The paper is based on the study of the practices of branded eating joints in Mexico and India. The branded eating joints were selected for two reasons: One the sector is very competitive, two the joints have mature practices and three these are professionally managed taking sufficient care of the consumer preferences. India and Mexico are two countries placed diagonally opposite on the globe. In spite of a world full of differences between the two, there are some striking similarities. The study tries to highlight the differences in customer expectations vis -à-vis the fast food services in these two societies. The study evaluated the hypothesis by one, studying the consumer response- enabling gap analysis – what consumer wants and what he gets, two by analyzing the provider opinion of his/ her services, three by making independent observations. Most of the service providers have become conscious of the requirements of the customer satisfaction. They would like to have valuable feed back from the customer. Unfortunately, in spite of their best intentions they fail to understand that consumers of services have needs and requirements that are typically local. They are used to designing services and feedback evaluation forms that are standard and created and used by corporate offices. They fail to realize that local priorities often are different and vary from location to location. They perhaps need to even position their services accordingly. Branded (franchised) eating joints are a case in point. The study focused on identifying the relative importance of various service quality dimensions and the respective gap
