Most fast food chains are franchises these days. There are guidelines and requirements for aesthetics, branding and even baseline IT stuff, for sure.
Corporate owned restaurants are likely to have standardized IT systems which saves a ton on bulk costs. It’s just easier to have 5000 units of the same thing and train people once to fix it.
With franchises, it’s not that easy. However, since things like specialized button panels have been replaced with touch screens, there isn’t much need for custom equipment like there was in the past. (I am excluding all the custom cooking equipment, of course.) Unless a system is absolutely critical to the business, there is probably no reason for it to be standardized.
It just makes sense (using shareholder logic) for corporations to push as much of the operational cost back to the franchise owners. The corporation is basically a service provider and governing body for its franchises and that is about it. With that, probably comes premium pricing for pre-canned IT network systems. It wouldn’t surprise me if restaurant “features” come with subscription fees too.
The quality and standardization of hardware boils down to how a chain is managed and owned, I suppose.
To your point, when I worked at McDonald’s 30 years ago, it was all corporate-standard custom electronics and computer systems. It had to be. A network that used to be highly specialized and cost $100k now just costs just a few thousand and only really needs to support a browser of some kind.
Most fast food chains are franchises these days. There are guidelines and requirements for aesthetics, branding and even baseline IT stuff, for sure.
Corporate owned restaurants are likely to have standardized IT systems which saves a ton on bulk costs. It’s just easier to have 5000 units of the same thing and train people once to fix it.
With franchises, it’s not that easy. However, since things like specialized button panels have been replaced with touch screens, there isn’t much need for custom equipment like there was in the past. (I am excluding all the custom cooking equipment, of course.) Unless a system is absolutely critical to the business, there is probably no reason for it to be standardized.
It just makes sense (using shareholder logic) for corporations to push as much of the operational cost back to the franchise owners. The corporation is basically a service provider and governing body for its franchises and that is about it. With that, probably comes premium pricing for pre-canned IT network systems. It wouldn’t surprise me if restaurant “features” come with subscription fees too.
The quality and standardization of hardware boils down to how a chain is managed and owned, I suppose.
To your point, when I worked at McDonald’s 30 years ago, it was all corporate-standard custom electronics and computer systems. It had to be. A network that used to be highly specialized and cost $100k now just costs just a few thousand and only really needs to support a browser of some kind.