Service Efficiency of Fast Food Restaurant and Customer Behavior When Making Purchasing Decisions

MARK 2120 Observational exercise report - McDonald

Topic

Service efficiency of fast food restaurant and customer behavior when making purchasing decisions

Introduction

Fast food restaurants are well known for its high efficiency in preparing and serving the meals. Some McDonalds in Australia even a launch a scheme “60-second Promise”, which promises the customers to serve their ordered food within one minute. McDonald claims to have a speedee service system, so researchers are interested to know whether the branches can also meet the target even though there is no such scheme launched in Hong Kong.

Methodology

The observational research was conducted on March 8th, 2015 at a McDonald in Quarry Bay, from 08:45 pm to 10:15pm. Observers carried out observation at a table near the cashier to observe different decision making behaviours. As there is only one counter serving the customers (one queue), observers would focus on that particular queue. In the 1-and-a-half-hour observation in the restaurant, observers would observe the customers who were making decisions or involving in any transactions at the cashier counter, and also pay attention to the behaviours of the staff members.

Hypotheses

The restaurant would provide the food within one minute, meaning the waiting time after ordering until the restaurant serves the food.

Observations

As it is the after-dinner period, there was only one cashier and one manager providing services at the front counter. In the observation, customers generally spent on average 17.01 seconds to finish ordering and 12.94 seconds to pick up their food, and most of them did not have to line up for ordering food. Nearly half of the customers make payments using Octopus card which is faster than those paying cash.

Around 75% of customers spent less than 5 seconds to make their choices. Some of them walked straight to the counter and ordered the food without reading the menu beforehand. The customer who spent some time...