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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

This is intentional. In fact, I've seen many McDonald'ses that were redecorated such that you can't see the screen with the queued/ready orders from where the kiosks are. This way, you're not discouraged from ordering if you feel like the wait will be too long.

This is also why McDonald's introduced table service, which is only in restaurants that have a layout where it's impossible to hide how many people are waiting. It costs manpower to deliver food to tables, but the additional orders are worth it.

McD's don't mind if you have to wait, they mind if you leave before you order. "Busy-looking queue" is a much more frequent problem than "totally-packed-restaurant".

Source: I like hamburgers + I geek out over stuff like this. I.e., Just Guessing.

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I wonder how much of the delay is due to their recent decision to offer breakfast items all day. Many franchisees were complaining at the time about how doing so would reduce throughput, as it expanded greatly the list of possible items a customer could order and necessitated pulling people away to staff tasks that were only required for breakfast, like cooking eggs.

A lot of these measures have come to markets where breakfast is still not served all day (e.g. UK, last I checked).

My reasoning is that they are just trying as hard as they can to decouple order-taking from order-preparing and distributing, taking their clue from Starbucks. Volume of this or that is not really an issue: with the exception of chips, these days they hardly prepare anything at all before it’s been ordered, so it doesn’t really matter whether they make a burger or a muffin.

Yet we are willing to wait for chipotle, five guys, shake shack for 20 min m

Chipotle is about as fast as it gets

Not when the person in front of you is getting 6 different orders.

Do you not have tastebuds?

Do you? Those are some of the best dirty burgers you can have on this planet.

They've gotten horrendously expensive in the fast few years, though. That's my only real issue. My order has gone from $10 to $17 since they opened in my town, so I just don't go anymore.

I was talking about this just last night. Five Guys is absolutely the worst of the mid-priced hamburger chains, and even their fries are almost as bad as In-N-Out's, which is like making a car whose steering wheel flies off while you're driving.

I think my tastebuds must be off because I feel the same way. There's always a huge line at Five Guys and people rave about it but whenever I eat there I feel like I need a straw for my fries because they're just drowning in grease.

I get that people like it and I'm certainly not going to discourage anyone from doing what they enjoy, but I also feel like social media has turned certain fast food chains into memes where you can't merely just be satisfied with something, you either need to looooovveeeee iiiitttt or demand it be "canceled". There's no middle ground.

The fries are fairly mediocre, but their burgers are pretty fantastic, espesicslky if you’re a fan of animal style.

Saying Five Guys is the worst in a thread that features McDonalds... Five Guys is gourmet compared to McDonalds.

That's why I distinguished McD's out of the comparison with "mid-priced."

In-n-out fries must be eaten while they're hot. In that state they are delicious. The precipitous decline in quality upon cooling occurs because they are made by frying potato pieces rather than by assembling various starches in a laboratory.

Well someone tell McDonald's some people are not going there anymore. The few I do I use McDrive because the wait is predictable and shorter.

If I had the money I'd spent it to open a good old McDonald's I'm sure more people would come.

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