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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

I hope I one day get to visit a Russian nationalized McDonalds; just to fully grasp what deglobalization means ...

Currently it's probably the same stuff as the original McDonalds. Eventually the quality will deteriorate due to lack of supervision - unless Russians will do an equal job in supervising, which I doubt.

>Eventually the quality will deteriorate

What quality? Even in Austria, at some really busy McD's I've been to like the train station or airport, their finished burgers looked nothing like the ones in the menu.

Often they had components like the cheese, lettuce and sauces missing and I got just a dry paddy between two barren pieces of bread as a burger lol. It was uneatable so I had to throw it away and buy a sandwich from the SPAR next door which has much better quality.

The McD's I've had in NY weren't much better either.

OTOH, McCafe's in Europe (the separate establishment, not to be confused with the coffee you can get from McD's) are amazing, coffee is always great, on par with even fancy hipster cafes and their pastry and cakes aren't bad either.

> looked nothing like the ones in the pictures

This is surely too high a standard!

Did Coke ever give you the satisfaction of the people in the Christmas adverts?

Did you get girls after you bought Lynx?

Did you score more goals with those Predators?

Sure, not looking exactly like the menu/ads is one thing, that's just marketing for you, but being served a patty in a bare bread bun, missing the cheese, lettuce and other parts of the product you ordered, is an outright scam in legal terms if we're being pedantic.

Sure, I get it, having underpaid and overworked people making your food is not a recipe for a great experience, but ultimately I paid in full, the company got their money and I didn't get the product I ordered, which is why I jusy stopped eating there, since I don't like being "THAT GUY" who ask for "the manager" in order to complain about overworked people on minimum wage that they got his order wrong and they need to redo the order while 10 more customers are waiting in line.

I've had a lot of fast food burgers in the US but never have I had a bare patty in a bun, unless I specifically asked for it a time or two as a child.

What likely happened in this case is they gave GP a burger intended for someone who ordered it 'plain'. The slips McDonalds uses to attach special order tags to the sandwich wrappers are prone to falling off or being overlooked.

N'ah, the employees were just overworked so made mistakes or cut corners. The amount of customers that come at an airport or a train station at rush hour is insane. Mistakes happen, or some employees cut corners to save time, knowing that the customers won't have time to notice the mistake and complain about it, since they have a train/flight to catch.

Lynx kept the defenders away so I scored more goals, and the Predators made me look like Beckham...

This depends on how much has been sourced locally before and how much has been sourced from the US.

Like buns and meat and so could be sourced locally. But spice (mixtures) may have been imported and the mixture recipe is locally unknown.

It can't be that hard to reverse engineer a spice mixture in 2022.

It is not even necessary, since local tastes are different and you need to adapt the recipe.

As we're not talking about small cuts of leaves but some highly industrialized component it is not so easy as counting leaves and mixing them together. You can certainly analyse the flavors, but that won't tell you much on the production process for creating this with all the artificial components.

However that could creates some creativity in place and create similar, but different (better? Worse? Who knows) products.

Compare this to Coca Cola in Germany during WW2. Due to the embargos they couldn't deliver the "secret syrup" so Coca Cola Germany used some "fantasy" and created (the predecessor of) Fanta, which nowadays is a brand of Coca Cola served in multiple countries (with differeing recipes)

Why would you even want to copy Coca-Cola's "super secret syrup" when we already have in Europe several local Cola drinks that are better, and sometimes even healthier?

Fanta is now nothing special either, just a sugary fizzy drink with orange flavoring that can be done better by other local companies.

Coca Cola is just a branding and marketing juggernaut at this point, but their drinks themselves are easily replaceable by better local alternatives at any time.

Come to think of it, banning Coca-Cola could actually be a health benefit for the population lol.

I remember that in Mexico there are poor villages addicted to Coca-Cola where the company uses local water to make the drinks and the villagers have no access to clean tap water and have obesity and diabetes from all the coke they drink, and all is sponsored buy the Coca-Cola and their lobbying. Absolutely disgusting.

That's orthogonal to the discussion. Fact is that local branches can survive with some form of pivot if their owner can deliver a core component for the product.

So we don't have the technology to analyze chemical components of things? I still find that hard to believe.

You can analyze components, but that doesn't give you a process to recreate in scale. Many aromas and stuff are remainders of some Enzym processing things or some chemical reaction where the initial ingredient is dissolved.

I myself spend some time in bread and a part of the taste of bread comes from my bacteria/yeast culture growing here at my place, feeding of stuff which is in the air at my place. If i go elsewhere that already changes to a small degree. If I vary temperature, humidity of air ... this has impact. On industrial scale the impacts are way more as they use processes to ensure the end product stays as much the same as possible independently from changes to ingredients (natural products change with each harvest ...) and where it is processed further (a Big Mac is, by McD, supposed to be as equal lgibally as possible) this is done by having Enzyms, chemicals and other comments doing their work.

Yes I agree living things like bacteria/yeast cultures are hard to get right. In regards to your previous example you can get the blend of leaves right, but if the plants aren't genetically identical or even aren't grown in the exact same climate the end product may taste very different. When it comes to completely artificial flavorings though it would seem to me that it would be much simpler. For example isoamyl acetate is isoamyl acetate regardless of where or how it is produced.

Pepsi is a thing. And there were many more; Pepsi is just the one which survived Coca Cola's lawyers.

Russians are actually good at building restaurant business. It is one of the most competitive and difficult businesses there, so only the smartest survive. I’d rather go to Starbucks or McDonalds in Moscow than anywhere else in Europe (I’d prefer though a local chain). One of the fastfood chains even applied kaizen in their operations including kitchen.

The biggest problem will be the quality of supplies, as sanctions will damage the supply chain.

They could send spies into the American McDonalds ...

Of course! But if the government cared about quality of life of their citizens to that extent, it would be quite a different country, and the sanctions wouldn't be there.

I hear the Polonium McFlurries are to die for, but the machine is usually broken.

Why do you doubt it?

> just to fully grasp what deglobalization means

Deglobalization means you can't travel to Russia ;)

Sure you can, it's just limited - like with North Korea.

It has been nationalized since 2014 in places like Crimea.

(Not sure if Americans can visit the place. There are downsides to deglobalization too...)

I hope they get rid of the clown.

And that terrifying living purple beanbag creature.

France?

Grimace.

Not sure "they" refers to "McDonald's" or whether it refers to some country and the "clown" leading the government.

In case it refers to McDonald's: They already did. https://www.mashed.com/202684/the-real-reason-mcdonalds-got-...

Putin?

But I guess that one aspect of this deglobalization trend is that you won't be able to travel there in the first place until the trend changes.

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