WEST VALLEY CITY — Like a little "Phantom" with your fries? Some "White Noise" with your white-meat chicken? Can't have a meal come off without a "Hitch"?
McDonald's and Redbox can help.
The fast-food chain has put Redbox Automated DVD Rental kiosks at a slew of its restaurants in Utah, allowing customers to get dinner and a movie at one stop.
You'll have to come up with your own "Fat Albert" pun, however.
"The one thing our customers don't have enough of right now is time, and if we can save them an extra stop and have that convenience of dinner and a movie, I think that's helpful to them and something that offers value to them," said Chris Sparrer-Baer, owner-operator of several McDonald's restaurants, including the one at 5600 W. 3500 South.
Up to 40 movie titles will be available, and the list is updated with new releases every Tuesday. Each kiosk contains about 500 DVDs.
Users must be at least 18 years old and have a debit or credit card that to get the movie from the touch-screen machine. The return deadline is 10 p.m. the following day, with the card charged $1 plus tax per day until the DVD is returned.
Rentals can be returned to any Redbox location, where the machine scans the DVD to verify the return and puts it back in the mix. If a DVD is not returned after 25 days, the user keeps it and the accumulated $25 plus tax will be charged to the card. At the user's request, a receipt can be e-mailed to them.
To get folks accustomed to the Redbox concept, through July 25 the first one-per-customer rentals will be at no charge by using the code FREE.
Ninety of the 111 McDonald's locations in Utah, western Wyoming and eastern Nevada have the kiosks, some of which are outside the restaurants. A list of locations is available at www.redbox.com.
Sparrer-Baer figures the drop-off-anywhere concept will be popular, especially for people renting DVDs for children to watch on long drives. She already has found that helpful.
"I rented a DVD at one of my restaurants recently and the next day I wasn't going to be back in that area," she said. "I was going to be in Park City. I was able to rent my DVD in West Valley City, and I dropped it off in Park City. . . . That was a nice way to do it. It was so convenient."
The Utah area is one of only a few test markets for the ATM-like Redbox machines. The others are Denver, Minneapolis and Houston.
Washington, D.C., and Hartford also have had them in grocery stores and office buildings in addition to McDonald's.
Redbox is a wholly owned McDonald's subsidiary, and the DVD rental is the latest experiment with Redbox technology. In late 2003, the company experimented with selling grocery and convenience store items — including toilet paper, shaving cream, eggs, milk, bread and paper towels — at some locations in the Washington area. Those machines were 18 feet wide and offered 130 items.
"Over the last few years, we've just been refining, refining, refining, based on what consumers tell us they like the best," said Greg Waring, senior director of the concept development team of the McDonald's Restaurant Solutions Group. After narrowing that down to DVDs, the company has been perfecting the technology, price and number of DVDs in the machines.
"We really went for what consumers responded best to and what was the greatest convenience for them at McDonald's. A lot of people were stopping along the way home from work and were grabbing a movie and grabbing dinner anyway, so we thought, let's cut one of those stops out and put them in one place."
Waring said the goal is up to 1,200 Redbox locations in McDonald's and grocery stores nationwide by year-end. "We like to say we're doing for DVD rentals what ATMs did for the banking business," he said.
Eventually, customers may be able to purchase DVDs in original packaging at the kiosks.
"It's a dollar, just like our dollar menu," Sparrer-Baer said of the DVD rental. "So we have value in the food and value in the DVDs, which our customers enjoy. It's been fun watching the customers come in when they see the machine and they get very excited about it. The manager told me that this morning (Wednesday) there was a line of about five different people waiting in line to rent a video, so there's a lot of interest in it."
E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com