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Help Me Save McDonald’s
I have been inspired by The Daily Shot’s reference to my McRib obsession on the one hand, and McDonald’s poor earnings reports on the other. (How often are those linked?!) We must come to McDonald’s rescue and help it deliver a menu that real fast-food-loving Americans want. No empty snack wraps for me. No more artisan grilled chicken sandwiches.
The Daily Shot’s citation of KFC’s Double Down provides a good template: a sandwich made out of two McRibs with bacon inside — no bun. That’s not an appetizer, but what we fancy pants in the Bay Area would call an amuse-bouche (I think).
So, Ricochet food lovers, what would be your suggestions for additions to the McDonald’s menu that you would actually eat? How about a sausage, pepper, and onion Philly-style hoagie? Help me rescue McDonald’s with a new menu!
Published in Culture
Truncate the menu.
1 specialty sandwich (with a chicken and beef variant) at a time.
Like it or not McDonald’s is suffering from the same problem as all down market brands. Its all about status markers. McDonald’s does a lot of testing of their products, so its not so much technical factors that are the problem. In a world of radical abundance, people differentiate on factors higher on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like it or not how we perceive the brand will change how perceive the product, and McDonald’s is poor people food to make them fat. It doesn’t matter that people who blindly try the product like them. Its McDonald’s. This is how Coca-Cola stays in business as well.
I would double down on being a working mans lunch place, and fast cheap road food. No single combo should cost more than $5 with tax.
If I were to make 1 recommendation, I would work out a deal with Nature’s own for their whitewheat line of products to reduce the caloric content of their buns. That’s what largely keeps me out of McDs. I would be eating 2 mcDoubles everyday with a diet coke if it had slightly less caloric content, which is nearly all bun.
Do we really think McD’s needs saving? They’ll be fine.
I agree with the objection to Five Guys, way too expensive.
My preference for fast food burgers is Wendy’s.
Aren’t ‘Be Yourself’ and ‘devote yourself to making the best hamburgers in the world’ contrary pieces of advice? If they were themselves, they would keep making bad hamburgers, or if not bad, certainly far from the best in the world. McDonald’s is doomed if it does not adapt. Recent entrants like Shake Shack and others will eat its lunch (pun intended).
Egg McMuffins 24×7 would be good. And Duck Fries – that’s duck fat for the french fries, not fried duck. And maybe some lollipop lamb chops.
I had an amazing lunch at Shake Shack yesterday. The burger was wonderfully thin with nice bits of char all around and a great sauce. The fries were delicious. The employees were friendly, and the atmosphere was cool. The problem is that Shake Shack is ten bucks for a single meal. No one will pay that for McDs.
McDs may be able to woo customers back by tweaking some of its classic menu items. For instance, improve the burger patty and bun, but keep the classic flavor. The fries are already great (if made well), and the shakes are passable. McDs sells so much peripheral garbage–factory fresh salads, mutant fraps, apple slices no kid eats, hot pies that languish until a nostalgic sucker buys one on a whim he’ll soon regret, and “snack” wraps no one has ever craved–that there has to be room to cut without profit loss.
McDs also needs to improve customer service. When you go into McDs, you sometimes feel unwelcome. The employees are often visibly unhappy, and don’t appear to be working. A poorly managed McDs is easily identified: it sounds like an understaffed ICU. Ten different alarm systems buzz in the background (calling out for the fries to be pulled, etc.). And, the front-end employees are so accustomed to the symphony of disorganization behind them that they barely notice, giving the customer a sense that he’s walked into an insane asylum. Bad scene.
Mechanize!!
Install kiosks so people punch the buttons themselves to order their meals/pay. (we already do this at the grocery store).
Get those robots preparing the food. Technology is amazing.
Get rid of the surly employees. Pay more to fewer employees handling Customer service (Oooh….. Concierge Service. White gloves)!
Leave the fries alone. they’re fine.
A Big Mac isn’t a good burger, but it is a great Big Mac. Most of the advice I’ve seen here and elsewhere focuses on having them go back to what they did in the first place (beef fat to make the fries). I agree, but would also suggest focusing on the simple things. I haven’t done it lately, but when I was regularly gaming with a group of friends we would get about 20 burgers off their dollar menu. The dollar menu is probably the best thing they’ve done in the past several years (not sure how long it’s been around, but since I don’t recall anything else they’ve done, it’s still the best.)
P.S. I should also add my vote to the group that thinks Five Guys is overrated. Might be a case of too much buildup though.
What is it with Five Guys and all those peanuts everywhere? Peanuts are wonderful but its hard to eat them by the bucketful without making a mess.
Return real eggs to the non-McMuffin breakfast menu. A travesty.
Move here to San Diego, they are testing it here. Another reason to live in paradise.
Several comments have touched on the poor customer service and I wholeheartedly agree. I am willing to put up with the lower-quality food because it is cheap and fast, but the incompetence of the employees drives me nuts. They mess up special orders for my kids so often that I now check everything before I leave the drive-thru window. And the attitude of the employees is about what I would expect in a super-max prison.
These are the same people who claim they deserve $15 an hour. Most of them don’t even deserve the Minimum Wage they get now!!!
I hope some corporate honcho over at the Hamburger University reads this thread. When your store atmosphere is compared to insane asylums and super-max prisons, you’re in trouble.
McDonald’s USA can offer for a limited time only 20 or so of the meals it serves in other countries: McArabia, etc.
What really makes McDonald’s special is the onions they use. I don’t know why but they are AWESOME.
We talked so much about it I had to go get a McDouble.
In other words, McDonalds should become In-n-Out?
Too late, it’s already been done…
So John, you realize they’ve gone in an entirely different direction?
Kale. K-A-L-E.
That’s what they think will save McDonalds.
John, no complaints about McDonald’s from me. After all, they gave me my first job at age 16, and in doing so helped me determine that I needed a good education and a solid career so I wouldn’t have to work there the rest of my life.
Now having said that…if you really have a “thing” (and we all have our “things”) for the McRib…I’m a tad worried about you.
Might I suggest that you join us at the KC Meet-up and enjoy some real, honest-to-goodness, BBQ?
In the phrase “Fast Food”, the modifier is “food”, the object is “fast”.
Instead of their current process of putting the thing together after I order, go back to having the burgers wrapped and sitting in a bin, ready to grab, stick in a sack and hand to me immediately after I order so I can get the heck out of there.
The Double-Down is too salty.
I also suspect there’s a secret ingredient in their ketchup.
McDonald’s ketchup tastes … different … somehow.
I know this is a McDonald’s thread, but Chick-fil-a does have the clearly superior mayonnaise.
Bring back the Cheddar Melt. It recycles through the menu every few years and I get re-addicted each time.
It’s basically a Quarter Pounder but with nice grilled onions, a cheddar cheese sauce, and a nice rye bun.
I don’t expect McDonalds to ever rival Shake Shack (the best fast burger I’ve tasted) but they can still clearly do something within their time and cost constraints.
Let’s face it, they’re don’t make the best burgers. If Mickey D’s wants my business back, I vote for breakfast all day. I can pass on the Big Mac, but I find it hard not to eat a bacon egg and cheese biscuit every now and again. (Throw a McRib biscuit in too if that will please the Berkeley crowd.)
Chick-fil-a has the clearly superior everything.
I still miss Little Tavern.
OK, John, you got me a’hankerin’ so I went to McDonald’s for lunch. Got one of those new sirloin burgers. It was ok. Shoulda got something classic.
Gotta admit it was fun just to go in again though. It had been some time.
Tell you what, next time you find yourself back in PA, make your way over to the state’s better half and we’ll throw a McDonald’s Birthday-Party-style Ricochet Meetup and you can help me navigate the menu and get to the good stuff.
No Eagles gear, though!
The Wooly McMammoth would be a good addition.
If this proves successful, and it surely will, McDonald’s could expand on this delicious treat with a new menu featuring once extinct and currently endangered species fried to perfection. Think of all the possibilities! The McDodo Sandwich, Pterodactyl McNuggets, Big Mac Aurochs (already on its way!), and, my favorite, the Filet O’Sabertooth Salmon.
I want to support McDonald’s, even though they’re not serving the beloved McRib* in the Seattle area. I am checking out the new-retro menu. But they’re now up against this juggernaut in the Seattle area.
They are getting my business now.
* John, I can recommend the rib sandwich at AM/PM Markets.
I think the growth in the standard of living is a big factor. McDonald’s appears to cater mostly to an economic class that most of us aspired to in the 60’s and 70’s. The explosion in the standard of living since then has created opportunities for the various niche restaurants. McDonald’s has been making only partially successful attempts at gaining that business. But I also think they’re up against perception. People go to niche-y restaurants because they have a negative association with being seen at or eating the kind of food that McD’s serves (hint: that’s what drive-thru’s and tinted windows are for!).
I have my own McD’s legendary bad service story, actually it’s 2nd hand from my brother. My brother went to the McD’s one day (this was in the 70’s) and wanted the standard cheeseburger. The woman / girl behind the counter — apparently peeved that she couldn’t immediately serve him with one of the more expensive concoctions like the Big Mac — regaled him with the now infamous attitude, “You’re gonna have to wait fo’ it!” (that’s exactly how he said it, I wasn’t there).
This is opposed to my personal experience in that era of the service personnel always being courteous. But these days, it runs the gamut, and depends a lot on the attitude of the proprietor of the franchise and the manager on duty.