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Fast Food
Kirby's Korner · February 11, 2000

The drive's been a long one. You're itching to get your hands off the wheel. You want to get your fingers around that most American of foods, a juicy, sloppy, dripping hamburger.

You know it's not good for you. But once in a while even a Boston Market or Cracker Barrel is too high-class.

Thank God in the US of A you can seldom go two miles without running into one of the ubiquitous hamburger chain restaurants. Sure, it's not a real hamburger they're serving; those don't taste like cardboard stuffed inside Play-Doh. But it's quick and it's nearby.

Major and minor burger chains announce themselves on the Web, and almost without fail they follow Kirby's Immutable Law of Negative Returns: the more money obviously lavished on a Web site, the flashier it looks, the more multimedia it uses--the less useful it actually turns out to be.

Take the big three chains, McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's. The first two have loads of corporate information, and Wendy's provides investment information through a link to a an independent site. The information should be there, but does it have to be so prominent? Are most visitors looking for a job, stock tip, or franchise opportunity, or are they looking for a meal?

The first two also have a restaurant locator, with McDonald's, powered by Vicinity Corp., adding driving directions from your starting point. Burger King's locator may do that, also; I never could get the thing to work.

The Burger King site is easy to navigate, if somewhat overpowered with graphics. McDonald's left-hand list of internal links doesn't stay the same from page to page, so it is difficult to find your way around. Wendy's use of a pop-up device for virtually all navigation is a pain to get used to.

All have nutritional information that also provides a menu of sorts, and Wendy's has a separate menu section.

McDonald's offers merchandise for sale, but you can't make online purchases. You have to print out an order form and mail, fax, or phone it in.

Compare these behemoths to three smaller, regional chains: Fatburger, with 34 locations in Southern California and Las Vegas, In-N-Out Burgers, with 150 restaurants in California and adjoining states, and Whataburger, with 500 restaurants in California, nearby states, and Mexico.

You can buy merchandise online at Whataburger. You can print out and fax a take-out order form at Fatburger. You can easily navigate anywhere you want to go at the quick-loading In-N-Out Burgers site.

All three sites have menus and store locators, and In-N-Out Burgers provides nutritional information. In-N-Out offers merchandise for sale, but you can't buy it online.

The Hardee's site offers menus and a store locator, but most of the site is dedicated to a rebranding the company is undertaking, something that so far affects only a handful of its 2,900 restaurants.

Sites from Jack in the Box and White Castle are simply irritating. They both use a lot of multimedia, wasting bandwidth for no apparent reason other than that they can.

Both sites are also highly involved with their corporate images. White Castle is particularly bizarre, trying to shake off a staid and dowdy look attributable to it having started in 1921, predating all the other kids on the block. Instead, it is trying to appeal to a younger crowd, as if people in the target audience would be seen in any of the restaurants it has remaining in a mere 14 cities.

White Castle, baby! Embrace the staid! Maybe then we could find our way around your too-cute-by-half navigation scheme.

I'll give Burger King credit. Prominently displayed on its home page is an announcement of a voluntary recall of one of its premium give-aways.

Travel around this country can get depressing when you realize that everywhere looks like everywhere else. The companies behind these Web sites must take a large share of the blame. It is interesting that the simplest and most useful of the sites come--except for White Castle, through no fault of its own--from the least homogenized and smallest of the malefactors.

Pardon me, now, wile I get something to eat.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at david@ticked.com.