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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.

Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order.

I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.

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> The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.

Yes, peepul, this was a thing.

You'd go in, and ask them what's hot, and you'd pick one and pay and you're off to the munchies races.

The experience now is definitely worse but even back in the early 2000s, owners tracked drive thru service order times and the managers constantly reminded us of this.

I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store.

They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.

In some ways, it feels like cosmic balance that DT gets priority. Hear me out:

In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.

At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT.

(Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)

> Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.

Tell this to the idiots at supermarket checkout who wait for the total price to ring up before they reach into their purse (or whatever) to retrieve their checkbook and only then begin filling in alllllll the check's fields...

That used to piss me off 10 years ago when I last saw it.

They still seem to be gaming the system these days. I constantly see them clearing the order out and printing the ticket to stick it somewhere temporary so their time metrics look low, but now I get a notification in the app my order is ready when it actually is not.

When I worked at McDonald's we had impossible target times and the only way to meet them was to hit the serve button right away and go off memory.

I'm using McDonalds completely differently. I come in, I sit, I order on my phone, have fun on my phone while I wait, they deliver food to my table, I'm eating and having fun on my phone, when I have enough of food and fun I get up, carry the tray to where it supposed to go and get out. I don't care about the wait times as long as the order eventually arrives. I don't care about interactions with the employees. "Bon appetit" is even a bit too much. Perfection would be if the whole interaction was limited to my "Thank you!" when the food arrives.

But current system is close to perfection for me.

When I visited the Netherlands, they have a fast food chain you would love called FEBO that basically takes this to the extreme: they have a giant vending machine-like wall with small glass food warmers cabinets displaying burgers, fries, etc all freshly cooked, one per door, so you literally just put in your payment info and grab the food already right there in front of you!

They're not always all that fresh. But they can't leave them in there too long.

We call it an automatiek. It's not just FEBO, there's a few other chains that do it too. Like Smuller's at the train stations. I always love the satay croquettes.

These go back 70+ years. Walk in and there is an array of glass doors with delicious meals behind them, ready to eat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat

I remember 1980s McDonalds, where they had steel rows of styrofoam encased Big Macs and Quarter Pounders behind seven tills of staff, with little metal separators telling the time they were made so anything older than 10 minutes was sent to the garbage. This was before drive throughs, but even with a line five deep you'd be out in 5 minutes at noon. My boss would take us for lunch every day, it was amazing.

I've seen a few places like this in a few countries. It's taking the automated, no human involved thing to the extreme. You never even see anybody working.

> Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.

I get what you're saying, but a downside to what you're describing is guaranteed waste of food. If food is prepared based on expectations, there's no way that all the food will be ordered before it goes cold/end of hours, and has to be dumped.

Not necessarily. Restaurants are nuts to get food waste down (I used to work in house at a large corporate chain and 80% of what the dev team did revolved around inventory tracking, and figuring out how to minimize unsold food).

If you sell 80-150 hamburgers at the lunch rush, front loading 70 so there’s a bunch at the start is fine.

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