Your next drive-thru order at MacDonald’s may not be taken by a sweaty, slightly overweight and harried assistant manager with an ill fitting corporate dress shirt. If you’re in Hawaii, the person asking you about supersizing may in fact be over a thousand miles away – in Santa Maria, California.

Thanks to low-cost VOIP, centralized call centres and a standardized menu, remote order-taking has arrived.

MacDonald’s executives first floated the idea at a retail conference a year ago.

“”You have a professional order taker with strong communications skills whose job is to do nothing but take down orders,” said Matthew Paull, McDonald’s chief financial officer.

Paull said a “heavy percentage” of complaints the company receives are from drive-thru customers who got the wrong order. “Even if 95% of the time it is right, those 5% are very upset with us,” he said. (USA Today)

Today, the NYT details how one call centre 150 miles from L.A. is serving drive-thrus in Mississippi, Wyoming and Hawaii – among 40 locations.

“When the customer pulls away from the menu to pay for the food and pick it up, it takes around 10 seconds for another car to pull forward. During that time, [Doug King, CEO of the outsourcing firm Bronco] said, his order-takers can be answering a call from a different McDonald’s where someone has already pulled up.

The remote order-takers at Bronco earn the minimum wage ($6.75 an hour in California), do not get health benefits and do not wear uniforms. Ms. Vargas, who recently finished high school, wore jeans and a baggy white sweatshirt as she took orders last week. (New York Times)

I can see one benefit to the consumer: an outsourced call centre may be able to provide better service in spanish – if the right order-taker picks up. I don’t know whether these order-takers will be immediately familiar with local condiment or combo preferences.

Really, are we going to revert back to the old Automat restaurants, with giant displays of prepared food ready for sale at the drop of a quarter? It’s bad enough I can see the teenage “cook” take the sausage patty for my Egg Mcmuffin out of a plastic warming tray – like an Easy Bake oven – without dropped data packets ruining the call and completely depersonalizing the experience.

Remember, at lunchtime, Skype “Ronald’s McNuggets”

For further commentary, American Public Radio reported on the use of call centres in fast food in January 2005.