Pop-Up McDonald's

The McChronicles was tooling around Shenzhen, China and dropped into a trade exhibition at the city's beautiful exhibition center. Imagine our gleeful delight at:

a) encountering a McDonald's within the exhibition center (exhibition vendors typically offer generic and horrid food)

b) encountering our first-ever "pop-up" McDonald's!

That's right fans, McDonald's dragged in a counter, fryers, cash registers, storage racks, and a freezer, threw a tent up around it all, and started doing business.

This was obviously an event that was very well planned for. The tent was awesome, perfectly-sized, sporting a bank of built-in exhaust fans, displaying a carefully selected and prominently displayed menu, and the outside walls were perfectly decorated.

The menu was limited (one egg/breakfast sandwich, Big Mac, and 3 chicken sandwiches, fries, taro pie, and canned soda), but adequate - and superior to the usual trade show fare.


The results? A resounding success. There were actually 3 "pop-up" fast food vendors on hand: McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and a local Chinese food chain. At one point in the lunch hour, with hundreds of conventioneers queued up for food, the Chinese food choice had almost no one on line, the Pizza Hut had a small crowd, and the McDonald's option was mobbed. So mobbed, in fact, that they ran out of Big Macs. We captured this image of the manager calling in reinforcements since the freezer was empty.

This was a great experience - we had never heard of a "pop-up" McDonald's before . Let us know if you have ever encountered one.




The McChronicles: a blog about, not affiliated with, McDonald's.
Images: The McChronicles.