Fast food chains have their origination from America. They are the franchises or part of operations that provide rapid food service to consumers in time, at tables or door delivery by order. White Castle and Automat in America have their mark in history as the first fast food restaurants. Fast foods are prepared quickly to serve customers hot and tasty food enriched with freshness. Fast food chains are outlets that preserve particular brands’ or the corporations’ standard ingredients and cooking methods. The whole operation and menu to be prepared are at the decision of the brand establishments’ procurement and supplies to the franchises. Sometimes local tastes mingle with the international recipes to keep up the zest of natives in the regions.

Day by day the shrinking global village folks are adopting new food habits. Globally fast foods image created fast food chains across continents. Among inter- continental fast food chain competitors, hundreds of establishments came into existence from US, North America, South America, South Africa and Australia. To have a glimpse we can notice few brands at top-notch. To name we have the Mc Donald’s, KFC, Wendy’s, Subway, Togo’s, Taco Bell, Quickly, Rally’s, Checkers and many more. Each of these fast food chain competitors have their own special menu and are distinguishable from their competitors in terms of appealing and appetizing fast food adorers.

                            Fast food chains started enticing customers with tag lines ‘Less work for mother’, ‘Speedee service system’ for ‘take out’, ‘take away’ or ‘drive through’, ‘walk-ins’ of packaged food services and value meals at discounts, making use of loyalty marketing. With competition the brand establishments of fast food chains improved unique food technologies by bringing up new flavours, tastes, cost effective preservations and maintaining the nutritive values. They aim at providing delicious, scrumptious and luscious cuisines to their patrons.  Their fast food preparation mode includes adding unique tang, tart and piquant with additives and salines in order to make their product palatable and relinquishing.                             

                             People developed a sort of ‘mania’ for fast foods in spite of the overwhelming effects of obesity and diabetes warned by researchers and doctors. Now-a-days people spend more on fast foods than on anything else like movies, shopping, fun etc. Generations prefer these fast food stuffs for breakfast, lunch and dinner too. Even birthday parties and anniversaries begin and end with tantalizing, palatable and succulent ambrosia from fast food chains of their choice. The growing consumption of fast foods indicates the proportionate growth of fast food chains and their turnovers. There are large numbers of orders at low cost generating high revenues. The fast food chains revenue increased by two-thirds in the last five years across the globe.

                  Improved revenues and patronage spurred the multinational corporations establish a more number of outlets. With the upcoming demand of fast food consumers, fast food chains indirectly improved employment in the service sector in many nations. Though recession occurs sometimes in different spheres of employment, there is always a boom for fast food chain hospitality services. Employee pays and hikes are good. Earlier teens provided services in fast food chains for pocket money. But now not to under -estimate the profession, it’s a money fetching job where one can get sufficient reward for hard work and loyalty.

              Fast food chains of thousands of outlets of course need a business intelligence working behind in network infrastructure to achieve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Evolving technologies improved data integrity, cost effectiveness and reliable service. Business analysis techniques for financial metrics and customer satisfaction metrics are adopted. Some of these include customer surveys and mystery shopping results. All these help fast food chains get their services audited to detect theft, under sales and improve integrity, ethics at franchises. 

                                       Coming to the pros and cons of fast food chains, on the positive side we see that they interlink nations and promote global food habits. They help in a nation’s progress towards economy. The credit of lessening the burden of cooking at home goes to these fast food chains. On the negative side we see the health effects of fast foods and people becoming more mechanical.Also with the advent of fast food chains, trend of home food consumption and perfect nutrition food habit declined.