Fries Of The Future

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fast food delivery is threatening the french fry. So a band of potato scientists go to work. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:07.0	When Deb Dyle went to China on business about five years ago,
0:11.0	she noticed something she hadn't seen before.
0:14.0	You saw so many scooters with boxes zipping in and out of traffic,
0:21.0	zipping in and out of apartments or into offices.
0:25.0	And it was just so so pervasive, I just had to I just couldn't ignore it.
0:30.0	She was like, where are all these scooters coming from?
0:33.0	What's in all these boxes?
0:35.0	Is this like a delivery thing?
0:37.0	So she follows one of these scooters to see where it stops.
0:42.0	And there was a whole line of scooters.
0:44.0	All these scooters are parked outside of a McDonald's in Shanghai.
0:49.0	And Deb is like, is this a thing in China?
0:52.0	So she keeps following more scooters and she keeps seeing these scooter lines
0:58.0	outside of US fast food chains in China.
1:02.0	McDonald's Burger King, young KFC,
1:05.0	each one of those restaurants would have maybe 40 or 50 scooters lined up.
1:12.0	McDonald's and Burger King?
1:15.0	Yes, yes.
1:16.0	It was very common actually.
1:17.0	The restaurant could be empty, but the scooters could be going to the restaurant.
1:21.0	It could be going 10 a minute.
	...

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