It’s About Time, McDonald’s


Posted: December 16th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: PR Opinion, Rants | No Comments

mcd-wifiFrom Mashable, this headline:
McDonald’s Adds Free Wi-Fi to the Menu

Halleluia!

I wrote a post on this very blog (well, it had a different design at the time, and maybe a different name, but it had the same URL anyhow) nearly THREE YEARS AGO, laying out a case for why McDonald’s needed to get rid of its $2.95 wi-fi fee.  And, it appears the reason they switched is the exact reason I laid out in my post.  Here’s what Mashable says:

…McDonalds is hoping to become a hang-out spot of the coffee shop variety — it also plans to start selling frappes and smoothies mid-2010. And given the fact that coffee chains like Starbucks charge customers to surf while they sip, the idea doesn’t seem all that pie-in-the-sky.

…and here’s what I said in my post, On Wi-Fi Hotspots and McDonald’s, on February 10, 2007:

Free web access [...] would open McDonald’s to an entirely different set of customers. If you walk into a Panera Bread Company store in the middle of the day, you’ll see that it’s crawling with business people who are eating and getting a little work done. McDonald’s could combine cheaper food with free Internet, and draw a bunch of those businesspeople in. Parents could even get some work done while their kids catch syphilis from those hamster tube play areas.

It’s nice when a big company reacts to a reasoned argument from a PR guy like me ;)

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