Open Letter To Western Fast Food Resturants

[gymshark]

To McThai Minor Food Group Yum Brands BK Foods DQ et al.

Will you kindly start to print your menus & promotions in Thai & English?

You are insulting the rest of the people who might be visiting Thailand & wish to purchase some of your food.

This is typically what happens when western companies come here, set up businesses hire a bunch of local MBS's & then go home & forget about it.

Maybe you could learn to read a Thai menu if you weren't so lazy?

[chivo]

a little translation help...

cheeseburger in english is 'cheeseburger" in thai!

[TheWalkingMan]

To McThai Minor Food Group Yum Brands BK Foods DQ et al.

Will you kindly start to print your menus & promotions in Thai & English?

You are insulting the rest of the people who might be visiting Thailand & wish to purchase some of your food.

This is typically what happens when western companies come here, set up businesses hire a bunch of local MBS's & then go home & forget about it.

I agree with dotcom.

Not because i'm a quasi colonialist but because from the restaurants point of view it makes good business sense.

I'm in the restaurant business and have worked in many developing markets. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is sometimes to get restaurants and restaurant companies to understand the advantages of dual signage.

Correct. I always wondered why restaurants do not pick up on this. I am referring to restaurants in heavily traveled tourist areas where it would be advantageous for all to have multilingual menus.

This is not Thailand specific.

As an example, I worked in Tokyo in an "international" building meaning that there were several overseas businesses paying rent. Of course these businesses would have overseas visitors who spoke little or no Japanese. The largest Japanese restaurant in the building did not have an English menu. I had a chat with one of the managers about the menu language, he was Japanese but grew up in LA, and he was absolutely shocked that the restaurant did not have a bilingual menu. Before he got there, it never occurred to the staff that with all the foreigners in the building to have something in English. It is just not on the radar.

Another example - I was in Hawaii, with a large Japanese tourist base, and Burger King just had it's menu in English. You can imagine the difficulty some elderly tourists have with the English language.

Restaurants - get your menus together and sell more product!

TheWalkingMan

[onethailand]

It is rare for a restaurant in Bangkok to not have English-language menus (unless you're talking mom/pop/auntie's couple of stools in front of the family shophouse, or a street stall). All of the chain restaurants in Bangkok have English-language menus, period.

Promotions are not always the case - if you're talking about coupons and the like, yes they are often in Thai - and you can't always tell when it expires. I presume this is what Dotcom really meant. Irritates the hel_l out of me too - but there's always pictures, plus I generally frequent these places only with my kids.

However, one also has to understand that, with coupons, they don't have the space to print both languages in most cases, unless you want them to remove the picture. With brochures - I agree though.