When I was last in France, teenagers could often be found studying in McDonalds, because unlike the french cafes, they don’t get kicked out of McDonalds for buying some fries and a coke and then holding the table for a couple hours.
Personally, I have no fondness for McDonalds at all, but your claim that they have some sort of corporate policy of not letting people linger seems spurious to me.
> The kerfuffle started when word spread that the police were repeatedly evicting elderly Korean patrons from a McDonald’s in Queens. The Koreans have been milking their stays over $1.09 coffees, violating the restaurant’s 20-minute dining limit.
The article also mentions a group of women taking up an 8-person sitting area for hours at a time, nursing a single $1 coffee. For a four hour visit, this averages ~$0.03/seat/hr in revenue. These customers aren't truly dining, they're just congregating under the pretext of dining (by buying the minimal amount possible). _This_ is the type of behavior that would drive an individual store into implementing a 20-minute dining limit. Chances are it's loosely enforced for actual dining customers, but provides the necessary pretext for booting these people when the lunch rush begins and actual dining customers need somewhere to dine. If customers come to eat and can't find anywhere to sit, they'll start going elsewhere for food and the store will see a noticeable decline in revenue.
While it sounds harsh, a restaurant is a business that makes money by selling food. The dining area is meant for dining. Systematically abusing it for congregating, while providing marginally little revenue, is going to result in limitations being erected to discourage such behavior. Coffee shops do the same thing with time limits on wifi, which is a limitation that works well to discourage their typical customer base. This crowd is just in it for the space, so the limitation invoked in this case is a time limit on the space itself.
Just because it is not enforced where you are, does not mean it is not corporate policy. It can also depend on how busy the McDonalds is, I can imagine when it is after lunch, and the store is almost empty, they aren't going to kick anyone out.
While I don't have access to their corporate policies directly, at least one store owner has claimed he isn't aware of such a policy[1]:
Roger Muselman, owner of successful McDonald’s
restaurants in Kewanee and Geneseo,
said he hasn’t heard about putting time limits on
customers and that it will never happen here.
>There's an environment ripe for disruption.
I agree that there has to be some sort of disruption, especially since the trend signals towards a lot more elderly and other people with idle time.
Maybe some civic-minded startup, NGO or other kind of nonprofit. I hope someone wealthy funds such ideas, I'm annoyed that at least in my country much of those services are hijacked by "churches" that are very opaquely run, but give people a sense of community and things to do. I hope for similar secular services (think televangelists).
Example (in Spanish):
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_An%C3%ADbal_Gim%C3%...
Or VFW halls, Shriners/ELKs/etc halls, rotary clubs, bingo halls, the food court of a shopping mall. I'm not a religious person either but like you pointed out many churches provide space to solve this sort of problem. There actually are a lot of options, for those willing to compromise at least a little.
<= 2 blocks from home
Bathroom facilities
Enough room for tables and chairs to accommodate ~5-15 people
Free or close to it
Completely enclosed, some form of A/C preferred
All that in a high density/high land value urban area. Like the old song goes, something's gotta give.
(That said, good luck to the GP's business disruption plan which will involve paying a lot of money for renting or owning real estate in the most expensive places on the planet, in order to let people who don't want to buy anything use it.)
[1] http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0399.p...
Hah, good luck with a business in which your plan is to allow people to linger for hours after a $1 purchase. Cafés tolerate lingering only as long as you regularly purchase a worthwhile amount of their product (ie. buy a $5 coffee every day, maybe a sandwich and pastry, etc...).
Furthermore, McDonald's restaurants are franchises, which means each location has a different owner, usually someone who's clawed their way into the middle class and saved up some money to start a business. Not the corporate fat-cats that no doubt come to mind when thinking of McDonald's. It's not like a location with adequate seating and business can make up lost revenues for another location.
I'm not sure about that. From quick research, it looks like they generally require about $750,000 in liquid assets to open a franchise.
That's a bit more than clawing your way into the middle class.
Also, most of the McDonald's I've been too, (and I pay attention to this) are part of a multi-store franchise.
And yes, those who open one franchise successfully are likely to open more. However where I live, about half the McDonald's restaurants I used to visit as a kid are now Chinese and Indian restaurants...
Many sociologists consider anyone with a net worth of more than $1,000,000 rich (someone with $750k in cash likely has a net worth north of a million). Granted, that number is somewhat arbitrary and it depends on where you live.
Your original description of the average McDonald's owner was of someone who clawed his way into the middle class. Implying that he started out poor and saved up until he could afford to buy a business. This may (or may not) be true of other less expensive franchises, but based on the available evidence, I'd wager that a very small percentage of McDonald's owners fit this description.
>There are scores of fast-food outlets, bakeries and cafes near Main Street, a half-mile away.
Too busy feeling smug to read the god damn article?
the reason this is making the news is because it's extraordinary, not because it's ordinary. people don't hang out at mcdonalds.
you are concluding exactly the opposite of what common sense would dictate, probably because you haven't actually thought about what you are thinking. this is called a logical fallacy.
in fact, why am i even explaining this to you... if you're so world wise and savvy, i'm sure you've been to new york to see for yourself.