On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, there are double fish filets on the menu. I’ve heard you can order them at any McD’s, but I have not tested this theory. (Unfortunately they do not use two slices of cheese, so it throws the flavor combination off.)
…cicadas?
I’m a vegetarian, so while I occasionally eat breakfast at McDonalds, there’s nothing for lunch or dinner. The fries have beef fat in them, there’s no veggie sandwich of any kind, no onion rings, the one salad with no meat is pretty lame, and if it’s the only choice in town I can get a milkshake and dessert, but it’s seldom the only choice.
Five Guys make a grilled veggie sandwich and has better fries, Burger King and several other chains have veggie burgers, and this being California, there’s actual Mexican fast food around as well as fake Mexican like Taco Bell.
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Apparently these are things that McDonald’s has never thought of before; I’m sure there is an opportunity for you to launch a hostile takeover bid since you’ve got the ideas for a quick, easy, and profitable fix.
Or maybe it doesn’t make sense to have dedicated breakfast equipment that will be underused for most of the day, and which can’t be used to cook burgers. This is very different than inventing the “next big thing” that works on the same equipment.
Adding back the full breakfast menu would also go against their stated plan of streamlining the menu, and would likely have a significant penalty in time to fulfill an order.
They don’t have beef fat, and haven’t for a long time. They have had vegetarian burgers in the past, but they obviously haven’t sold well enough to justify staying on the menu. I have my doubts that vegetarians are part of McDonald’s target market, anyway.
I think Five Guys’ fries are pretty crap. Sure, you get a lot of them, but they’re not crispy at all. And if you’re a hardcore vegetarian to the extent you are worried about the level of beef flavouring (not oil) in McDonald’s fries, I suspect that a lot of “vegetarian” Mexican food has similar levels of cross-contamination.
I don’t even like McDonald’s, and went 15 years without eating there, but a lot of the criticism of them seems off-base. They’re a high-volume seller of cheap and very fast food whose offerings must appeal to the lowest common denominator.
No, billstewart is right. The Vegetarian Resource Group questioned them for years until finally McDonald’s admitted that they spray a form of beef fat on the fries before freezing. That’s how they were able to get away with saying they “didn’t fry in beef fat” for years, but they were caught out.
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Yeah, I think some Hindu groups were pretty upset about that.
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I did a stint of food inspection and a potato stuff factory I would visit had a McDonalds fries contract, the whole facility was 100% kosher, no non-kosher ingredients(including no meat or dairy of any kind) were permitted inside, only ingredients on the whitelist, even the food lab was kosher. The oil they use in store may not be kosher and have or had the added beef fat but post 2000 I know that the frozen and pre-fried(maybe it was oil sprayed and hot air or IR processed) potato was 100% vegan.
The menu is, as the article admits, vast. And it’s gotten so huge that it can’t all be displayed behind the counter, which leads to a bonkers display of “value items!” and “dollar plus!” and “value combos!” plus big special displays and video screens that change and flip, and the customer just stands there, staring, baffled. It’s user-interface chaos: there’s no separation of “burgers” and “chicken” and “fish” anymore, it’s all just sandwich sandwich sandwich, with wacky new flavors of burger and McChicken shuffled all together at different price points. McDonalds has been chasing the high-end burger market, so now there’s a half-dozen different ‘prime’ or ‘angus’ type sandwiches, but with Big Macs reaching the $5 level, it’s unclear what’s “high end” at McD’s anymore.
They need to strip down their high-end burgers to one choice, redesign their menu to be easily scanned, ditch the poorly-selling McCafe menu (a hit overseas that just seems lame here), and get rid of the duplicate items (McDouble? Double Cheeseburger? Double Quarter Pounder? Daily Double? all on the menu next to each other.)
The problem is, they’re stuck in the past. Monopoly promotions? McRib? They were around when I was a kid (and, when I was a kid they were rare, it seems like they’re on every other month these days… with ridiculously short windows on redemption of the prizes!). They need to go into the future.
Forget lines. Everyone’s got phones/tablets nowadays. You should be able to make your order on phone. Custom builds included. Get drone delivery up and running. Because the window between “hey, maybe I’d like to eat at McDonalds” and remembering how you felt the last time you ate at McDonalds closes fast, sometimes before they can actually get to a physical location.
New Menu items… not just different toppings on burgers, and a different quality/cut of meat. One of those pizza companies came up with things like the pizza-cake, got social media buzzing. Taco Bell put the obvious step of dorito-flavored shells and they’re always crunch-wrapping something. Even KFC had its double-down. The last invention I can think of for McDonalds were their wraps. Before that, the McRib. Go further. How about a burger with a gooey fried egg in the middle! I’ve seen it online, you can’t tell me you can’t systemize that! I don’t know, use your imagination! Try out some crazy ideas! Wendy’s has a pretzel bun, do a french fry bun! McNuggets made of wrapped bacon coated in onion ring batter! Fries with GRAVY INSIDE. OMG I JUST THOUGHT OF THAT. CRISPY OUTER COATING, NO MESSY HANDS, DELICIOUS GRAVY TASTE. I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW THAT WOULD WORK. JUST DO IT.
And, I’m just going to say it. I think it’s time for a Soylent burger.
(I may be a little hyped up on sugar I had two donuts for breakfast)
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Not true. Not everyone can use those things. Not everyone can eat those things either, so I guess it balances out.
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True, although I didn’t literally mean to get rid of lines entirely, just use “order in line from your tablet” as a management tool to reduce wait times. If you didn’t have a phone or tablet, you could still go to the front and order the old fashioned way.
I doubt this would work well. People would place orders well before they were even in the store, leading to workers preparing the food and having it ready when nobody is there to pick it up, which would inevitably lead to complaints about cold food. In store, automated ordering kiosks would make more sense, and some of them do exist in some parts of the world (they have some in Australia where you can order custom sandwiches, for example).
I wish Taco Bell would have some clear explanations for what their various “regular” vs “supreme” or whatever categories are (is sour cream included? tomatoes? cheese?) On the other hand, they’re pretty flexible about substituting ingredients, so you can get beans instead of beef, etc. Big change from the 80s, when you couldn’t get a bean taco, because that would have been substituting stuff, unless you explained really carefully to the manager that you’d like a bean tostada using the bent taco shell instead of the flat one so you could pick it up, and even that didn’t always work…
Also, I was expecting this article to be about Burger King Japan’s Kuro Burger http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/burger-king-japan-sell-black-cheeseburger-article-1.1935880 which has bun and cheese colored with bamboo charcoal, and black squid ink sauce, and is a pretty scary looking burger.
I thought I was the only one.
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Obviously it’s not going to work as simplistically as I make it out to be, but you could make refinements (make it an app that only works within a very short distance of a McDonalds, have a “we prepare it the moment you pay (Through the app), so if you’re not close enough to pick it up it’s your fault” policy, etc, or some combination (if it’s pick-up, it queues your order from anywhere, but only pulls the trigger when you’re within a certain distance and confirm that you want it). I do think it’s the wave of the future, eventually (although by the time we get there it may not be tablets but rather just brain implants). I’ve seen kiosks at a few places (not McDonalds) and they’re probably useful, but they always seem like one more place for a line to form, albeit it’s usually a shorter line, and requires floor space in the customer area for both the machine and line… it’s an intermediate step between full self-ordering and normal lines, but one that can conceivably be jumped over fairly easily.
There are two reasons to go to McDonald’s – price and convenience. Their panic over shrinking margins has caused them to reduce their dollar menu and offer more high-priced items, and the resulting explosion in the size of the menu has made it much harder to keep track of the offers and what everything is. After the ‘human flesh’ hoax, I inexplicably got a craving to go there after 2 years or so of staying away, and had to wait a good 10 minutes for the clerk to explain all the possible options for all the deals to the person in front of me.
At first I thought 'who needs the McDonald’s menu explained to them, ’ but during the intervening time my eyes wandered to all the cards and displays of their menu items, many without price, and I suddenly realized that it was a different place entirely than the McDonald’s of old.
Not likely to go back again soon, and I’m sure I’m not alone. McDonalds without convenience is completely pointless to me.
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