(elipses added to truncated quote)
Oh, yes. “Don’t care” comes in so many varieties—lack of attention to detail, lack of culinary experience, understaffed / overworked workplace, caring on the part of the server but not the non-customer-facing cook / chef, disconnect between the customer’s familiarity with the food there and the server’s…
I’ll just note that when I said “a lot of people” probably don’t care about the style of French fries, I was also including many restaurant patrons, too.
In the case of the OP’s example, and as several have noted, I suspect that it’s a matter of either (a) the restaurant menu uses stock photography, or (b) it’s an older picture, and the restaurant changed suppliers and/or brands/styles of fries, either temporarily or permanently. Most mom-and-pop restaurants didn’t turn big profits before COVID (and may make even less now), and the supply chain issues which started in 2020 still continue in many industries.
I’m willing to cut the mom-and-pop restaurants a bit of slack on an issue like this, so long as the overall quality of the food is still there.
I can see not being particularly bothered between some fry varieties, but not caring about crinkle-cut? Are you serious?
I will never understand my fellow human beings. Ever.
Where exactly are you referring to?
In the U.S. fries are sometimes sliced long and narrow, but very often are sliced medium or fat or intervals in between. Just about every cookbook and cooking advice website says to soak the potatoes in water first. Lots of restaurants follow that advice, even down to local casual dining places that are proud of their very unskinny fries. I’ve literally never had a classic fish dinner - breaded or battered haddock or cod with french fries and coleslaw - with skinny McDonald-style fries.
Fatter fries are usually called steak fries, because any good steak restaurant will feature them, but I’ve also seen them referred to as “restaurant” fries, presumably to distinguish them from fast-food fries.
Lol, and here I’ve been thinking that i prefer regular fries to crinkle cut, and I’d be pleased to discover that substitution.
Do you mean scallions? My experience is different from yours. When the menu says chives, i get chives, and when it says scallions, i get scallions.
I see it most often with baked potatoes, which come with butter, sour cream, and “chives,” which are scallions / green onions / spring onions / jibbons / whatever you want to call them.
French fries are almost never imported from France.
Not exactly. I remember an interview with a commercial photographer who was discussing doing the photos on the box for TV Dinners back when those were a thing. They were required by consumer laws to take a picture of the actual product not altertered or “prettied up”. They could not even rearrange the peas in the one to look more photogenic. He said they would cook up 100 dinners, peel back the foil one at a time until they got one that didn’t look flawed.
I suppose they could cook a Big Mac or Whopper handling the buns carefully, centering the meat and fixin’s just right, and it would still qualify as a real depiction. It’s just the handling that tends to flatten them. After all, IIRC the buns come frozen to the restaurant.
Wherever I’ve been in Canada, “chips” can either mean those extreme thin potato chips, or as an alternative word for French fries when included with a meal. (Hence, “fish and chips”) McD’s has popularized just the word “fries” as an alternative. Most restaurants know what you mean whether you say “chips”, “fries” or “French fries”. Apparently Americans are not as enlightened or sophisticated.
(There’s the bit in “Supersize Me” where the filmmaker does a disingenuous trick - he puts restaurant fatter fries and McDonald’s fries in separate glass containers. After a week, the McD’s look the same, the restaurnat fries are moldy. Supposedly this demonstrates “they’re not real food”. What it actually demonstrates is the extremely thin fries cook all the way through and the outside is sealed, while gneric fatter restaurant chips are still much more moist and the outside is not fried crispy enough to prevent moisture from getting out and causing mold. They’re the same thing, McD’s are cooked better.)
Photos on food packaging may face different rules than other advertising (television, print, etc.).
I work in advertising, and have had several restaurant chains as clients; ad shoots always had a “food stylist” involved in the shoot, to make sure that the “hero” food depicted in the ads looked as good as possible – the food stylist’s job did include primping, such as precisely putting “grill marks” on steaks with a heated metal rod to make them look perfectly grilled, spraying the food with oil or water to make it look freshly-cooked, etc.
I have had thick cut aka steak fries in many places (I do not care for them, I like mine thin and crispy). So yeah, you can have fish and chips with french fries.
Mind you- I do not like “chips” as in thick fries.
They are, just a different style of fry, There are many styles of french fries.
Yep.
The whole film (and book) is a series of lies. Like liver damage- but the author was a heavy drinker, etc etc.
After blaming his parents for his bad acts, Mr. Spurlock asked: “Is it because I’ve consistently been drinking since the age of 13? I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years.”
Could this be why his liver looked like that of an alcoholic?
The experiment has been replicated many times, and never with Spurlock’s results.
In any scientific pursuit, the only way to prove a hypothesis true or false is to perform an experiment. If the experiment is unable to be replicated, then those claims may not be true. This is the case for some researchers who attempted to repeat Spurlock’s fast-food experiment: they were unable to justify Spurlock’s claims of physical and mental issues just from eating fast food.
Mind you, eating too much fast food over an extended period is bad for you.
In the case of the OP- “False advertising” is a bit much, but requesting a refund would be okay in my book.
I would presume England, since that’s where “fish and chips” originated. I do remember being taught that “chips” was just the British way of referring to what we call “fries” in the US.
However, based on some YouTubers I’ve watched, it doesn’t seem to be that simple. They do use the word “fries,” but only for the long slender cut—especially those you get from fast food restaurants. They also use terms like “curly fries” and “waffle fries”—which are still a slender cut. They also still use “chips” and distinguish between the two.
That said, “chips” doesn’t seem to mean only what we call potato wedges (as @Northern_Piper’s description would suggest). It seems to be used for any thicker-cut fry, including the crinkle cut being discussed in this thread, along with the equally thick straight fries and the even thicker steak fries.
My suspicion is that American-style burger-and-fries fast food restaurants brought over the term “fries”, but that Brits only adopted it for the specific kinds those restaurants serve. The rest remained “chips.”
I would love to find out if the term “fries” was used before, say, McDonalds established a presence there. Or even if that particular cut was even eaten there.
Obviously “French fries” can mean various things. See, for example, this page that shows over a hundred products available from Simplot, one of the largest suppliers of French fries to major fast food chains.
How bout we all pool our money and put in an order of everything and then divvy them out on our end? 
It was, but not to any great extent.
Google Ngram offers some insights. In North America, the term “French fries” predates McDonald’s, but not by much. It started to slowly gain currency around 1940; the term was practically unknown in 1920. It gained rapid popularity in the 1970s, which, coincidentally or not, was around the time McD’s was getting really big and going global.
In Britain, the term did not gain significant currency until the mid-60s. A dramatic increase in usage began around 1980. The first McDonald’s in the UK was in 1974.
I’m somehow strangely persuaded by these conversations to have beer-battered fried haddock and French fries for dinner tonight. Whether this is fish & chips I will leave to the discretion of the literati in the crowd. 
Too bad I responded just after coming back from a pizza dinner. Otherwise I too might have suggested a fish fry.
I will say that the best french fries I’ve ever had were hand-cut thick fries in our local highest-end steak house. I hate to think of how much much fat they must have been fried in but I’m sure the cut-off in life expectancy was measurable.
Shoestrings and bigger potato chunks are best cooked the same way. Soaked in water to remove starch. Cooked to make the middle soft, then cooked again, quicker and hotter, to make the exterior crunchy.
One of my standard joke lines in a restaurant when the server arrives to take orders is:
It’s too hard to decide. Just bring us one of everything and we’ll pick at it.
Which is actually a pretty great thing to do if you’re in a group of 8-10 people who don’t have hang-ups about sharing food. Just order every app and/or every entrée and pass 'em around. Then do the same again when it’s time for dessert. Sadly people free of sharing-phobia seem to be on the decline in the wild.
One of the nicer steak houses around here prepares theirs in duck fat, then annointed with truffle oil. Your arteries start screaming for mercy as soon as your nose smells them leaving the kitchen heading your way. Truly wretchedly excessively fantastic. Can recommend.
Do you have a reputable source for this etymology?