Fast Food Offers – are they a recipe for wheel repairs as well as satisfying your hunger?

Fast food in Australia is not new. McDonalds may have only been around for 50 years, but fish & chip and pizza shops have been in our cities for much longer.

Today, fast food locations are often next door to each other and it’s pretty rare to be able to drive from one suburb to another on a major road without coming across one type of fast food outlet or another. With in excess of 25,000 outlets across Australia, this is a big industry, serving out a mountain of kilojoules. Our spend rate for this largely unhealthy (but trying to reverse the trend) industry, is a staggering $20 Billion AUD per annum and increasing at 3 to 4% each and every year.

How you might ask can any of us afford this type of annual spend. It’s an amazing $20 per week for every man, woman and child living in Australia and given that there is a percentage of population who live remotely, don’t eat fast food, or are too young to consume this type of food, you could increase that spend by 50% for the rest of us that do. That’s a minimum spend of $30.00 per week per person, per annum. For a family of three, that’s close on $100 a week!

With a trend of eating healthier in Australia, even the fast food giants such as McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hungry Jacks and Red Rooster, (who combined are nearly 50% of the annual spend), are doing there level best to provide not only a healthier choice, but also information to assist consumers in their kilojoule choices.

But outside these kilojoule kings, the healthy trend continues to succeed and grow at a fast rate. This growth is also being assisted by the appetite of Australian business owners to buy into the franchise system, which is sprouting up new healthy options in shopping centers, petrol outlets and malls right across our broad land.

BUT, does this recipe and appetite for fast food outlets cost us more than just the food and a potential weight problem? The answer is staggering.

How does this tie in with alloy wheel repairs?

Not only does the fast food industry find new ways to continually empty our pockets of hard earned $ for poor choice diets, the other costs we bear that is directly associated with fast food outlets (other than the cost of fuel to get there and our personal time), is wheel repairs caused by hitting gutters in the outlets and associated drive through.

Even in shopping centers where people argue they didn’t use the drive through, there always seems to be gutters in confined spaces that easily catch you out. I’m not suggesting that these gutters are unnecessary or placed there with intention to catch you out, quite the reverse. In fact they’re almost all strategically placed there to protect others and property as well as us. So they are in fact quite a necessary evil.

The total cost of wheel repair damage in a shopping center or drive through is not measured, but if I were to put an estimate on it based on the day to day feedback we receive, I would hazard a guesstimate that in excess of 40% of alloy wheel repairs or scratches, occur in these fast food outlet scenarios. The balance of alloy wheel damage outside of fast food outlets would be consumed in wet weather or low visibility weather conditions, general motor vehicle accidents and of course, parking.

Additionally, capital cities like Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide, boast higher than normal gutters in many suburbs depending on where rainfall is greater and with less places for the water to safely disperse. Perth and Darwin don’t appear to suffer as much from that problem but we all know that when it does rain in Darwin, it’s not worth being out in.

Unfortunately I’m unable to confidently calculate the overall cost to consumers, as this type of information is not collected in Australia. The average cost to repair an alloy wheel sits at around the $180.00 though, so if it’s only one repair per year for each family, it’s not a ridiculous addition to what is already a large sum of fast food spend money for each family.

A wheel repair colleague even made a comment that without the higher gutters, the damage could be far greater and therefore have increased costs so it could well be the better of the two evils.

If however you have damaged your alloys, The Wheelman is the only National repairer in Australia. We’ve worked hard to establish and maintain a reputation second to none and are extremely proud of the wheel repair offer we put to our customers. That is, quality workmanship, your choice of repair, convenience and competitively priced.

If you require assistance, please call us on either the 1300 933 299 or text a pic of your wheel to us on 0490 040409 and we’ll come straight back to you with your repair options.

In the meantime, happy eating at your favorite fast food outlet – AND watch the gutters!