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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac

Your point is 100% valid, so don't consider this a disagreement. It is merely that McDonalds has changed, and it annoys me.

I went to the one on El Camino near Oregon, and waited 7 minutes to have my order taken, and 14 minutes more for my food. Why?

Doordash, and others.

https://nypost.com/2022/02/14/doordash-to-penalize-mcdonalds...

This is a pivot too, from restaurant to delivery as a primary business model.

But, just like facebook, mcdonalds borked this. Its whole business model was fast food, and really the only reason I ever went there.

They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins.

But instead, drop the old, and now I can go to a real restaurant, order a burger, and get it made and on my table faster.

Good job McDonalds!

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> They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins.

McDonald's hasn't been fast food for a long, long time -- and this has nothing to do with Doordash/delivery.

In the 80's and 90's at least, all food was made ahead of time. There were rows of burgers sitting under heat lamps, and once you paid the cashier, they would grab your entire order in under 30 seconds and hand it to you. It was fast food.

But as competitors started making better-tasting food freshly prepared (e.g. Wendy's made all hamburgers to-order), McD's had to catch up. So the burgers under heat lamps are long gone, and you have to wait 5-15 minutes for your food to be made. You get a number on your receipt and walk over to a pickup area now.

Also the 7 minutes to have your order taken has nothing to do with DoorDash/delivery -- it's the fact that McD's raised their minimum wage a few years ago, so they can only afford 1 cashier instead of 4-5, and they want you to use a kiosk/app to order using a touchscreen.

McDonald's didn't bork anything. Their hot, fresh quarter pounders are now almost infinitely tastier than the old shriveled ones in dried-up buns baking under a lamp for 30 minutes prior that we ate in the 80's and 90's. But that comes at the cost of waiting for them to make them fresh.

With how much McDonalds has raised their prices in the last 2 years, I don’t understand how they can even be competitive on DoorDash. When I can get actual food for less money and the same exact effort, why eat McDonalds?

Until very recently I used to be able to get a full meal for ~$4, but now it’s hard to get out for under $12. The only reason to ever eat McDonalds at this point is the “it’s there” factor when I have left the house.

Huh, they're still ridiculously cheap here in .uk still ... though perhaps only if you pick the least profitable things off their menu.

Triple cheeseburgers reheated in the microwave with a brick of extra mature cheddar added between two of the patties first remain one of the most cost effective "my depression is trying to eat me but I really should still actually have food" meals I've figured out though. (the trick is to microwave it just enough to soften the cheddar then cut it in half, stupidbrain finds a whole burger upsetting but half a burger twice acceptable, yes I know how little sense that makes logically but the entire point here is "working around my brain being irrational.")

I'm in Germany, and I've always liked McDonalds. I enjoyed eating there maybe a handful of times a year, even when doing so was considered "uncouth" by the majority of the people I know.

No more. Why? Because they've stopped selling burgers.

They've switched almost all of their restaurants to a "made to order" model, wherein they assemble your order on demand from warming trays, instead of producing them ahead and storing them in this huge heated cabinet.

Now the result looks exactly like the product shot on the menu, but is so lukewarm that the cheese hasn't even melted. That's not a burger, that's a at best a strange sandwich.

The margins are better on "premium, made-to-order" food so they do this to justify their increased prices. Unfortunately this is working well for them, and at scale, people don't seem to care about the extra wait: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros....

Another way to look at this is that McDonald's is making customers feel like they're getting restaurant quality food for less money. Personally, like you, I miss the cheap fast food.

I don't mind that, even if the "experience" might be lost on me. What I do mind is the food being cold.

The patty/bacon should definitely not be cold and that's not my experience with McDonalds. However it is less warm than "scolding hot from sitting under a warmer for 45 minutes."

Oh ... so that is why McDonalds is bad now. I wondered why the hamburgers are cold nowadays. I did not realize the slides were heated.

In the same way the fries seem to be cold from the complexity of all the different menu items messing up their flow.

95% BigMc and fries must have been so much more easy to organize around.

McDonalds was an assembly line for burgers. As far back as the 80s, and as late as last year, in Canada, during busy times, they'd definielty have burgers under the warmer. During slow times, none.

They can cook and assemble a burger in 2 minutes, along with fries... even a dozen burgers.

This was McDonald's specialty! How to keep ahead of the crowd, in sync with demand, and also, how to build a burger fast.

The fact that they don't have 50 big macs on the go, during doordash/dinner peak, is a major problem.

No, it's not difficult, not for them, they've been doing it for 70 years!

There may be some merit to some of what you say, but it just leaves one with more questions.

Made for you MFY has been around at Macca's for a long, long time. It's not a recent change.

It was around long before all of the delivery service apps, and before smartphones were a huge thing, even.

> Made for you MFY has been around at Macca's for a long, long time. It's not a recent change.

Don't know where you're from, but you gotta remember that Macca's is not quite the same all around the world. In Europe as an example, you can notice clear differences between the different countries Macca's. So even though MFY exists for a long time where you live, it's very well possible that the other persons local Macca's only recently-ish changed too.

I guess that change is not only noticeable between countries, I'm pretty sure you'll get a different experience if you either visit a big restaurant in a city vs. a smaller restaurant on the countryside.

That's the thing, yeah. In Germany, this changeover started just a few years ago, and it has only been dominant for around two.

About the regional differences - I remember visiting an Amsterdam restaurant in the mid-2000s that still served the food in styrofoam trays, many years after those had been phased out in Germany. And being able to pump my own ketchup and mayo into little waffle cups in another one in Denmark. There are quite a few regional differences.

> In Germany, this changeover started just a few years ago

In Switzerland as well, yes. And I can't remember which burgers or items it were, but I remember seeing items in a german McDonalds which I've never seen in Switzerland.

In Italy you can order a couple of different beers, even from self-service terminals. In Switzerland I remember them only being available when ordering at the counter, and they only offer one kind of beer. Not that I care about beer at McD, just something I noticed.

Originally New Zealand (so makes sense as we're used as a test market for a lot of stuff) but UK now. I'm surprised, even with us as a test market, that it took _so_ long to propagate to other countries, though. Sure Macca's has diffs, but usually only in menu, their general restaurant practice usually seem to be pretty in-sync.

I noticed the last time I went to a McDonalds a huge sign on the door advertising that they're on DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc., basically saying "don't come here!"

Really short term thinking if that's true. DoorDash/UberEats might not be around forever. Its also not clear whether people will order the same amounts if an actual recession rolls around.

By prioritizing DoorDash over in-store customers, you're just destroying your long-term value prop and brand.

Plus there's one small detail: you can still enjoy e.g. a pizza that's not hot anymore; other food (Indian, Chinese, ...) can mostly be kept hot without losing its quality. With burgers and fries (especially McDonalds), you have to eat them hot, and trying to keep them warm during delivery results in a soggy mess that's not enjoyable at all anymore IMHO.

I used to think this with burgers until I found the secret to reheating a fast food burger:

1: set the veggies aside

2: put the whole burger in the microwave upside-down for half the time it takes to reheat (usually 30 seconds for this step if cold from the fridge)

3: flip it and nuke it the rest of the time

4: restore veggies to rightful place

I was amazed the first time I did this and had a 100% sog-free bun. The burger was indistinguishable from fresh. I don't know exactly what's going on, or what's different from just nuking it all the way on one side, but it works.

There is something about McDonald's fries that gives them the sharpest drop off in quality over time compared to literally any other fast food restaurant. I swear, it's like they are 100% within a couple minutes of being pulled out of the oil, merely okay for the next three, and then literally inedible by six minutes.

It's true— McDonald's will toss any leftover fries from the fry station after seven minutes. Burger King has a similar timeline.

Or at least they are supposed to… I would probably be eating a lot more McDonald's if I could be assured of getting fries that weren't dead every time.

I'd say it's long-term thinking. McD's is a franchise, and paying commercial rents at the levels they're at now is not economically viable in a lot of cities, especially if your walk-in traffic is mostly delivery service workers.

They'd probably make more money if they moved spaces into a ghost kitchen and cut out walk-in traffic entirely.

Where I live, there is tons of empty retail space because of Amazon, eBay, etc. I would assume that would push commercial rents down, but I evidently don’t understand that market at all.

The commercial real estate market has been untethered from reality for a while.

Heck, that’s true for all real estate markets. Funny money and overseas wealth has distorted all notions of market efficiency.

I'm thinking about fast food locations in cities, not suburban strip malls and stuff. We expect Starbucks for example to have nice locations in high-rent downtown areas, but I always see McD's not far away from there too.

What if 80% of your revenue base comes from food delivery services?

A more important reason that McDonald's has become slow is that they've switched to just-in-time assembly of burgers. They used to have an inventory of burgers, and for most orders, you ordered and the person taking your payments immediately assembled your order. Now there is no buffer, and everything is made fresh.

Does 'fresh' mean 'cold', like burger king?

So far as I've seen here in .uk they still have an inventory and most orders happen that way. (given them being a franchise this may not generalise beyond the locations I visit, of course)

All the locations I've been to in the UK in the past 3 years have the warming trays and don't keep (and so dispose of) fully-prepared inventory.

At the same time they did this they changed to touch-screen ordering and panelled off the 'kitchen'.

Wait times seem much longer to me, I assume they prioritise drive-through.

I would disagree with the term 'fresh'. They still fry the patties etc in advance and leave them heated in plastic trays.

They just moved the assembly process closer to the customers but the ingredients aren't any fresher.

They switched to MFY instead of pre-made stuff (in New Zealand at least) around 2002-2005 or so? It's been like that a long time.

The reason for the slowdown is purely just the delivery apps. Staff doing payments & cooking/assembly are usually different people unless it's like 3am on a weekday.

The issues is that until the delivery business model runs into a brick wall (which IMO is inevitable), we'll see this continue. It's hard to blame them because being slow to disruption can be fatal to a business. It's just hard to tell at the beginning which disruptive ideas will end up taking over, and which ones end up as duds.

There is a local company (morecambeeats.co.uk) that was set up during the covid lockdowns to provide -just- centralised online ordering to local businesses that already had delivery drivers.

I first learned about them because I ordered a kebab on Just Eat and my order arrived with a flyer inside saying "please use them next time, they charge us less."

The site is honestly a bit janky and regularly annoys me slightly ... but only slightly, and I'm happy to deal with that to have all the revenue go to a local company and my favourite food places - and the cost is at worst identical to the venture capitalist subsidised companies and sometimes lower.

I have a possibly misplaced hope that they'll survive the collapse of the VC players. I intend to live in hope anyway though because (a) I much prefer my money to stay local (b) they're the easiest way I've found to order from the chinese place with the best prawn toast I've ever had.

If they disappear at some point I'm going to have to go back to phone calls and paying cash on delivery, and while I love the places I order from enough to do that if I have to I'd really rather not.

Curious why you think it is inevitable? The convenience of having the whole city available for delivery for consumers, and for restaurants to have access to a broad base of on-demand drivers and these customers, seems like an intractable modern day invention.

It's not. This was working in Columbus Ohio since at least the 1990s...and probably elsewhere and for longer. Just didn't have an app.

Individual delivery is different and it's here to stay

A centralised "we pick your food for you"? Unlikely

The issue isn't the delivery, we've always had local food delivery and it's a subsidised bundled service to sell the main product. The issue is whether they can run a tech company off the margins of delivery, where they take the risk setting the physical infrastructure to do delivery, but have little to no control over the actual restaurants providing the products.

Recession means less money available for a luxury service like delivering your food.

The cost right now is subsidised by VCs to get everyone to switch.

With the incoming recessions VC will spend less money, especially on a business model which doesn't feel novel anymore.

Their business has gone up. If those customers were to show up in person you'd be in line behind them parking, in the drive-thru, in line with them fiddling for coins and change and ummmm-ing on what to order.

as someone who has managed the front lines recently at a fast food restaurant, companies like Doordash have been a boon for the in-house efficiency

I remember being in Bilbao, Spain wanting to eat fries and a cheesburger in a Burger King. They didn't have anything like that. All I could choose from where potato wedges and weird Spanish style burgers with way too much stuff on it. Is it too much to ask for fries and a regular old hamburger in a Burger King nowadays?

Have you considered that what's a "weird Spanish style burger" to you is likely a regular old hamburger to someone who lives in Bilbao, Spain

Now that you mention it, that town was in deed pretty weird. good point.

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