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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
With all due respect, I think humans are better at preparing food for humans. I don’t think I’m biased. Robots are better for saving the world.
I live for the toppings! Meat and cheese are optional. They don’t taste like much anyway.
Serving breakfast until noon would be good start. Make the McRib permanent. Dump the Dollar Menu (which served them well during the recession but has suffered a massacre by attrition ever since).
Don’t skimp on burgers that include bacon, onions and pickles. Use whole onion discs, not the chopped stuff. Get some better barbecue sauce and introduce some barbecue into the menu. Serve a good variety milkshakes with real ice cream, not the soft serve stuff. Serve onion rings, hushpuppies, cheese curds, cole slaw. Learn some things from the Southern chain Cook-Out.
Most of all, improve the taste of the beef patties. This might mean flame-grilling them, or at least frying them, instead of steaming them, as you do now, in those little pressure cooker cubbies or whatever those are. That stuff has gotta go. Huge towers of smoke billow from the top of Cook-Out. Cook your burgers however they do.
Incorporating kale is going in exactly the wrong direction. Don’t try to be Panera; it’ll never work. Cook-Out shows us that guilty, greasy, fast-food can be both cheap and good.
Final note: service is terrible at all fast-food places (with the exception of Chick-Fil-A for some reason). I’m not sure there’s much McDonald’s can do to improve in this regard. But giving more control to franchisers might help.
Yes this. McDonald’s does way too much product testing and development. Its that there are enough niche players that everybody has a preferred one that isn’t “obesity causing fat pills for poor people” at MickeyDs
Back in my day, McDonalds had a simple menu of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, filet-o-fish, milkshakes, and cokes. Nothing else. You ate in your car.
The grill man would put down, say, 48 burgers, and call out, “How many cheese on 48?” The front man would look at the bin, make a judgment on this important question, and perhaps call back “12 cheese.” A shake guy would keep the shake freezer full of vanilla, chocolate, black and white, and strawberry shakes. The fry guy would keep the real fries coming. The front man would add up the total on his pad and make change without help from a computer.
The service was excellent. The food was good. The work staff were all high school students making minimum wage ($1.10). Business was booming. Hamburgers were 15¢, fries 12¢, coke 10¢, with inflation, $1.09, 87¢, 72¢ respectively. Two burgers, fries, and coke would set you back $3.77 in today’s dollars.
There is a business opportunity for McDonald’s to open a “McDonald’s Classic” restaurant that duplicates the old model. I bet it would succeed. They can test market it right where I live.
“The service was excellent. The food was good. The work staff were all high school students making minimum wage ($1.10). Business was booming. Hamburgers were 15¢, fries 12¢, coke 10¢, with inflation, $1.09, 87¢, 72¢ respectively. Two burgers, fries, and coke would set you back $3.77 in today’s dollars.”
I, too, remember walking two miles to school in the snow.
Now get off my lawn!!!
Their urban, funky-music “I’m lovin’ it!” campaign didn’t help in this regard, and drove the SWPL crowd to your In-n’-Out Burgers and Chipotle Grills.
All of this points up an uncomfortable fact for the SWPL crowd… Paleface Progressive is supporting companies that essentially exist to give them places to shop, socialize, and eat where there are no black people. Their whole aversion to McDonald’s isn’t the food as much as its “Uh, no, not going there, because THOSE people eat there… I mean, err, the poor, dispossessed minorities eat there. How horrible for them“. I wonder if the irony occurs to them at all?
I hate to call a man with an axe old, but when you hearken back to the good ole days when things cost 15 cents and pine for a time before cash registers, you sound like a grandma who doesn’t understand the concept of inflation and that burgers are probably cheaper in real terms today than they were in the golden age, which (happy accident!) happened to coincide with your youth.
I may be pining for the fiords, but not for the good old days. Clearly I do understand inflation as I provided the inflation-adjusted prices and wages.
My point is not to go back to those days, but to remember why McDonald’s was considered in those days to be the ultimate fun food. It was actually good, and at prices that, adjusted for inflation, are close to the prices they charge today for not-so-good food. Perhaps they lost something when they went from “millions sold” to “n billions sold” to “billions and billions sold.”
My point about the cashiers making change is that McDonald’s had to hire employees who could count. Thus, they tended to be smarter and better educated than the cretins (no offense intended) you sometimes encounter there now.
I had an order there once which came to $4.28. I handed the gal a five along with three pennies. (I’d rather get three quarters back than have a pocketful of pennies.) She refused the pennies and handed them back, snidely remarking that I had given her too much. I asked her to humor me and plug $5.03 into her little keypad. As the figure for the change owed to me popped up she tilted her head from side to side like a puzzled dog.
All it would take for any cashier with half a brain to be able to make change is to be told by a supervisor on day 1:
I actually received this lesson my first day working the register. It took less than one minute.
I don’t understand.
You must have studied under Common Core.
Studied? I invented it.
Good boy, here’s a biscuit.
(I am assuming we’re both joking. I know I am.) ;-)
Oh you did include inflation adjusted amounts! I missed that in my haste to make fun of you.
Absolutely. You can chart the decline of Micky Dees from when they caved to the veggie crowd and removed the beef tallow. All they had to do was say, nope it’s not vegetarian and we aren’t going to change it because our customers like how they taste but instead they folded…