What’s Carl’s Jr’s. and Jack-In-The-Box’s marketing niches?
From the ads, I’d say that Carl’s Jr. is going after the “people who like their food sloppy” demographic and Jack-In-The-Box is after the “people who like to put funny things on their car antennas” demographic.
As for the ball pits, the McD’s closest to be removed the balls from their pit (which was a fairly small pit and attached to a tube network) and just put a lot of padding on the bottom. Now the tykes just jump around in there a lot, sans balls. So I don’t see where ball pits in of themselves are the problem.
Jack in the Boxes is the whole 24 hour a day thing. I was in the drive thru last night at two in the morning, and the line went clear around the building, and stayed that way the whole time we were in line (like 30 minutes).