Hacker News Reader

Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

McDonald's used to be fast & cheap. But it's become slow and expensive. My local McD has switched to ordering kiosks with shitty touch screens, which are hell of a lot slower than in person ordering used to be. The UX is awful. Each item you add requires multiple taps, often a good 50cm away from the previous tap, and they try to trick you into adding shit you don't need at every possible opportunity. Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.

Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the BigMac has gotten smaller of late. But maybe I've just gotten fatter.

View on HN

I usually use the kiosk. It took me a few times to figure it out but if there's not already someone at the register with nobody in line then I'm faster with the kiosk. Especially because when I customize the ingredients the person at the register usually either gets it wrong or can't understand so I have to repeat myself. I guess they only put new people at the front register anymore at the McDonald's near me.

plus i can take my time, i can reconsider. i can browse the full menu at leisure, i don't need to know what i want before i start ordering.

> Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.

where is this? In CA, almost all payment terminals seem to work in retail for me. Businesses would not stay in business easily if their payment accepting device was broken.

(And for McD's, it's not too difficult IMO to select & checkout via their native iOS app.)

Low income consumers aren't counting taps. They're counting dollars. COL has risen faster than wages.

I don't think "counting taps" is the point here. Virtually all UX research ever indicates that any friction added to interactions usually means losing customers at the margin. Maybe customers don't cancel the current transaction, but some of them are still going elsewhere next time because they don't want to deal with whatever friction you've inserted.

Counting dollars, my local McD's used to be the cheapest option, and their salads were quite good.

They're no longer the cheapest option, and the salads are no longer available. There's something going wrong there. I can get cheaper, healthier, better food at e.g. my local Subway, and many other places.

It is still reasonably fast (although not super-fast). Unique to my location, the service is excellent.

subway is falling into the same greedflation trap. a simple sandwich can run $10 - $12 these days with no add-ons or sides. better to pay $15 for something local and actually quality

The UI of the kiosks are quite blatently designed to try to sell you more stuff than to make ordering easier. Give me the same interface you give the employees and I'd be a lot happier.

are we having different kiosks in china? because i don't remember any experience about things being pushed on me. there is a list of categories with one category being recommendations or hot/onsale items or something like that, and a list of items in each category. you scroll through and pick the item you want. when you select an item you get a few recommendations to go with that. usually they make sense or i ignore them.

> McDonald's used to be fast & cheap. But it's become slow and expensive.

I forgot how I used to order McDonalds at the counter, and wait in front of the register I paid at until I got my food (because it only took moments).

Now I order, leave with my receipt, and come back when they call my number, a procedure I used to associate with "trendy" places.

> Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.

when their spicy mcchicken stops being good, i'm gone

I'm 192cm (6'4) tall and those screens are a pain for me to use. Also, adding you your comment

>Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.

I feel the same everytime i open my burger box and see a smashed pile of crap that is nothing like the burger in my mind or on the ad. Marketing is strong. Fortunately I maybe go to BK or McD once a year, but always disappointed.

It is slow and expensive and also......very unhealthy

No kidding? The heck you say!

Approximately what percentage of the readers of this site would you estimate are laboring under the assumption that eating at McDonald's is healthy?

It turns out that it's not strictly necessary to constantly lecture other people about things like this.

I guess the point is that yes it was always unhealthy but at least you could get something tasty cheap and fast, but now the unhealthy part is more difficult to ignore if everything else has also gone to the gutter.

I don't know how to use those things, and I'll never learn. McD's are a public restroom to me.

the big mac was almost 50% larger 20 years ago.

Was it?

When I made Big Macs in the late 80s, they were made of two "10 to 1" patties (i.e. 10 to the pound, 1.6 ounces each). That's still the formula, according to their web site.

I did see a Reddit post that claimed that the product was physically bigger from 1972-1975. It doesn't show the ingredients, and it looks from the picture as if it is bigger bread rather than more meat. (You can't see any meat in the photo of the bigger sandwich.)

The big mac had around 500 calories when it came out in the 70ies, in the 90ies that changed to 640, at the start of the century they changed it to around 705, now its down to 500 again.

Interesting. I wonder what changed. Formulation of the bun? Or the "special sauce"? Or perhaps just a change in the way calories are calculated.

I recall a time when the Big Mac was the gold standard of "this product has too many calories", and articles would decry things that somehow managed to have more. Now, it's hard to find anything with a mere 500 calories.

1k calorie (often just called a Calorie) is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 litre of water by 1 degree Celsius.

The screen on those kiosk are so big that they probably just could fit all items on one page instead of having to navigate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com