Here in Germany they had free refills for a while in the aughts, at least in some locations. The only group who seemed to embrace it were hordes of tweens who went there after school and turned the place into their pub.
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Neither of the new McDonald’s near where I live have self-serve fountains, only the older ones.
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That’s what I’ve always suspected, that the ice was the costliest but of a beverage. It makes even less sense that when I get fast food drinks they are 90% ice.
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That half of the non-explanation makes it sound like there’s also some interest in driving use of some ordering app; which naturally inclines one to wonder how valuable the data it is almost certainly chiseling out of your phone is.
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It was never more convenient to fetch my family’s ice, drinks, lids, straws, napkins, and ketchup. It was a way for McD’s to shift that labor cost to the customer. It would be more convenient for me if they would put the entire order along with utensils and napkins on a tray and bring it to my table.
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This doesn’t make sense, especially after the remodels they did years ago to ditch the kiddy image in effort to attract coffee shop folks with drab restaurant exteriors and interiors. But they can maintain smaller staffs by taking away the job of cleaning the dining room.
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People keep mentioning free refills, but the angle that springs to my mind is what about the people who have their own mix formula. Not sure the people at the counter are going to be interested in pouring my 1/2 rootbeer 1/2 orange soda.
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I love how people think McDonald’s is going to replace employees with robots when they can’t even seem to keep ice cream machines working.
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I’m not much of a big ol’ burger chain fan, but this is what I love about Jack in the Box. The Coke fountains that allow you to do whatever mix you want.
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As you could imagine, I was happy to try my first foreign McDonald’s in Deutschland. I might have tried it again had I not awoken at midnight with the telltale, gut-wrenching symptoms of food poisoning. Anyway, I was there for about a year in an immersive, educational experience. Whenever I needed a reset, I just popped a 0,5L of Coke from a vending machine.
I don’t know if you ever made it to any city in India with a McDonald’s, but the New Delhi McDonald’s had a great vegetarian patty that I tried more than once while in town.
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There were some unique, at the time, cultural aspects of living in Germany that I enjoyed learning, like mandatory composting of uneaten food, bringing my own cup to the cafe, and feeling content with one fill of soda before paying for another, that are now seem to be catching on here, maybe for those same economic and cultural constraints.
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Around here, a few McDonalds have installed Coke Freestyle machines for dine-in use, giving a much wider choice of soft drinks. This is great for me; as a type I diabetic, I only drink diet drinks (please, no comments about aspartame; I pick my poisons) and because my kidneys are buggered up, I can’t drink dark-colored soft drinks (the caramel coloring is renal toxic). With the Freestyle machines, I can get things like Sprite Zero.
This is customer convince.
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McDonalds UK has never had self-server drinks. Nando’s, a Brazilian chicken place, used to.
5 Guys UK had self-serve the last time I went there over a year ago. IDK if they still have it. I stopped buying the soft drink option anyway because the empty cup cost £2.45 and I never drank more than one fill so it seemed overpriced.
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Nando’s is South African
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I never knew that.
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Speaking as someone who’s done this, it took longer to actually get to the room with the stacked boxes of drink syrup than it did to switch the hoses from the empties to the fulls. (On the other hand if the CO2 needed to be replaced, that was a more time consuming operation since only a supervisor was allowed to do that.)
It;s totally a labor thing. There already is a soda fountain behind the counter for drive-thru. So going to refill it (the syrup bags) or the ice machine is a lot easier between things when the machine is right in front of you. Plus, since you are using it all the time - you don’t have to wait for a customer to be pissed off at you that the coke is out of syrup, you would find out doing your normal job and act accordingly. Having the machine in the dining area requires someone to go over there in a regular shift pattern to check the machine/clean/refill napkins/etc. If all that is behind the counter only (cause it already is cause drive thru) you can potentially cut a whole a shift (we always rotated dining area duty) from having to pay attention there. SOURCE: first job was at BK.
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It sounds like I’m going to be paying for a lot of drinks if I every visit Europe. I would say I consume 75% or more of my daily liquid intake at meals. I’ve seen people drink maybe 8oz / 250ml of liquid at a meal and be completely fine. Meanwhile I’m usually at 3 or 4 times that much. My wife has a cup of water with her practically all the time. She probably drinks between 1.5 to 2 liters of just water in a day. That’s not taking into account other things like coffee.
Also if you are going to charge me +$3 for a drink…I want one to go as well.
It’s been a very long time since I ran a McDonalds, but when I did (a few decades ago), it roughly cost me 7.5 cents to fill an extra large (current large) drink, rolling all labor and equipment percentages into the cost, at a new store. At an established store, it was closer to 5.5 cents. And those were about $1.50 then.
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Yeah sorry about that - but to be fair, in the UK, we’ll screw every penny out of you for everything else as well.
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