McDonald's+Opportunity+and+Market+Assessment

You have identified a prospective opportunity to help a friend purchase a McDonald's franchise restaurant in a growing town that currently has a population of 50,000 affluent people. The only other restaurant in this town is a mom-and-pop coffee shop that they have run for years and has been slowing down because mom and pop are getting old. Because this town is within a 30-minute commuting distance from a much larger town (Fort Worth, Texas), you believe that this town could grow to a population of 200,000 over the next ten years. The town, however, is 10 miles away from the nearest Interstate highway. The initial costs to your friend to open the store are $1,000,000 for the franchise rights to the entire town and about $100,000 in equipment. media type="custom" key="10850674"

Discussion
It's not easy coming up with an estimate of how many customers you might expect for a new business, whether it's a brand new venture or an existing business in new location. Most retailers like McDonald's have massive databases with geographic and demographic information to help them decide where to place new franchises. Here we have some limited information and have to form defensible assumptions. We also need to identify what other types of information are important, as many of you did in this exercise.

The mean estimate of transactions was 1,700 per day and the median was 1,000. Think about what this means in terms of operational efficiency. Imagine that the store opens at 6am and closes at 10pm. Here are the numbers:

Go to McDonald's during a busy meal time and see how many transactions they are conducting per minute or hour. Are these estimates reasonable?
 * Daily trans || 1700 ||
 * Open || 0600 ||
 * Close || 2200 ||
 * Transactions/hr || 106.25 ||
 * Transactions/min || 1.77 ||