Read the "Production and Cost Analysis in the Fast-Food Industry," Case for Analysis located below. Identify how the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns set in for the production process, and how management responded to this situation.

The fast-food industry in the United States has typically used drive-through windows to increase profitability. With 65 percent of fast-food revenue derived from drive-through windows, these windows have become the focal point for market share competition among fast-food outlets such as Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Arby’s, and Taco Bell. Even chains that did not use drive-through windows in the past, such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, have added them to their stores.

Production technology changes have included the use of separate kitchens for the drive-through window, timers to monitor the seconds it takes a customer to move from the menu board to the pickup window, kitchen redesign to minimize unnecessary movement, and scanners that send customers a monthly bill rather than having them pay at each visit. Now, in an attempt to cut costs and increase speed even further, McDonald’s franchises have tested remote order-taking. It takes an average of 10 seconds for a new car to pull up to a drive-through menu after one car has moved forward. With a remote call center, an order-taker can answer a call from a different McDonald’s where another customer has already pulled up. Thus, a call center worker in California may take orders from Honolulu, Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo. This means that during peak periods, a worker can take up to 95 orders per hour. The trade-offs with this increased speed at the drive-through window are employee dissatisfaction with constant monitoring and the stress of the process, decreases in accuracy in filling orders, and possible breakdowns in communication over long distances. However, this technology may be expanded to allow stores, such as Home Depot, to equip carts with speakers that customers could use to wirelessly contact a call center for shopping assistance.

In Asia and other parts of the world where crowded cities and high real estate costs limit the construction of drive-through, McDonald’s and KFC have added motorbike delivery as part of their growth strategy.3 Fifteen hundred of the 8,800 restaurants in McDonald’s Asia/Pacific, Middle East, and Africa division offer delivery, while half of the new restaurants KFC builds in China each year will offer delivery. The delivery option requires an area in the restaurant to assemble orders that are placed in battery-powered induction heating boxes. Along with cold items in insulated containers, all of the orders are placed on the back of yellow and red McDonald’s branded motorbikes or electric scooters. Most McDonald’s delivery orders are phoned in, but the company has started offering Internet-based ordering in Singapore and Turkey. The number of call centers may be reduced in the future as online ordering increases. Neither McDonald’s nor KFC plan to use this technology in the United States, where McDonald’s derives two-thirds of its sales from drive-through customers.

This case illustrates how firms can use production technology to influence their costs, revenues, and profits. Because firms in more competitive markets may not have much ability to influence the prices of their products, they may depend more on strategies to increase the number of customers and lower the costs of production. These strategies may involve changing the underlying production technology, lowering the prices paid for the inputs used, and changing the scale of operation.

To analyze these issues, we’ll first discuss the nature of a firm’s production process and the types of decisions that managers make regarding production. We’ll then show how a firm’s costs of production are related to the underlying production technology. Because the time frame affects a manager’s decisions about production and cost, we distinguish between the short run and the long run and discuss the implications of these time frames for managerial decision making. This chapter focuses on short-run production and cost decisions, while we analyze production and cost in the long run later (Chapter 6).