The standard retort (rightly or wrongly) to claims that the economy is improving, jobs are increasing, and outsourcing is actually good for US employment, is that the jobs that are being generated are, in fact, cheap, low-wage, “McJobs.”
Well, even those McJobs may be in horrible danger.
Pull off U.S. Interstate Higheway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald’s next to the highway and you’ll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant – or even in Missouri.
The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles, or 1,450 kilometers, away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines.
So next time it sounds like that order-taker at the drive-thru doesn’t speak English as their native language — it’s now even more possible.
Well, probably not. International circuits and latency — plus accuracy issues — would make it unlikely for the local Wendy’s to outsource the order line to Bangalore. But for domestic consumption, so to speak … well, it’s still kind of an odd development. You have telecomm costs on the one hand. On the other hand, you have supposedly improved accuracy and throughput (and, though unmentioned, the eventual efficiency of balancing “rush” order periods across multiple time zones).
It’s a bizarre idea, on first blush, but it makes enough sense that, someday, it may seem perfectly natural.
I always enjoyed working drive-thru …
(via GeekPress)