Sonic Corporation is an American drive-in fast-food restaurant chain based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Troy Smith founded it in Shawnee, Oklahoma in 1953. Sonic is known for its car hop service in which the servers skate around on roller skates to bring the customers food. Sonic servers more than three million customers per day, and has more than 3,500 restaurants in the United States. Total revenue in 2011 was 546 million with a net income of 19 million. Sonic's company slogan is "America's Drive In.
2. Sonic's Business Model.
Sonic is in the quick service restaurant industry and has more than 3,500 locations in 44 states. The company provides drive-in fast-food service to customers all over the United States. The customer parks their car in one of the parking spots at Sonic and a menu is provided for them outside. They then hit a red button to order from their car, and a carhop brings them their food. Sonic is primarily a service business that focuses on serving food with mediocre quality and has low cost menu items. Sonics provides menu items like hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs and root beer floats. Sonic's marketing position is one in which they are "stuck in the middle" of all their competitors. They do not provide high quality food like restaurants like Subway and Chipotle, and they cannot compete with low quality food providers like McDonalds in the industry. Sonic values its traditional style of using carhops to deliver food even though it is increases the employee wages and is more expensive to maintain. Sonic needs to change if they want to get out of the "stuck in the middle" business model in which they are in.
2.1 Sonic's Cloud Computing Model.
About two years ago Sonic did not have a cloud-computing model. This was a big problem because they had over 3,500 restaurants and 90% of them where franchised, which means that Sonic did not directly own them. When Sonic doesn't own the stores collecting the data it needs to make company-wide decisions becomes a very big challenge.
