The bigger reason I don’t go to McDonald’s is because of the self serve kiosks they’ve forced us instead of paying people to run the registers.
Price is still a reason though, so I’m glad they are at least considering that as well.
i don’t get why people complain about this – i’d so so much rather type my order in myself, see what’s in everything, make modifications easily, etc without having to talk to someone. get those workers on the line and help ease the load on the kitchen
Because I go there once in a blue moon and it’s easier for the guy doing it 1000x/day to push in my order than me finding it on a big dumb Kiosk menu.
I won’t frequent places that force me to use a kiosk.
Maybe i am just too old and go to McDonald’s too infrequently, but i can never figure out how to get my order done properly on the kiosks. Try ordering a McGriddle combo with a Carmel latte. There’s no visible option for that. Unless you ppan on doing a basic order, the kiosks suck
They didn’t “get those workers on the line” though. They fired them. Fuck McDonalds, and FUCK ANY BUSINESS that forces these fucking things on us. I’m not there to work, I’m there to order food and eat. If you can’t be bothered to take my order, I can’t be bothered to drop a fucking dime on your business.
The McDonalds near me have people on tills as well as the self order machines. And you say they fired them. Can you prove that?
To be clear. I dont think you are wrong, I have no idea, and I am genuinely curious and want to know if that happened. since you claimed it with such conviction, I assume you can give a reference or point me in the direction of the search terms I could use to find a source myself?
They weren’t paying them a living wage in the first place let them replace it with screens
Of course RagingRobot would support this.
You dislike self checkouts too?
I can guarantee you nobody got fired for these machines, the turnover is already so fucking high there that it’s not even needed. When I worked at MCD I lasted an entire year and excluding the managers I was probably in the top 3-4 in terms of “seniority”
Also, I feel a bit awkward when I order two BigMacs at the register.
Why would you want people to take orders? It’s not some amazing work that is satisfying. We should be glad these jobs are going away
If they’re going to be gouging us on price the least they can do is employ people.
Nah, those jobs should disappear. Worthless labour is still worthless.
Those people could actually be doing something productive with their time instead.
bubble popping?
We all wish
At what point are we blaming people who eat there?
Many have little choice in the matter.
What? Isn’t it cheaper to buy and cook your own meals?
In order to prepare a meal, you need to be able to afford ingredients, have the required skills, and have the time/energy to cook. So yes, it is cheaper to prepare your own meal, but if for example you’re working three jobs to make rent while raising a child, you’re going to have difficulty finding the time or energy required for cooking. Doubly true if you don’t already know how to cook.
There’s also people without access to a kitchen. If you have to rely on other people to cook for you, you’re extremely limited in options and as a result you’ll likely have to spend more money on fast food and takeout.
Another thing to think about: it’s cheaper to grow your own food than to buy it. Most of us don’t grow our own food - probably because we lack time, knowledge, or land.
All valid points, thank you.
Another aspect to this is our society and culture. Eating out is a special treat, a privileged event that’s deep in our subconscious. Have grandparents that take you to a favorite spot? A friend that loves to eat at this one certain place. Just want to have a more relaxing day because of over-stressing? The food joint is our new spa.
I don’t enjoy eating out so it’s easy for me to avoid it. But, my family has the average addiction and my partner comes from a household that would eat out at any opportunity (I’ve seen them do all 3 meals in a day when visiting once). You don’t realize the amount of money being spent on advertising till you’re trying to get someone to cut back. Newspapers, online ads, roadside signs, we even get “coupons” in the mail it feels like several times a week. Kid’s programming, sponsored school events from nearby food chains, high schools will have a domino’s in it before they get a robotics lab.
It’s crazy we allow any of this, we know from past cigarette legislation what this kind of inundation can do to people psychologically.
A homeless person couldn’t really do that.
Very true, for some reason that didn’t cross my mind.
It probably doesn’t cross most people’s minds most of the time. That’s why people on these forums seem to be changing so much.
Wrong, there are so many fast food places to go to besides McDonald’s. There is literally no one on this planet who is forced to eat there.
Alright, so they’ll be forced to eat at Greggs or Subway, then, I guess.
I resent the implication that Greggs and Subway are equivalent. Subway is the only place where they ask you 500 questions when you ask for a cheese sandwich.
I’ll just take some ketchup with whatever the other hobo is having then, I guess.
But I find mayonnaise quite distasteful.
Blame them for what? The sales decrease? That makes no sense.
The people that eat there are not tolerating their continued price gouging after the pandemic shortages.
Shitty food for retarded prices. I’ll just go to the pizza place on the next corner and get a burger there. Better burger, better fries, same price, better surroundings.
As someone who used to be a daily fast food eater, I’m just proud that these greedy fast food chains have forever lost me as a customer. Ethics aside, after not eating at these places for so long, I now get to compare the experience to the local places around me or my own cooking skills. The only way I’d ever go back to one of these fast food joints I used to frequent daily is if they provide a better value than myself or the local restaurants here. And the local quick service places here give you a ton of good food instantly for under $10, which I know McDonalds et al will never reach again.
I think this will be the long term impact.
Customers have been pushed to discover alternatives and are unlikely to return for reasons beside price and quality.
For example, there are sit down restaurants near me that haven’t raised their prices or have barely done so and are now cheaper than McDonald’s.
The fact that local one offs haven’t needed to raise prices signals to me that a large multinational company did not need to either. This adds a fuck off and die factor to my future purchasing decisions. I am not a price conscious customer but I take being gouged personally.
Last month, the head of its US operations formally responded to the complaints with an open letter to customers, saying social media was painting an inaccurate picture. He said the average price of a Big Mac in the US, which is now $5.29 (£4.11), was up 21% since 2019 - roughly in line with the pace of inflation - and many items had risen by less.
Sure, place the blame on anyone but themselves.
$5.29 is ridiculous for a Big Mac, which is super tiny.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Even if they were to lower the prices, they’ll just make the fucking burgers even smaller.
Does anyone remember how much bigger the Big Mac was in the 90’s? Shrinkflation is everywhere.
They could always try to lower the quality standards to lower the price. Lmao! Quality standards! As if!
Can’t wait for the McSawdust in 2026!
Especially because that’s just the sandwich, not a side and a drink. A combo meal is like 10.15$
I’m sorry but the quality of the food does not justify 10 dollars.
For comparison, I remember in Berlin not even 5 years ago I got a currywurst with fries and a drink for 3.60 € (about 3.90$), and in London I got an absolute mound of fish and chips with peas for like 6.50 £ (about 8$). Both of these I got as much or way more food than a Big Mac combo and they were much better quality.
I won’t defend McDonald’s, but you’ll struggle to get fish for under £7-8 now, and the chips are £2-3.
In the south, at least.
roughly in line with the pace of inflation
Roughly in line with the terrible inflation of the past 5 years which has been primarily driven by corporate price gouging.
As far as I can tell the whole appeal of McDonald’s is bland but edible food, quickly, at a low price.
Over the years, they’ve switched to what appears to be a prepare by order method so it’s no longer quick (it used to be on the little racks behind them, all pre-made), and it’s no longer cheap (especially if you get delivery and therefore immediately send half your dinner money to a Silicon Valley billionaire). It’s not quite Burger King levels of pricing, but it’s getting close.
The only thing they’ve got left is bland but edible, and that’s only desirable if you’re feeding a bunch of picky children.
There are so many better places to eat, and they don’t cost an enormous amount more.
You feed picky children by giving them anything they don’t eat the next day.
Here in Germany Burger King is actually cheaper than McDonald’s, especially when you use coupons, since the ones at Burger King are actually useful.
I don’t think the production method has changed, I worked there a decade ago and it seems to be the same, essentially precook the meat and assemble to order. However, I think they no longer pay employees enough to care about speed. They don’t pay more now than when I worked there. In fact, I moved to a state where they pay LESS. Why the hell would anyone working there bust their ass to get food out quickly? You get what you pay for.
It was a lot longer ago than that.
They used to have it so those racks behind the counter were stuffed with already made standard prep burgers, and if you just wanted that you’d get one pulled off the shelf and be served in seconds.
You only had prep-to-order if you wanted the change the default configuration, no lettuce, no mayo, etc.
It’s definitely a lot slower. I remember working there and at lunchtime they’d be working the grills 24 down - basically double the usual capacity and that stuff was wrapped and put into the racks constantly. They’d try and make burgers to meet demand with a holding time by which the burger should be sold by or thrown into a red bin. Usually it worked fine and waste was minimal but I assume some beancounter thinks that system and red bin waste costs McDonalds more money than it does to waste 5-10 minutes of somebody’s lunch break. If people get pissed off by the wait though they might consider going somewhere else - after all, if they’re going to wait, why not in a place where something more substantial than a burger is being prepared.
Or even a more substantial burger. I just learned that the standard McDonald’s burger patty is 45 grams (that’s 1.6 oz or approximately 1 medium celery stalk in freedom units). 45 grams! Only the quarter pounder has the 4 oz (113g for the rest of us) patty.
This is all the pre-cooked weight. If your average patty loses 25% of its weight during cooking, that 45g patty becomes about 34g. WTF.
Ok, converting to imperial is nice but then acting like we don’t understand our own measures is just insulting.
BK here is cheaper and wayyyyyy better than McD. So weird when people say “at least McD is consistent” - that doesn’t help if “consistent” is inedible garbage.
A BK opened near my office a year or two ago. I’ve never had a burger I’d describe as depressing before then. But that Bacon King or whatever they called sure was.
Their food sucks. 🤷♂️
They largely removed their vegan options. Nuff said.
Because low demand, the demand is low because McDonald’s is a bigger joint. Also most vegans are ethical vegans and wouldn’t support giving business to a huge player in the cattle slaughter game.
Good. I used to grab a burger after work sometimes but it barely feels worth it anymore.
First sales call since 2020.
Three years? So what? That’s nothing. Now if they said first sales fall since 2002, now that would be something.
No business weathered Covid without a drop in sales, except maybe for the healthcare sector. Good luck finding any customer-facing business that survived Covid without lost sales.
Healthcare definitely lost out during the pandemic. Hospitals were struggling to stay open amidst consumers opting to delay elective procedures.
Yeah basically all business lost money when covid hit.
My boss at work went to pick up some McDonald’s food a few months ago, not particularly because he wanted to eat that, but because he wanted one of those free glasses that came with the meal - honestly, what a strange reason, right?.
He was sick for a solid two weeks due to salmonella. If I have had any desire to go eat there again, it evaporated when he told me that.
Not to try and discredit your or your boss or anything but a lot of people assume that they got salmonella from the last food they ate. Usually it’s from food they ate a day or so ago, as the incubation time is between 24 and 48 hours.
If he got sick right after eating McDonald’s food then it’s probably just a coincidence. Have he got sick 2 or 3 days later then yeah it was probably the McDonald’s burger.
Also what free glass?
Honestly, even if it hit him 2-3 days later, it’d be kind of hard to pin it on the McDonald’s unless he ate all of his meals there that day or there was an outbreak of salmonella in the area and McDonalds was the common factor between the cases.
He could have just as easily gotten it from his breakfast or dinner, and that may even be more likely. I won’t pretend for a moment that McDonald’s employees can be 100% trusted to follow their proper food handling procedures and such to the letter, but I’m certain that a corporate outfit like McDonald’s probably has so many guidelines in place and has idiot-proofed as much of their equipment as possible that it should be next-to impossible for them to be at fault even if half their rules end up getting ignored.
There’s of course cases where things out of their control could happen, like they get a batch of lettuce that’s contaminated with salmonella from their supplier, but that’s the kind of thing that could happen at literally any restaurant, and there’s only so much you can do to mitigate that.
Does in America exist small fast food restaurants? In my country those are affordable and most of times better than McDonald’s I prefer to spend money there.
I think you kind of need to define a bit what fast food means and what you consider small.
Following the McDonald’s model with a drive through, self-seating dining area, no table service, etc. those are mostly going to be chains, although some chains are pretty small, only operating in certain areas with a handful of locations.
And there are exceptions of course, some independent restaurants do have a drive through (often I see this setup when they move into a location that was formerly a corporate fast food place) and there’s chains or locations that don’t have a drive through, or do have table service, etc. but those tend to be exceptions rather than the rule.
If you expand it a bit to include other small, no-frills restaurants with a heavy emphasis on fast service and take-out, there’s a lot of places that could fit the bill. Pretty much every town has some little hole in the wall burger joint, deli, sandwich shop, taqueria, Chinese takeout, pizzeria, bodega, snack bar, etc. that you could potentially argue fits the fast food category.
Most of those places probably don’t exactly advertise themselves as fast food and would probably want to avoid that label (although to be fair, the same can probably be said for most fast food restaurants, I’ve never heard a McDonald’s commercial call themselves “fast food”)
There’s also going to be some overlap with other categories, fast-casual, convenience stores, etc. where the lines get blurred about what can be considered “fast food.”
In general though, in America, the term “fast food” is usually going to refer to the larger chains, and the smaller independent restaurants with otherwise similar service will be called something else.
They were making way too much money to begin with, nevermind growth.
Also McDonald’s is just a real estate company, I’m guessing the franchisees are complaining they aren’t going to stick around.
Oh wow… Increased prices resulted in people going else where… Who would have seen that coming 🤔
I mean, you’re half right. Yeah, it’s gotten expensive, but it’s now expensive for McDonald’s-quality food. It’s not the worst of the worst, but you can easily find better quality food cheaper.
