Big Mac goes Big Tech, with a few hiccups
When McDonald’s first opened for business in the 1940s, its workers stood at physical counters, its burgers and fries were listed on paper menus, and its customers paid cash to its human cashiers. How quaint.
Today technology so infuses every aspect of McDonald’s business that it would only be a slight exaggeration to call it a tech company that happens to sell burgers.
Its mobile app; its humanless, order-taking kiosks; its digitised menus that change based on trends, the weather and more; and even its generative AI — together, these enable McDonald’s to eke out additional sales and efficiencies worth billions of dollars to the company, which has 40,000 locations in about 100 countries.
Yet that same tech can also bring McDonald’s to its knees.
On Friday, system outages plagued McDonald’s locations across some of its biggest global markets, including Japan, Australia and the UK, forcing many stores to temporarily take only cash or shut down. McDonald’s hasn’t disclosed how widespread the outages were, but on Friday afternoon, 12 hours after the outages were first reported, a franchise in San Antonio, Texas would not accept orders on its app and could not accept cash.
McDonald’s said the outage was caused by an unnamed third-party provider during a “configuration change”. McDonald’s Japan on Saturday apologised, saying all its restaurants and its delivery service were operating normally.
The burger giant did flag that something like this could happen, at least to Wall Street.
“We are increasingly reliant upon technology systems,” lawyers wrote in its annual Securities and Exchange Commission filing on February 22. “Any failure or interruption of these systems could significantly impact our or our franchisees’ operations, or our customers’ experiences and perceptions.”
Even AI gets a warning in the filing: “The artificial intelligence tools we are incorporating into certain aspects of our restaurant operations may not generate the intended efficiencies and may impact our business results”.
McDonald’s wants more customers to order through digital avenues, which already made up a third of its sales in top markets in 2022.
In December, McDonald’s announced a partnership with Google to move restaurant computer systems into the cloud, where the global scale of data will allow McDonald’s generative AI system to “better understand the broadest range of patterns and nuances”, resulting in what McDonald’s at the time said would be “hotter, fresher food”.