mcworker checking in, here we put cheese on everything that normally has cheese, even if ordered plain. we don’t if ‘no cheese’ is said. saying double hamburger will result in 2 patties of meat, ketchup, mustard, onion, pickle, and… wait for it…
a bun.
however, to us, there is no ‘quarter pounder’. the only one listed on our menu is the qp w/cheese.
They didn’t change the sizes. The available sizes of drinks are child size, small, medium, large, and supersize. That seems fairly rational to me.
The problem you have encountered is only 50% the order taker’s fault (I’ve done the math). I would venture that nine out of ten customers, if not more, still want cheese on their sandwich even if they order it “plain.” If we assumed the other way around, we would be remaking a LOT more sandwiches. I have no idea why this is, only that it is. Plain still means with cheese to the grill team. Plain, no cheese, means just meat and a bun. Most people who order a “Quarter Pounder” are using shorthand for “Quarter Pounder With Cheese” because they can’t be bothered to say the whole thing. It’d be like saying “Quarter Pounder with Cheese and pickles and onions and ketchup…”
So if you want to be sure of getting your Quarter Pounder just meat and bun, then say, “Quarter Pounder, plain, no cheese, just meat on a bun.” It should work.
However, you do have a legitimate grievance. The order-taker should have asked you whether you still wanted cheese on it after you said “plain.”
Funny you should mention their salt content, because I noticed something else even more peculiar.
The same night that I ordered the Plain Quarter Pounder (and the lady had to remake it as a Plain Quarter Pounder Without Cheese [TM]), I decided to do a little “comparison shopping”, and went to a Burger King down the street, where I ordered a Plain Whopper (which, by the way, came without cheese without my having to tell the guy that I explicitly wanted it cheeseless 
).
The Plain Whopper cost about as much as a Plain Quarter Pounder Without Cheese (McD’s no longer has separate price structures for QP w/Cheese and the now-special-order-only QP without Cheese, like they used to), but the Whopper was considerably larger and heavier. It seemed to be the better deal by far.
BUT,
There was something in the flavor of the Plain Quarter Pounder Without Cheese that made it less bland than the Plain Whopper. So I bit into both of them and payed close attention to the difference.
The Plain Quarter Pounder Without Cheese was a little bit saltier, but the thing I really noticed was that the Plain Quarter Pounder Without Cheese was also sweeter! I’ve heard that McDonalds adds a little bit of sugar to its French fries to make them more appealing to children. Apparently, they add a little bit of sugar to the bun (or whatever mysterious compound it is they sprinkle on the bun) of the Quarter Pounder, too!
Actually, a quarter pounder w/o cheese (known by those in the know as a quarter ham, as mentioned earlier) is not ordered too terribly often. To be generous, I’d say one out of 10 QPCs are ordered without cheese. The most common special orders for QPCs and like sandwiches (beef patties, catsup, mustard, onions, pickles, etc) is probably “w/o onion,” “w/o pickle,” or both. Next popular would be plain, and I don’t really know how many of those customers actually wanted “plain w/o cheese,” because I would assume not all of them come back and ask for it to be remade. So I would hazard to claim that a customer who doesn’t want cheese on their QPC is in the minority.
And about the sweeter McD’s food, about a year ago we started getting new buns that did supposedly have more sugar in them, though I’m not sure why exactly. Them’s good tastebuds you have there!
mmhmm. bun. and whoppers don’t come with cheese. and you didn’t get interrupted after the word whopper with a spanish inquisition style ‘wanna have cheese on your whopper’?
i wonder about the pervasiveness of the wax square. not that i eat there much, but i have found that the “cheese” adds pretty much nothing to the sandwich. except calories and fat.
on another note, i have gotten used to special ordering all my food - it makes sure it’s at least hot…
how 'bout the unfortunate coincidence that resulted in the following coming out of the speaker: “welcome to yack in the box. may i take your order?”
It was after 10 PM. The guy manning the drive-through window may have been too tired to bother.
Hmmm … Yak in the Box …
Do they also serve Bison on a Bun, or Llama Enchilada?
McDonalds is big enough that they probably try out all potential changes in their basic formulas on Test Subjects before they roll them out to their chains. The test subjects won’t know why they decided to rate the more-sugary-bunned burgers as a 7-out-of-10 instead of a 6-out-of-10 on the survey, they just know they’re marginally more ejoyable for some inexplicable reason.
I suspect the original inspiration to try a higher sugar content to begin with may have been as simple as “It worked for our fries, maybe it’ll work for our burger buns too!”.
When the only thing you’re biting on is a bun and a slab of ground-up cow, and you have a **different ** plain burger in your other hand for comparison, even average tastebuds will catch the differences.
more sugar probably equals prettier toasting of buns. and the sugar thing varies… sometimes its added, sometimes removed from potatoes… all to keep consistent looking fries. b/c the sugar content of potatoes varies from season to season and even potato to potato. of course none of the fry magic matters if mcworker ignores the fry timer and pulls them out of the 100 percent vegetable oil when he feels like it
I’m pretty sure there’s no ‘small’ here, just medium, large and XL - I remember my dad ranting to a bored order-taker about how medium needs to be midway between their smallest size and their largest.
And also quicker.
I’ve always heard, and correct me if I’m wrong, that the buns are spreayed with a sugar solution prior to being seared over a hot element for only a few seconds. So the buns just look toased, but they’re actually just covered in a thin film of caramelised sugar. Much quicker than actually toasting the things properly.
I work at McDonald’s, hon! I have poured and sold many a drink cup. Medium size is midway between the smallest size and the largest. It breaks down like this:
Child size (available with Happy Meals): 12 oz.
Small (available with All American Meals): 16 oz.
Medium (available with the regular meals): 21 oz.
Large (available on request): 32 oz.
Supersize (see above): 42 oz.
Maybe you are thinking of Burger King? Or maybe the confusion arises from the fact that the medium size is the smallest size that you can get with an extra value meal and still get the discount. (This is because the profit really comes from the sodas and Skinflint McClown doesn’t want people to get a discount on the fries and sandwich while buying a tiny drink.)
But the fact remains that the drink cup titled “medium” is the median size of drink cup. McDonald’s is responsible for a multitude of sins, but this is not one of them.
/
/
you’re corrected… unless that happens where they’re made, we toast them for… 16 seconds i believe. and at 550 degrees (right? or is it 540?)
Cheers, donk. 
Medium size is twenty-one U.S. fluid ounces?
That’s a very peculiar number.
Did it used to be 24 oz., but they “throttled back” to save on costs? Did it used to be 20 oz., but they added a “bonus ounce”? 21 oz. isn’t a size you usually see for beverages.
Or maybe from the fact that medium is the smallest size displayed on those big overhead menus above the ordering counter.
It’s like hamburgers. You can get a hamburger, and they’re 89 cents, but you won’t see an 89-cent hamburger listed on the big menu display. You’ll just see Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese and Big Macs and McValue Meals and such. Individual hamburgers seem to be beneath mention, or something. (I’m guessing it’s because everyone “knows” you can order a hamburger at McDonalds, so there’s no reason to waste overhead menu space listing it.)
Okay, today I went back to Mickey-D’s and ordered a plain Double Quarter Pounder, and this time I explicitly said “no cheese.”
And, sure enough, when I got the receipt, it was just like people have been saying in this thread. The item was listed as:
Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese
Just for kicks, though I decided to try a plain non-double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, with cheese. I haven’t touched a hamburger with cheese on it for over three decades, and I have no memory of what such a thing tasted like. I did it only out of morbid curiosity. I was prepared for the worst.
But instead, I … um … suddenly discovered that I like cheeseburgers. :o
Hey, wait a minute – I just noticed that this thread has been moved from Cafe Society to MPSIMS!
But I thought threads about cooking were supposed to go in Cafe Society.
(Perhaps whoever moved it doesn’t consider McDonalds to qualify as cooking, and, well, they might have a point. 
)
Well, the McDonalds around here, consider cheese on the fish sandwich plain