I heard on the radio, and was only able to confirm in a Canadian newspaper, that McDonald's will soon be offering one hour of wireless internet access with the purchase of a combo meal. The technology will be rolled out in New York, Chicago, and an undisclosed location in California.
Although not interesting in iteself, as places like Starbucks have been offering wifi access for a while now, it does raise a question about how this affects McDonald's concept of what their business is. As a company that helped define the term "fast food", do they really want to encourage customers to sit around for an hour watching flash movies, sending email, and IM'ing their friends?
McDonald's has tried in the past to serve different types of food, like spaghetti, which are considered more "sit-down" type meals. Last I checked you couldn't order spaghetti there anymore, as those trials failed miserably. Hell, they don't even have comfortable benches, installing cold plastic slabs instead so that you'll leave more quickly and allow another cow to get in and feed at the trough.
It's a neat idea, but really. Didn't we learn in the 90's that 'e' everything caused more problems than it was worth? Won't this just drive the price of a hamburger and fries even higher? Will customers even use it? In my opinion, there are a lot of interesting questions here, questions that I'd be curious to see if McDonald's will address.
This is a pretty interesting topic, because when I go to 2600 meetings in NYC, we have a tough time trying to find any places that will let us plug in laptops. The security guards at Citicorp make sure that none of us use the outlets on the ground to power our laptops. So, since most of us want a place to connect (since batteries won't last long enough), we've searched all over the building for outlets. For a while we would use random outlets in Barnes & Nobles, but they eventually turned off the power to the outlets because they didn't want us there. It's interesting to see that Borders will be providing wireless connections, but B&N doesn't even want people using laptops in their store.
After the meetings, a group of us would always walk to a nearby McDonald's to get food. Interestingly enough, there are outlets next to the tables where we would plug in our laptops, and nobody has ever said anything to us about it. I guess the next step is McDonald's going one step further and offering us wireless connections.
A corroborating link:
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/2107771
yeah, links to different stories about it are popping up all over. I'm proud to say, though, that I got that story before slashdot. There time shows 8:13; my time shows 8:01. I rule!