The company’s franchises in Central Ohio are experimenting with selling breakfast food beginning at midnight.
http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2012/07/31/mcdonalds-launches-breakfast-after.html?s=print
It’d be nice if they started doing it in the afternoon too. I hope to live to see the day when I can buy an Egg McMuffin at 2 p.m.
I’d like to see them extend breakfast until noon. I’d order it a lot.
For real! I ain’t in the mood for a BigMac at 10 freakin 30 am! At least have it until noon!
But then, I don’t know the logistics involved and my son (who worked at McDonald’s doesn’t know because he never worked breakfast) doesn’t know either - just how hard WOULD it be to have an overlap between breakfast and lunch for maybe an hour and a half?
Well, they turn the signs over (when they change what they’re serving), so they’d need to switch the way those work.
Extending their breakfast hours to noon would be good for their bottom line but bad for my waistline.
It is interesting to me that there are so many people who apparently are not only NOT revolted by McDonald’s breakfast food, but actively seek it out.
However, my opinion on this is probably colored by the fact that for two summers I worked starting shift at McDonald’s, and the smell of McMuffin still turns my stomach. I used to ask my manager if he could delay my break time until after the lunch changeover just so I could get lunch food for my break instead of the breakfast crap, even if that meant going on my first break six hours after I started work for the day.
As for overlapping breakfast/lunch, things may have changed, but when I was there they didn’t have separate breakfast and lunch grill areas. At the changeover, the grill was cleaned off, the temperature was reset, and after that you couldn’t cook eggs and sausages on it anymore, because now it was set for burgers. So they’d have to either halve the area needed for lunch production, or install a whole new grill. Both options seem like non-starters IMO.
Things have definitely changed. It appears to me sandwiches are cooked in little plastic slide out trays, presumably by microwave. So there’s no grill clean up problem. I’m with you on disliking the breakfast, I just don’t like how the eggs are cooked. And I wish the sausage, since its pre-cooked and microwaved, was better browned, and not just grey and hot.
Sorry, that’s dumb. You guys are right–keeping breakfast longer would make more sense. Almost no one wakes up at midnight, but some people do wake up late.
Though both ways have the downside that I know people who want dinner food at both those times, and every McDonald’s I’ve ever seen can’t handle both at once. Plus, it would mean they’d fry their chicken patties and hashbrowns at the same time, which means cross contamination for those of us who can’t eat wheat.
I love McRonald’s breakfast. It’s my only reason for ever eating there. I worked for Big Mac in the mid 1980s, and unless things have changed, the eggs are cracked open, scrambled and fried in a little butter. The eggs for the muffins are “poached”
in a rather clever covered ring contraption, with water dribbled in from the top. All of the meat- sausage, canadian bacon, was fried on the grill. The Mickkey-Ds I worked for had a microwave…in the employee’s lunchroom.
When I worked overnights, I would occasionally get into a McDonalds around 3am. Never really did feel like a heavy burger at that time of day. Being able to get a bacon egg and cheese biscuit at that time would be a lot more appealing.
As of the mid-1990s, there wasn’t a fresh egg to be found inside McDonald’s. The eggs came in liquid “egg product” form, in what looked like a milk carton. To form the egg puck that goes on the McMuffin, they poured the egg product into the little ring mold on the grill. There was also a microwave in the grill area, although they called it a “Q-ing oven” so that customers didn’t realize we were just nuking some of the food.
McDonald’s most recent ad campaigns have been incessantly advertising their “fresh-cracked” eggs, so they must have gone back from the carton stuff.
This is me (minus the bacon). There are several 24-hour McDonald’s near my third shift job, and coworkers often take lunch at them. I never go along; I’m a vegetarian, and I’d be stuck getting a salad and some cookies or something. It’d be nice to be able to go with them on occasion.
Some people—like truckers and drinkers—are *still up *at midnight, though, and want breakfast food. Why else have a 24-hour IHOP? (Yes, I know, IHOP sells things other than pancakes, but that’s usually what the post-drinking crowd went for in my IHOP days).
The scrambled eggs might be made with the liquid “egg product” but the eggs on sandwiches definitely have a white and a yolk. It certainly looks like a fresh-cracked egg that’s been cooked in a ring. (I even have some rings for that purpose, Homemade Egg McMuffins!)
I work third-shift, and if I could get breakfast when I get off work, I’d love it. I think they’re also going for the 2:00 am drunks who want Egg McMuffins after leaving the bar.
There really isn’t enough room. Back in my McDonald’s days, I would regularly work during the switchover, and the hardest part was having space for both sets of products at the same time.
Everything’s still grilled, the slide out trays just keep it warm. The only thing that’s pre-cooked and then microwaved is the breakfast burritos.
Around here, all the McDonalds are being torn down and rebuilt. Maybe part of the reason is to accommodate a larger kitchen area? Jack In The Box serves breakfast all day, so it’s not logistically impossible.
Most, if not all, of the McD’s around here use big LCD displays for the menus, so changing the menus or even having sub-sections alternate between egg-things and burger-things is trivial.
For the places that do breakfast all day - anyone here ever work at a Jack in the Box? How do they manage different grill temps and finding room to park the cooked components before assembly? If they’ve figured a way for teenagers to do it, it can’t be too difficult.
If the main obstacle is eggs, there are some very small commercial griddles available. The cafeteria at my office has one and the top is roughly 1x2 feet with a raised rim. Just big enough to pour on some scrambled eggs and about 30 seconds later, a deft cook will have about a dozen portions, all cut and folded, ready to assemble into sandwiches.
I work for McD’s. We do cook the sausage, steaks, & bacon, round eggs, folded eggs, and scrambled eggs on a grill. The burittos, and hotcakes are microwaved. A big factor in breakfast all day is cross contamination, wasted product, and limited space. All the cooked food goes into a heated cabinet to keep it at 140 degrees. There is also a limited time these items are considered fresh, there are timers for every slot. You also need different utensiles for different products. Then there’s the 11 different sauces.
Trust me the powers that be are always looking at the numbers. if they thought breakfast all da would make them more money, they would reconfigure stores to be able to do just that. Our region is already selling breakfast after midnight. It is easier and faster. There are fewer items to cook, and most of them take less time to cook.
not to go all ‘attention-whore’ on you guys, but “what are the hurdles to having breakfast served all day” has always been a subject near and dear to my heart.
I started this thread a few months ago, and had my ignorance sufficiently fought. Good to see Student Driver posting in this thread as well, as (he?) had one of the all-time best contributions, to my prior thread.