McDonalds and UberEats have been shouting a lot about their partnership, even coining the 26th July Global #McDeliveryDay. A celebration of how you can order your MaccyD’s online via their McDelivery service.
There are now 150 locations across the UK where you can get your food delivered for £2.50, and you could even win some natty merchandise too on this special day too! From a cursory search, a lot of local and national press picked up the story, a few examples:
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The Metro
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The Sun
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Cosmopolitan
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The Mirror
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Time Out London
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Liverpool Echo
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Hull Daily Mail
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Newcastle Chronicle
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Gloucestershire Live
From this level of press, you’d expect it to be a national campaign across all 150 locations? I certainly did today, when I ordered lunch for Wifey and I.
The food finally arrived (after the delivery driver went to the wrong entrance and in lukewarm fashion). I was a little bit miffed there was no freebies included but ho hum, it’s a lottery and not everyone’s a winner. That’s when I went online to check the number of participating restaurants that were participating?
5
Yup, that’s right FIVE:
For a population of 65 million, with more than 1200 restaurants and 150 that offer delivery, 5 were participating in the giveaway!
My day job involves lots of statistics so I thought I’d have a bash to see how this compares with some of the other countries featured in #McDeliveryDay
This is in comparison to:
- Canada – pop. 36.3m – 4 Swag ‘Benches’ (Yup even worse for them!)
- New Zealand- pop. 4.7m – 5 stores
- Amsterdam – pop. 820k – 8 stores
- Australia – pop. 24.1m- 28 stores
- Hong Kong – pop 7.3m – 37 stores
- Poland – 38m – 90+ stores
- USA – pop 323.1m – 324 stores (California had the most with 55, Kentucky only had 1)
UK unsurprisingly does the worst with 1.3m per store, whereas Amsterdam comes out best with 102,500 population per store.
The delivery radius is 1.5 miles so with a bit of old math (remember πr squared?), I worked that out to be roughly 35 sq miles of the UK covered by this global event, out of 94,060 sq miles out of our glorious isle (or 0.04% of the country covered).
That’s being a little bit unfair though, they only have 150 stores that deliver remember? But that’s still just 3.3% of the UK stores who could participate who did.
But maybe that’s still unfair, these are dense urban areas so surely that’s weighted in these 5 stores favour? Going from the nomis website (2011 census) the population density of the five locations is:
- London W2 – 48,372
- London SE1 – 67,037
- Basford, Nottingham NG7 – 58,012
- Nottingham NG1 – 12,897
- Leeds LS2 – 10,120
Now postcode area is probably disingenuous as some delivery areas will not cover the whole area but some will cover more. It’s a fairly good guess and gives us about 200,000 people close enough to qualify for the free #McDeliveryDay swag. Now 200,000 divided by 65 million is… 0.3%
Hmmmm….but again that’s unfair, there’s only 150 shops with delivery. So, I was sad enough to calculate the total population reach of these 150 stores (excluding commuters too, this is just residents) is 4.05 million. So out of the reachable population, that’s 5%.
This is just a bit of fun remember and I make no claims to any kind of accuracy. I just feel it’s a bit unfair for a ‘Global day of Celebration’, covered in the UK national press, to be only accessible to a small part of the population, and the number of locations kept hush hush until 24 hours before launch.
There’s been a bit of a backlash on Twitter under the #McDeliveryDay hashtag feed, as the list of restaurants only went live yesterday (25th July). To be fair to McDonalds, they’ve also given some away on Facebook (15 or so by the picture they put up), who were outside the delivery areas.
Now, this is not meant to be sour grapes; just a bit of a tale to make sure you read everything fully before buying into the hype of two global brands, perhaps not expecting those to check beforehand.
Anyway, back soon with an actual food review. Toodles!
