pretty impressive from a business and logistics perspective. Imagine delivering the exact same physical object, which is perishable and must be locally prepared, everywhere in the world. That's a different challenge than your cloud app's capacity.
Internationally there is quite some variation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_availability_o...
But that it's a global system does surprise me. Their main market should be the US, but EU data protection is legally mostly incompatible. I am pretty sure they have major violations.
For FAANGs that's not news and they have their cases with the commission regularly. But for pretty old brick and mortar restaurant business I am suprised.
Edit: Of course the central recipes are globally standard. But otherwise I'd expect the logistics more regional. Especially for Australia mentioned in the article.
Even if they do follow local regulations and have mostly "isolated deployments" of things touching customer data, they might still have things like a centralised DNS server or update server for kiosk/POS software etc.
I would be pretty surprised if anno 2024 an organisation like McDonald's had regional independent SWE/Ops teams building essentially the same thing but for their region.
Of course using basically the same kiosk software makes sense despite being different localisations and different business owners. Having single points of failure globally not so much. I wonder how business owners take functioning sea cables for granted. We have wars in several places on the planet.
Seems easy enough.. You tell what you want, they make it, you hand over your cash money and they hand over the burger.
Cutting that $1,- off the average meal bill that allows McDonald's to sell their francises deals as more profitable then being independent depends on both the reality and perception of it being an integrated system, so there is every incentive to make the IT system as global and pervasive as possible.
I can imagine this will cost a few heads at McDonalds who didn’t have a DRP or BCP which included secondary payment infrastructure. Even if you were paying double retail rates and ate the cost for your franchisees, it would have been worth it.
For a company so dependent on external vendors, I’m surprised we don’t see more outages. I was always surprised to hear they outsourced their integration infrastructure for the core business. I’m sure it’s like that elsewhere given the number of customer stories floating around for McDonalds.
They have the capital, brand, network and infrastructure to be a tech powerhouse. But they’re not.
https://www.mastercardservices.com/en/dynamic-yield/case-stu...
https://blogs.mulesoft.com/digital-transformation/business/m...
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/mcdonalds/
https://www.evoke-creative.com/projects/mcdonalds
https://www.abbyy.com/customer-stories/mcdonalds-relies-on-a...
https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2023/mcdonald-s-corporat...
https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
Interesting how you can't even get a hamburger without being connected now. I'm not sure if I'm happy about having been right.
(Maybe this is where I should explain that I was cycling home with a cycle cart behind my bike filled with computer and camping hardware, wearing wooden shoes)
I entered the drive-through lane behind a car but when it was my turn the woman behind the counter said 'only cars allowed'.
That was close to the first and thus far the last time I went to a McDonald's. It is also a good example of correlation without causation...
I can't even use an app from my Gym without it lagging / crashing. Many of us predicted this was going to start happening at an increasing rate because of AI and the over-saturation of under-qualified students with CS degrees. It is going to be a bad decade for software.
