One thing I question is what kind of WAN link a single chicken fast food restaurant can get, or is economical. A lot are in places where the only last mile ISP options will be adsl2+ over copper or docsis cablemodem. I don't see it being a good use of money to spend $600/mo to pay some local ISP for a dedicated 100Mbps line on a 5 year contract.
But then again it's highly likely that what they do is not bandwidth intensive and will work fine on a 5Mbps x 1.25 Mbps DSL connection.
One thing I question is what kind of WAN link a single chicken fast food restaurant can get, or is economical
At this point, I don't think it's a problem for CFA.
CFA doesn't try to go into every little town in the nation like McDonald's. It's expansion is very deliberate and only seems to go into very high value locations, where internet presumably isn't a problem.
Moreover, landlords fall all over themselves to land a Chick-fil-a. Almost as much as they do to get an Apple Store. A landlord will make business-grade internet happen, if it means getting a CFA.
Meh. Unless you personally own a franchise, or work for corporate, this is pure conjecture.
The article did mention if a failed node is detected, a next-day restore 'disk' is delivered to the store, so obviously that is faster/more reliable than random ISP.
Not conjecture at all. Two jobs ago I worked in a real estate adjacent field, and there were repeatedly articles in the trades about this. CFA and Apple are two at the top of real estate developer “want” lists, along with Urban Outfitters, Starbucks and a few others.
It’s why when architecture firms render new commercial buildings the fake logos often look like those brands. It looks much better in financing presentations and when you’re trying to attract other tenants.
Some agents even Photoshop Apple and CFA logos onto buildings in their private (and sometimes public) presentations to make the projects look more attractive.
Just because you’ve never worked in this space doesn’t make it conjecture.
Im not 100% sure its all of them (malls and airports come to mind) but yes its a vast majority.
True I didn't consider the cable investment either. Normally the landlord pays for this but I imagine chickfila probably pays for part of the bill. That I dont know though
For an ISP, if it requires a costly outside plant build to reach a premises for a business circuit, it will usually be rolled into some combination of an upfront connection fee (NRC) and monthly rate (MRC) to recoup the costs and have some positive ROI over a 3 to 5 year term. If it's something like a multi tenant office building they may gamble and take a calculated risk to lose money on the first customer over 5 years (example: $800 NRC and $500 MRC that comes nowhere near xoveinft the cost of the build), with a new expensive fiber build, and hope the sales team can sign up more tenants ASAP.
When a McDonald’s is located on a pad in a Target parking lot, the McDonald’s franchisee doesn’t own that land. It belongs to the owner of the strip mall.
Ditto for the tens of thousands of McDonald’s restaurants located in office buildings, malls, airports, and inside other stores like Wal-marts.
It’s not the 70’s anymore. The standalone McDonald’s is far from a majority of the outlets these days.
Chick-fil-A also has a mobile app that allows you to order your food and pick it up either at the counter or in the drive through, so they need the internet connection for that.
It's difficult to estimate what value the described systems add to a location, but in the grand scheme of a location's expenses, even $600/mo is a drop in the bucket. Align those contracts with the lease on the building itself - no more problems!
We had one just open in my town and for the first 3 days, their slowest take was $6k/hour. Regardless of their margins, $600/month would be lost in the noise.
But then again it's highly likely that what they do is not bandwidth intensive and will work fine on a 5Mbps x 1.25 Mbps DSL connection.