The two McDonalds restaurants that are on Seattle's 15th Ave NW (at Market and Mary Ave NW) are both doing this via Uber Eats. I suppose they almost had to get in on the game considering it seems like basically every other food-selling establishment north of the ship canal has signed up with at least two food delivery outlets.
I don't really see the attractiveness but, hey, options are options.
How about: if you are lazy and want that style of food?
I like to eat mexican a lot, but taqueria cantina (amazing mexican place in seattle) is not always delivering, such as tonight. Thus, If I am really craving mexican, I will order qdoba as a backup.
The people eating McDonalds and the people paying for food delivery are not the same people. I'm pretty sure their intersection is statistically insignificant.
"McDonalds probably has better research on their own business than you do."
This is never something you should believe in a major, for-profit company heavy on management. Those companies have people investing in all kinds of BS all the time everywhere from top to store level. That includes McDonalds which is easy to verify by just listening to the employees talk about management and company politics.
Now, it may be a good idea that might have come from someone thinking well. A big company investing in it across the stores isn't proof of that in any way, though. One needs more details.
> "McDonalds probably has better research on their own business than you do."
This is never something you should believe in a major, for-profit company heavy on management.
It takes an astonishing amount of hubris for any single individual to believe they can really have market research superior to a company's when it comes to the company's core competency. Even where it's true, I expect such an individual to have a far more reasoned claim than, "for-profit companies with lots of managers suck!"
Just because companies try things and fail all the time doesn't mean they're not well-thought out and often even well-executed. Do you honestly believe "management heavy" companies are full of people who don't know what they're doing? How do you know what their research teams do or don't do, and know or don't know?
On what basis can you even begin to assert an absolute statement like the one you just claimed? You didn't provide a substantive argument, all you said was companies try things that fail all the time, and implicitly repeated the meme that managers are just vapid drones in the aggregate.
It really doesn't. All it takes is a person to listen to people that work at these Fortune 500 companies talk about how big decisions get made. I did that most of my day for years. I also read what many say on online forums. I believe there's plenty of smart people in them including excellent marketers at McDonalds. There's even plenty of well-informed decisions and sensible projects.
However, years of empirical data says what makes most of these companies run amounts to political skill of managers and the Peter Principle. Again, that's not my guess so much as what people in the middle and on the ground tell me. The low-level employees of big, food chains also gripe about corporate visitors saying they're worthless by adding nothing to what's going on or things they say are hugely disconnected from how the place runs day-to-day. As if they're managing a different, better-run company with more staff. Those people come and go with high turnover but a fraction of them move up into the positions making bigger decisions despite adding about nothing to the effectiveness of their restaurants. Gotta be politics and authoritarianism instead of performance given the data.
Attempted some quick Googling for you. As expected, it's mostly noise about what managers think of their workers instead of other way around. However, I did find this Gallup piece studying a huge number of workers and companies that supports my hypothesis about management competency in average case.
It's not clear that you understand the majority of the ~36K MCD restaurants are franchised, so the employees do not work for MCD, they work for small local franchisees businesses. MCD only owns ~7k locations (i.e. ~16%).
My comments apply to what majority of US workers tell me regardless of owners. I'd love to see a survey on competence covering both franchisees and corporate stores.
Do they? They've had some epic disasters over the years. Their whole approach to product creation seems to be "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks".
You should come to the McDonalds on Clark and Wrightwood in Chicago. It's in one of Chicago's most affluent neighborhoods, and the breadth of people I see there is nuts.
There are no less than three groups of senior citizens who come every single day for breakfast. There are a number of people who go there all of the time because they like it. They show up in $100k cars because they want something from McDonalds.
I grab breakfast at McDonald's all the time. I can afford to pay more for food, but I really love McDonalds breakfast. It's fast, convenient, and unlike other fast food restaurants it doesn't taste like a poor version of better food. McDonald's taste's like McDonald's.
That being said, I only order delivery when I'm with other people, so I can't really see myself utilizing the service often. I can, however, see someone ordering like 100 McChickens (or happy meals) if they've got a huge group of hungry kids.
Totally true, I don't know where people get the idea that only the poor eat McDonald's, being able to grab something quick and consistent is an extremely handy thing. Their breakfast is quite tasty and cheap too.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but most of the time food quality is not the #1 most important thing when I eat, speed is more often a consideration for me, I find myself going "well, I can sit down at a restaurant and waste an hour or grab an egg mcmuffin in 5 minutes", especially when eating alone I tend to lean on the quicker option so long as it doesn't taste actively bad to me.
I think the perception that there is no way to be healthy and eat at McDonald's is kind of ridiculous. I ride my bike 20 miles a day, I play basketball, I go for walks during lunch. I drink a ton of water, go to the doctor regularly.
Eating a McDonald's breakfast isn't going to kill me. Honestly, some of the 'healthy' foods I see people eating are way worse. There might be a ton of salt, but it's not loaded with carbohydrates and sugars.
I imagine using Uber Eats would actually degrade the value image of McDonalds' product. I'd rather have a clown car than a duck-taped jalopy deliver my Big Mac and fries.
How do you account for low end pizza delivery chains? I assume the pizza hut and dominoes market would overlap heavily with a McDonald's ordering market.
Around where I live (SW Missouri) most of the McDonald's already have screens where you can enter your own order.
I wonder if McD's sees this delivery stuff as an easy way to increase revenue without vastly increasing cost. If they can pair it with downsizing in-building personnel due to automation could turn out to be a big win for them.
Then in a decade or something they can just automate the delivery with autonomous cars/drones.
They remodeled the Seattle Northgate location and put in screens. Was not an easy experience despite some pretty slick software. They will have to retrain their customers to the new system (much like they trained us to use the extra value meal numbers back in the 90s).
That seems to be the direction they're moving. Several flagship McDonalds have popped up around NYC with fully self-serve computer ordering kiosks. I haven't been yet, but people are talking about them -- people who I've never heard talk about McDonalds before.
They've got a pretty big gulf of social-class-stigma to get past, but it seems like McDonalds is at the beginning of a comeback.
There is a McDonalds with a kiosk on my drive to work. The drive-through gets backed up out on to the street, so I started parking to go in. There's often a short line at the counter, but if you use the kiosk you can literally place your order within 20 seconds of stepping through the door.
Maybe it's because I grew up within a couple miles of the headquarters of McDonalds, but the only people I know that don't go to McDonalds are health nuts. That being said, the stores around here are way nicer than the ones I've gone to in other parts of the country. I think proximity to the HQ probably keeps the franchisees in line, plus there are a bunch of corporate owned stores which are amazing.
> I wish dearly that I could just enter my own order on the POS system when I am in such places
Visit France. Not only the burger quality is much better there, but also you can order yourself on self serve POS systems for almost a decade. They're also implementing restaurants where your food gets brought to your table.
> I wish dearly that I could just enter my own order on the POS system when I am in such places
As others have mentioned, they already have in several places. The UI is horrible and confusing though, you have to find the picture of the burger you're after, like selecting a netflix movie, which is even worse with McDonalds because the picture looks nothing like what you get.
Much like self serve checkouts they increase time but move that cost onto the customer.
So what happens when they put pickles on a burger ordered without them /s
The big issue with fast food is cost. It's usually eaten by those in a rush and the poor. It just seems ridiculous how complicated and expensive the menus gotten.
Even with the coffee, which they seem to be pushing hard. Is now obfuscated under 100 unnecessary drinks.
Poor person here. Inflation has made it so it's not even really an option. Everyone has removed their dollar menu and jacked up the price which is what I order off of if I was in a hurry. It's cheaper and effective for me to the burrito hole in the wall and get a massive burrito for 4 bucks than go to any fast food place.
I assume he means the fuzzy sense of the term that includes being part of a large chain. Most people's usage ofthe term doesn't include holes in the wall and language is obviously determined by usage.
I believe the commenter you responded is aware of the colloquial distinction, and is gently asserting a point that this distinction is not to be believed.
Regardless of the cultural zeitgeist about food preparation by large chains, food from McDonald's is qualitatively the same as food from many fast food restaurants that try to market themselves as above fast food.
> and is gently asserting a point that this distinction is not to be believed.
> McDonald's is qualitatively the same as food from many fast food restaurants that try to market themselves as above fast food.
This assumes incorrectly that the only use of the distinction is a one-dimensional measure of quality. A couple of uses for the distinction that have nothing to do with "quality":
1) I don't tend to eat at chain restaurants much because I don't tend to eat at the same restaurants much (ie, I really like variety). This was pretty much true even for the few years that I ate every single weekend meal at restaurants (or takeout).
2) Part of chain restaurants' explicit goal is mass appeal and consistency of taste. Practically by definition, you're less likely to find the niche of flavor that appeals to you the most directly, or even as high a level of novelty and diversity of flavor as you would if going to holes in the wall.
3) I'm cheating a little bit making this a separate bullet pt, but #2 works the other way as well, since some people explicitly prefer consistency of flavor and knowing exactly what to expect to being adventurous about flavors and tastes. This isn't a value judgment: I had a girlfriend who described her taste as preferring bland food and there's no real basis for me to claim that I had "better" taste than her.
It occurs to me that these examples are all pretty tightly related to the notion of chain restaurants providing consistency and mass appeal, but that doesn't really change my point at all.
I have a (serious) question, why don't you cook yourself? Is it more expensive to cook in your location? Lack of time? I have heard this argument a lot and am honestly wondering (I'm not from the us, I'm a chef, so for me things may be a lot different, hence the question).
I wonder if they are adding delivery options due to pressure from franchisees. McDonald's is really a real estate company[0], so I would've thought it's better for corporate if people are coming into the stores. That keeps the real estate valuable and means they can charge higher rent.
I see this "quality" thing mentioned time and again about McDonald's, somehow assumed because McDonald's is a giant "fast food" joint. I have commented about this in the past [1]. Here's a brief recap:
- McDonald's gives you consistent quality, taste and nutrition.
- It's fast.
- It's (food) safe.
- They provide nutritional info on all their products.
Until you can acquire nutritional info on the food sold by the hip joint you're fond of, you can't know if it's of a higher "quality" or healthy for that matter.
I also assume you don't mean "taste" when talking about quality.
Not sure why there are a bunch of people being negative to delivery to McDonalds. Sometimes I just want a burger instead of a Sandwhich or a pizza. I think it adds variety to be honest.
As far as burger places go, McDonalds is kind of terrible vs a local burger joint. I have burger places nearby that deliver but even if I didn't I could call UberEATS, Grubhub, Eat24, etc etc to just go pick up the food and bring it to me.
I once used McDonald's delivery for a board game event in Japan - we were playing Food Chain Magnate and just got in the mood.
It was late (took almost an hour) and I live in the Tokyo 23-ward area. I wasn't very impressed; I could have walked to the closest station and picked up the food with far less hassle, and no delivery charge.
I live in Scandinavia and love McDonalds, but it's pretty expensive so I don't eat it so often and healthy food is much cheaper. In the U.S. it seems to be opposite, McDonalds and fastfood in general is cheap, while healthy food is expensive.
As an Australian living in the US, I noticed that difference too, in addition to some others.
The staff didn't seem nearly as miserable (I was one of them for a while) or apathetic in Australian restaurants. I noticed when I went back that the food wasn't nearly as greasy in Australia (I've actually noticed that about meat in general, US meat tends to seem greasier for some reason) and it usually seemed prepared with a little more care (the burgers weren't falling apart for example). Also the restaurants were consistently cleaner, better maintained and more up-to-date than their US counterparts.
McDonalds isn't doing delivery. Third parties are doing delivery.
Doordash delivers KFC, Jack in the Box, and Panda Express in Silicon Valley as their fast food choices. With Doordash, don't order anything you can't reheat when it shows up. That's the trouble with these low-end delivery services. They're not using a vehicle with hot and cold storage. It's just some sucker's car.
I'm not sure if it's third party, but here in Japan aost all 'western' fast food offers delivery. (Note I don't eat that crap so I have never ordered it, but I see their badged delivery going around a lot).
Robot delivery is coming along. Here's a Starship Technologies delivery robot in downtown Redwood City.[1] It's in front of Box.net HQ. Notice the guy in shorts following the thing around. When I see that robot, it usually has a minder. The minder isn't driving it, just watching over it.
McDonalds in Thailand delivered when I was there a couple years ago. You just ordered off the McDonald's website. (And one time when we were somehow too drunk to make that work, by calling the store and getting a cashier's Line SN, lol.)
They had branded heat-retaining bags (like pizza places) and delivered via scooter. The cost of labor being somewhat lower in Thailand and the quality of the food being somewhat higher (a large double-BigMac meal was ~$10 while delivery was ~$1), it actually worked pretty well for drunk food at night -- or even if you just didn't want to go out to eat. (They usually were faster and warmer than, say, FoodPanda.)
I somehow think it's not going to translate as well to the US market (cost of labor; lower quality food; double BigMacs aren't a thing), but I do miss it.
Of course, Thai McDonalds is dead to me now that they no longer have wasabi sauce. (I suppose it's my schezwan sauce, now.)
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI don't really see the attractiveness but, hey, options are options.
I like to eat mexican a lot, but taqueria cantina (amazing mexican place in seattle) is not always delivering, such as tonight. Thus, If I am really craving mexican, I will order qdoba as a backup.
Same goes for burger places.
The people eating McDonalds and the people paying for food delivery are not the same people. I'm pretty sure their intersection is statistically insignificant.
This is never something you should believe in a major, for-profit company heavy on management. Those companies have people investing in all kinds of BS all the time everywhere from top to store level. That includes McDonalds which is easy to verify by just listening to the employees talk about management and company politics.
Now, it may be a good idea that might have come from someone thinking well. A big company investing in it across the stores isn't proof of that in any way, though. One needs more details.
This is never something you should believe in a major, for-profit company heavy on management.
It takes an astonishing amount of hubris for any single individual to believe they can really have market research superior to a company's when it comes to the company's core competency. Even where it's true, I expect such an individual to have a far more reasoned claim than, "for-profit companies with lots of managers suck!"
Just because companies try things and fail all the time doesn't mean they're not well-thought out and often even well-executed. Do you honestly believe "management heavy" companies are full of people who don't know what they're doing? How do you know what their research teams do or don't do, and know or don't know?
On what basis can you even begin to assert an absolute statement like the one you just claimed? You didn't provide a substantive argument, all you said was companies try things that fail all the time, and implicitly repeated the meme that managers are just vapid drones in the aggregate.
It really doesn't. All it takes is a person to listen to people that work at these Fortune 500 companies talk about how big decisions get made. I did that most of my day for years. I also read what many say on online forums. I believe there's plenty of smart people in them including excellent marketers at McDonalds. There's even plenty of well-informed decisions and sensible projects.
However, years of empirical data says what makes most of these companies run amounts to political skill of managers and the Peter Principle. Again, that's not my guess so much as what people in the middle and on the ground tell me. The low-level employees of big, food chains also gripe about corporate visitors saying they're worthless by adding nothing to what's going on or things they say are hugely disconnected from how the place runs day-to-day. As if they're managing a different, better-run company with more staff. Those people come and go with high turnover but a fraction of them move up into the positions making bigger decisions despite adding about nothing to the effectiveness of their restaurants. Gotta be politics and authoritarianism instead of performance given the data.
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/167975/why-great-manag...
There are no less than three groups of senior citizens who come every single day for breakfast. There are a number of people who go there all of the time because they like it. They show up in $100k cars because they want something from McDonalds.
I grab breakfast at McDonald's all the time. I can afford to pay more for food, but I really love McDonalds breakfast. It's fast, convenient, and unlike other fast food restaurants it doesn't taste like a poor version of better food. McDonald's taste's like McDonald's.
That being said, I only order delivery when I'm with other people, so I can't really see myself utilizing the service often. I can, however, see someone ordering like 100 McChickens (or happy meals) if they've got a huge group of hungry kids.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but most of the time food quality is not the #1 most important thing when I eat, speed is more often a consideration for me, I find myself going "well, I can sit down at a restaurant and waste an hour or grab an egg mcmuffin in 5 minutes", especially when eating alone I tend to lean on the quicker option so long as it doesn't taste actively bad to me.
Eating a McDonald's breakfast isn't going to kill me. Honestly, some of the 'healthy' foods I see people eating are way worse. There might be a ton of salt, but it's not loaded with carbohydrates and sugars.
So how did you single-handedly quantify what entire market research teams somehow overlooked about a major initiative within their own company?
Realistically, in an automated world, their flesh-and-blood employees provide negative value.
I wish dearly that I could just enter my own order on the POS system when I am in such places
I wonder if McD's sees this delivery stuff as an easy way to increase revenue without vastly increasing cost. If they can pair it with downsizing in-building personnel due to automation could turn out to be a big win for them.
Then in a decade or something they can just automate the delivery with autonomous cars/drones.
http://www.pcmag.com/news/349707/mcdonalds-pilots-mobile-ord...
They've got a pretty big gulf of social-class-stigma to get past, but it seems like McDonalds is at the beginning of a comeback.
Delivery might be a guilty pleasure gateway.
Maybe it's because I grew up within a couple miles of the headquarters of McDonalds, but the only people I know that don't go to McDonalds are health nuts. That being said, the stores around here are way nicer than the ones I've gone to in other parts of the country. I think proximity to the HQ probably keeps the franchisees in line, plus there are a bunch of corporate owned stores which are amazing.
I wonder if Japan would be a testing ground for such a concept. They already have pizza-ready vending machines, for example.
Visit France. Not only the burger quality is much better there, but also you can order yourself on self serve POS systems for almost a decade. They're also implementing restaurants where your food gets brought to your table.
As others have mentioned, they already have in several places. The UI is horrible and confusing though, you have to find the picture of the burger you're after, like selecting a netflix movie, which is even worse with McDonalds because the picture looks nothing like what you get.
Much like self serve checkouts they increase time but move that cost onto the customer.
The big issue with fast food is cost. It's usually eaten by those in a rush and the poor. It just seems ridiculous how complicated and expensive the menus gotten.
Even with the coffee, which they seem to be pushing hard. Is now obfuscated under 100 unnecessary drinks.
The burrito place is also fast food.
Regardless of the cultural zeitgeist about food preparation by large chains, food from McDonald's is qualitatively the same as food from many fast food restaurants that try to market themselves as above fast food.
> McDonald's is qualitatively the same as food from many fast food restaurants that try to market themselves as above fast food.
This assumes incorrectly that the only use of the distinction is a one-dimensional measure of quality. A couple of uses for the distinction that have nothing to do with "quality":
1) I don't tend to eat at chain restaurants much because I don't tend to eat at the same restaurants much (ie, I really like variety). This was pretty much true even for the few years that I ate every single weekend meal at restaurants (or takeout).
2) Part of chain restaurants' explicit goal is mass appeal and consistency of taste. Practically by definition, you're less likely to find the niche of flavor that appeals to you the most directly, or even as high a level of novelty and diversity of flavor as you would if going to holes in the wall.
3) I'm cheating a little bit making this a separate bullet pt, but #2 works the other way as well, since some people explicitly prefer consistency of flavor and knowing exactly what to expect to being adventurous about flavors and tastes. This isn't a value judgment: I had a girlfriend who described her taste as preferring bland food and there's no real basis for me to claim that I had "better" taste than her.
It occurs to me that these examples are all pretty tightly related to the notion of chain restaurants providing consistency and mass appeal, but that doesn't really change my point at all.
[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-e...
There's a definite market for people who want that and don't/can't/won't make the drive.
- McDonald's gives you consistent quality, taste and nutrition.
- It's fast.
- It's (food) safe.
- They provide nutritional info on all their products.
Until you can acquire nutritional info on the food sold by the hip joint you're fond of, you can't know if it's of a higher "quality" or healthy for that matter.
I also assume you don't mean "taste" when talking about quality.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654493
It was late (took almost an hour) and I live in the Tokyo 23-ward area. I wasn't very impressed; I could have walked to the closest station and picked up the food with far less hassle, and no delivery charge.
(YMMV)
The staff didn't seem nearly as miserable (I was one of them for a while) or apathetic in Australian restaurants. I noticed when I went back that the food wasn't nearly as greasy in Australia (I've actually noticed that about meat in general, US meat tends to seem greasier for some reason) and it usually seemed prepared with a little more care (the burgers weren't falling apart for example). Also the restaurants were consistently cleaner, better maintained and more up-to-date than their US counterparts.
Doordash delivers KFC, Jack in the Box, and Panda Express in Silicon Valley as their fast food choices. With Doordash, don't order anything you can't reheat when it shows up. That's the trouble with these low-end delivery services. They're not using a vehicle with hot and cold storage. It's just some sucker's car.
[1] https://s12.postimg.org/9gs8v03j1/robotatbox.jpg
They had branded heat-retaining bags (like pizza places) and delivered via scooter. The cost of labor being somewhat lower in Thailand and the quality of the food being somewhat higher (a large double-BigMac meal was ~$10 while delivery was ~$1), it actually worked pretty well for drunk food at night -- or even if you just didn't want to go out to eat. (They usually were faster and warmer than, say, FoodPanda.)
I somehow think it's not going to translate as well to the US market (cost of labor; lower quality food; double BigMacs aren't a thing), but I do miss it.
Of course, Thai McDonalds is dead to me now that they no longer have wasabi sauce. (I suppose it's my schezwan sauce, now.)