DVDs and Fries: New Ways To Consume Technology

"You buy it at the counter, take it out of the box, and you can be talking to whomever you want in the parking lot. There's no having to sign up. . . . That appeals to everyone," Chabris said.

Although the company won't release specific numbers, it said the cell phones are among its top-selling items. In February, 7-Eleven began rolling out the phones in more than 4,400 stores in 43 metropolitan areas, including Washington.

For Megan Flynn, the McDonald's kiosk has changed how she thinks about watching movies. Rather than making an appointment with friends to watch a movie at a certain time, she is more casual now and just likes to have one on hand in case the mood strikes her. Just last week she ran out of time before she could watch a rental movie, the Vin Diesel vehicle "XXX," but did not worry because it was so cheap and easy to rent and return.

"When I first saw this [McDonald's kiosk] I thought it was stupid, but now I think it's a good idea and I use it all the time," said Flynn, 25, an accountant from Minneapolis.

McDonald's experimented with DVD rentals in 2003 when it planted 14 vending machines in some parking lots in the Washington area, but this is the first time the corporation has tried to rent movies inside its restaurants. This summer, McDonald's began testing the movie-rental service in five metropolitan areas. The sixth will be Baltimore, where DVDs will be available for rental starting Labor Day weekend. The rentals cost $1 per night plus tax.

Each kiosk is stocked with 550 disks offering 35 to 40 of the top new releases. The kiosk is refilled every Tuesday. Each rental is due the next day by 10 p.m. at any McDonald's location with a kiosk, which is now limited to outlets in Denver, Salt Lake City, Houston, St. Louis and Minneapolis. By the end of the year, about 1,000 of the 13,700 McDonald's outlets in the United States will feature the kiosks.

"It's about making McDonald's more relevant and more contemporary," said Greg Waring, senior director of marketing for Redbox, a McDonald's subsidiary that operates the DVD machines.

Waring said that in Denver, consumers have rented more than 2 million DVDs and foot traffic has increased in the stores that have the DVD machines.

Starbucks has considered music a companion to its coffee since the company's first store opened in 1971. The Santa Monica store was set up two years ago as an experimental cafe, and the company considers it such a success that this fall it began to deploy "media bars" in other locations. The cafes, mostly in Seattle and Austin, feature computer screens where people can sample tunes and make CDs. The chain also has been selling previously unreleased music such as Bob Dylan's 1962 "Live at the Gaslight" and Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill Acoustic."

While response to the new Starbucks music stations has been tepid in some stores, the company has done spectacularly with CD sales. At a time when music industry sales are falling, a phenomenon that some companies have blamed on the popularity of free file-swapping services, Starbucks has managed to get customers to pay full retail price for its CDs. Starbucks sold about 775,000 copies of Ray Charles duets in "Genius Loves Company," 115,000 units of Coldplay's "X&Y" and 107,000 of Dave Matthews Band's "Stand Up."

Lombard said the company's goal is to connect with disenfranchised music lovers who want to discover tunes beyond the Top 40.

"It's not about driving coffee sales," he said. "It's about providing the music consumer new ways to acquire and discover music. This is a transformational opportunity."

Staff researcher Richard Drezen in New York contributed to this report.