Inventory Push Project: On Selling More Fries

As a marketing analyst for a fast food chain other than McDonalds, you're assigned to boost the sale of french fries. You cannot make recommendations that increase costs. You may experiment with ways of altering the product so long as there's no reason to believe the change(s) will add to the cost of goods sold. You're also encouraged to list other options to sweeten the report and both the chief recommendation and add-on possibilities should include the pros and cons associated. Stay away from major changes to work flow -- minor tuning is acceptable.

When in doubt, keep it simple. The simpler the solution, the easier to use.

Turn down the speed of the fan on the fryer so customers in line can smell the fries cooking and crave them more. it would save electricity cost (a little!) and boost the sale of fries.

That was quick. This is 1 of the 3 responses smiled upon. Technically I think it's the 2nd best answer of the 3 but they're closely ranked in HR. The speed alone of the response would give this the highest marks, though. They normally ask these questions at the beginning of the interview and allow you to respond at the end. If this was a follw-up round, it would be a series of interviews, so you'd have hours (from the beginning of the 1st to the end of the last) to consider the solution. If you rattled off the No. 2 answer in 2 minutes, you'd impress the Hell out of the interrogator.

make all the containers smaller but keep quantity the same, so it looks all dramatic when they pack 'em in real tight with shit spilling and make sure you always give extras noticeably shoveled into the bag.

people in line would see people getting the VIP treatment on fries and want them more and once they got 'em they'd feel like they got more, especially with tons of those wonderful extras in the bag we all love to find.

as a backup, my thought is kinda similar to junkpile's. i'd create more "meals" to lump fries in with other stuff. i'd make it very difficult to buy any solid food without getting some fries added in. you could even make more money per unit fry doing this cos the fries you'd add in could be an amount that's "in-between" sizes so no one could disintegrate the items in the combination and price out how much the addition of fries should add to the total order.

i'm all about cheating the consumer as much as possible. maybe i should've gone into marketing.

I would reduce the size of the burgers so that people have room to eat fries too. I say this because I don't like working for a fast food corporation and I've been thinking about getting out of the marketing analysis game altogether. I need to spend more time with my kids. They grow up so fast.

I would use a new line for my fries like, "it's toasted". Everybody else's fries are poisonous, ours are toasted.

Most of these are perfect answers. What HR does is poll the entire sales force up the food chain and rank the responses, so rankings can change year to year. More to the point, the positioning of a response doesn't matter because interviews are conducted by individuals, so regardless of where a response ranked overall, the individual interviewing will be more satisfied with the response he or she liked most, even if another response was liked more by consensus.

By overall vote, the smaller container size response was the favorite answer, slowing the fan second and the upselling response third, where you attach fries to other things. I believe KFC implemented the smaller container plan. When you order wedges, they overstuff and always give you an extra scoop into the bag. Z-Burger, which is similar to Five Guys, also does the overstuff and extra scoop method. You could ask, why not use bigger containers? Because they want the "getting more" effect. MrJunkpile's answer wasn't attaching to a package deal per se but in spirit was the same thing. His response would've been fine. The only advantage to combo deals is you can manipulate unit price and overcharge for the fries without detection.

My personal favorite, by a slight margin, is the upselling response, since its the easiest and cheapest to mobilize. You can do what MrJunkpile suggested at any time by giving instructions to workers at the counter. I like that simplicity. Anyways...

Separating out salt is not a bad response but there are 2 problems with it. Firstly, you can ask for no salt now, so marketing the opportunity doesn't add much new. Yes, you would have to wait for a fresh batch of fries to get salt-less, but fries can only stay in the bin unsold for 5 minutes to stay fresh, so the quick turnover means more fries are usually in the fryer on the way, anyway. The second problem with no salt fries is the lack of demand for them. Fries at McDonalds, as an example, have anywhere from 150 to 200 mg of sodium or around 10% of the daily allowance. Most of the burgers, sandwiches and wraps sold have considerably more. The basic burger has 500 mg, the Angus burger over 2000 mg. Since it's rare for anyone to order fries without a burger, sandwich or wrap, and even rarer for anyone to add fries to a healthy salad with low sodium, it doesn't make sense to remove the salt from fries when the same consumer is destined to get many times more salt from the item ordered with the fries.

The problem with offering toasted fries is the lack of research showing people prefer it. This is the primary reason you don't see fast food chains selling them. When people eat fast food, they normally accept the fried part before walking through the door and it's unlikely the other items they would order with the fries would be healthy enough to justify bothering with healthy fries. Toasted fries would drive down sales and also this change would be too large and require more equipment to be purchased for a different form of preparation.

Yeah, because you didn't get past season 1.

Haha, NOS was scared to take part in the exercise. He didn't wanna be wrong again! It's okay, Adam. Nobody thinks you're dumb 'cuz you got the other exercise wrong.

so basically i got the right answer. i'm shocked.

As a marketing analyst for a fast food chain I would submit my resignation being that I would find it to be unethical to be involved in encouraging the American public to increase their consumption of one of the foods most strongly linked to obesity.

Sometimes salespeople and defense attorneys have to push for things they know are wrong. You're point is well-taken.