Central Place Theory

Introduction

Focus statement

A study of three McDonald’s fast food restaurants in terms of Central Place Theory

My aims with each one of the three McDonald’s is to look at the shop in terms of central place theory:

• Central place theory which would be the geographical seeking of the number, size and location of the settlement, McDonald’s.

Threshold Population: the minimum number of people that McDonalds needs to keep it going. The sphere of influence: this is the area that McDonald’s serves. The range: the maximum distance that people would travel to get the food from McDonald’s. I will look at the distance between all three McDonald’s

Background Information about McDonald’s

The McDonald’s franchise was first started in 1954

Dilley; J. Earle; K. Euston Brown; G. Keats; A. Nxele; G. Ravenscoft. Central Place Theory: Important concepts.Caps edition. Maskew Miller Longman.

• Source summary

Central place theory is a theory explaining the number, location, size, spacing and function of urban settlements. The main ideas of this theory are: People want convenient, cheaply priced goods when shopping; businesses aim to get more profit by attracting the most customers; consumers aim to travel short distances to by goods as it costs less.

Settlements with larger populations are available to support more functions.

Lower order goods which are those that are needed every day – are more easily available and come in larger quantities

There are four main concepts that link up with this theory, these are:

Central place: an urban settlement that provides goods to the area around it

Threshold population: the amount of customers to keep the business running

The Sphere of influence: the area that a business’s customers come from

The range of goods: the distance that people are willing to travel to get the product.

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The limitations of this project would be the fact that I was not able to get all the answers from each McDonald’s Managers. I only got the feedback from one on Rosmead Ave, so I was not able to compare in information given from all three managers as I wished to.

When I called the owners of each McDonald’s franchise outlet, some weren’t able to give me exact figure of the amount of meals sold in one month. The other owner said that he would have to get back to me and never did. Although I know, from my literature review that McDonald’s nation-wide has 8million customers per month, I couldn’t find out how many customers per month for each specific McDonald’s that I was studying.

I was also limited with the amount of customers that were interviewed as I would’ve liked to have more people to give feedback. This affected the outcomes of the graphed data as they do not display a big variety of information but are rather limited to fewer amounts so it does not display an accurate average of the answers to the