McDonald's axes cashiers and cash payments

McDonald’s has revealed a new policy to let its customers order: touch screen terminals will replace cashiers, and credit cards will supersede cash payments. The hamburger giant hopes to gain “3 or 4 seconds per customer”… but will store your information as well.

4200 hours saved… each day

“Ordering food has not changed for 30 or 40 years”, said Steve Easterbrook, president of McDonald’s Europe, to the Financial times. Now McDonald’s wants to make its restaurants more efficient and customer-friendly, so reducing the queues completes measures like longer opening hours and new menus. McDonald’s points out that even three seconds per customer would be a huge gain, given the fact that every day over two million customers line up at McDonald’s every day – totalling a reduction of waiting time  of almost 4200 hours each day.

Europe fastest growing region for McDonald’s

The new strategy is not led by bad results, as Europe is the best performing of the three main McDonald’s regions: Sales rose 5.7% in the first quarter of 2011 (on a like-for-like basis). Easterbrook admitted that the new move would further improve sales, as it would allow the creation of data files to store information about customers and their consumption habits, much like the databases supermarkets have because of their loyalty cards.