Everybody wants free Wi-Fi, and McDonald’s Corp. is responding to that demand with Wednesday’s announcement that more than 11,000 of its U.S. restaurants will have free Wi-Fi in January.
“We’ve had Wi-Fi working in our restaurants for five years under the pay-to-play model, but now is the time, with the ubiquity of Wi-Fi devices — including handhelds and laptops — to extend that offer,” McDonald’s USA CIO David Grooms said in an interview today.
“We said, let’s go with free Wi-Fi… We talked to customers and asked what they wanted to see, and they really wanted us to go free. You don’t need a lot of focus groups to find that out, and we take what customers say seriously.”