McRant

The BBQ Pit
21

Obviously you don’t know how to shop or to cook.

Oh and I can make an Egg McMuffin for about 50 cents, hash browns for pennies and a large cup of coffee for about 10 cents. An Egg McMuffin value meal (with a small coffee) runs over $3.

A decent sized whole chicken is damn cheap and serves 4-6 people. Potatoes, per pound, virtually nothing. A decent sized bag of frozen veggies, 99 cents.

Meat on sale in a crockpot with veggies, damn cheap and damn easy…

No need to go on. There are some very easy, very cheap foods one can cook at home that are much healthier than the slop they have in fast food restaurants. I don’t mind their food but that’s once or maybe twice a month.

Tonight is a little more expensive, Boca burger and tomato soup but it’s good tasting and better for me than a burger and fries.

Oh and those chicken dishes you get at most fast food places? Quite often they have more calories and more fat than do the burgers. I can dig up the information if you want…

22

Factor in all the time you just spent on cooking and think about how it would have been better to do something else instead. McDonald’s saves money because time is valuable.

UnuMondo

23

McDonald’s is a fine place for me, or at least it used to be before they changed the oil. [sup]†[/sup]

I hate the idea of suggestive selling; there’s that devious air about it. However, more often than not, I find that more fries and more Coke (read: fewer trips to the soda fountain in the usual case of free refills) suits me fine.

I needn’t worry about approaching 300 pounds; I weigh 290. :stuck_out_tongue: Then again, I’m somewhat tall, as well.

[sup]†[/sup]I hear that they changed the oil back due to popular demand. Is this so?

24

UnoMondo, time spent cooking isn’t “wasted” - it can be a pleasurable, creative occupation. Also to cook the crockpot meals described by techchick takes a damn sight less time than going to the local fat food joint, unless you have the unique good fortune to live next door to one. McDonald’s food is unhealthy, unimaginative and overpriced. The company themselves exploit their staff and their customers, especially parents and their children. A lot of objectionable “upselling” techniques were initiated and popularised by them. They are a bad, bad company and you need to taste some proper food soon before you turn into a burger-munching, coke-swilling 450 pound advertisement for them.

25

Somebody told me that the “food” in the advertisements is actually made of plastic. Don’t know if it’s true or not.

26

aryk29 that’s true. The lights on shooting for those commercials are incredibly hot-the food would wilt and spoil, be all sloppy, etc.

So they make a mock up of what it would look like.

I like MickeyD’s every once in a while. I don’t think I could eat it every day, though.

27

[chorus] In-N-Out, In-N-Out, that’s what a hamburger’s all about… [/chorus]

I’m going right now…<click>

28

Oh, I love burgers, that’s one reason why I never go to McDs.

Mmmmm, burgers. Yummmmmmm. 125g super premium mince beef (at $AUS 10 per kilo.) Wholegrain crusty bread roll. Fresh lettuce & tomato. A slice of bacon (eye fillet piece, like Canadian bacon). And I have some home pickled beetroot in my fridge right now. Maybe a small onion fried in the pan with the meat, and oh, I have this great chilli-tomato chutney some friends gave me.

drool Hungry now. And it’s even healthy. Unlike that nasty place.

BTW, I had some friends who worked there in high school, and they told me that they used to get inspectors turn up randomly, and if they didn’t ask the upsize question they would be sacked.

29

It never will look as good as what the food mock ups look like.

30

Part of the reason I quit McDonald’s was because management was so out of touch with reality. Their distorted ideas on how the ordering process goes and their insistence that suggestive selling was a good idea were just further examples of that.

From one staff meeting I can remember their description of how a typical order is placed. It went like this:

Right.

For the five years I worked there an order NEVER went like that. I was always pleasant and smiling, but no customer ever approaches the register so receptive to suggestion. Usually, it goes like this:

Compounding the problem is that parts of the script are programmed into the cash register. It prompts you to ask what kinds of sauce for Chicken McNuggets, whether the meals are upgraded, what kind of drinks for meals, etc. You can ignore them and bypass the prompts by pressing a key for whatever else the customer orders. The problem with doing this, of course, is that if a supervisor/manager passes by to help you assemble the order and doesn’t see an entry for kind of sauce or drink, they’ll scold you a little. Because you were supposed to (interrupt and) ask. Come review time, if this happened enough, it’ll count against you and can lower the amount of raise you get.

So the options are either interrupt and annoy the customer by following an inane script, or get paid less to follow the inane script.

It’s ironic that a place that claims to want to make people happy is so insistent upon using a sales script that imposes its own unrealistic order onto the interaction and interrupts the customer to constantly pushing products they seldom want.

If you are truly upset by the suggestive selling, I suggest you write to corporate headquarters. If they’re to be believed, ain’t nobody’s input they care about more than their customers’.

31

I’ve only ever worked one retail job at a tropical fish store and our owner didn’t beleive in upselling. He did his best to insure his stock was the best quality, hand picked the animals we sold and gave reasonable guarantees and prices. He figured that was enough to sell.

He stayed in business over 30 years and only closed when he wanted to retire.

So I guess it worked.

32

I hardly ever eat burgers but that post nearly had me on the next plane to Australia.

33

Originally posted by Sofa King

You just don’t know what you’re missing!:wink:

34

Sure, if cooking is your main hobby, cooking is your profession, or you’re just a loser with nothing better to do. I don’t fit into any of those three choices.

Yeah, I live right down the street from one. And on weekends when I’m usually bound to the house with studying, that trip provides me with a nice opportunity to see daylight at least once a day. A who says McDonald’s doesn’t encourage healthy living?

Ooh, and you sound so cool and edgy calling it a “fat food joint”, just like those awesome Windows users who call Linux “Lunix”, or the Linux fanatics who hate “Micro$oft”. :rolleyes:

If you think kids began to nag their parents for stuff only after McDonald’s came to exist, I’m recommend taking a rehab stint to get off those stupid pills and then reading a history book.

I don’t see the problem with these upselling techniques. Sure, if you eat there rarely you might be caught off guard, but if you’re a regular you are already used to how to reply. Take me for instance:

UnuMondo: I’d like a McChicken menu, supersized –

Cashier: What to drink?

UnuMondo: – with a Coke, for here.

Cashier: Would you like a desert?

UnuMondo: No thank you.

Is that so hard? In any event, I question if McDonald’s pioneered upselling. The place with the most pushy upselling when I lived in the US were electronics shops like Circuit City who have the extra warranty of questionable value.

After three-going-on-four years of eating McDonald’s daily, I’ve always remained around my usual weight of 55 kilograms (I think that’s about 120 - 130 lbs), which is rather low for a guy. My physician informed me at my last physical that he deeply envies my low cholesterol level. So, it looks like your prophecy of doom doesn’t look very probable.

UnuMondo

35

Jeez, you’re touchy. You eat McDonald’s every day? And then you think people who cook are losers? A good history of McDonald’s pioneering sales techniques - including upselling and targeting children not old enough to make informed choices - can be found in “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. And congrats on your cholesterol level. You do know it tends to go bloody haywire after the age of about thirty when the metabolism starts to change don’t you? Go for the fish next time - good brain food.

36

No, I think you are. You don’t want to respect one’s tastes, and are obsessed with stopping people from eating at a particular restaurant which shouldn’t harm you 'cause you never eat there.

Fast Food Nation is a controversial book and much of it has been questioned.

In any event, I don’t see the problem “targeting” children. Children have parents whose job it is to care for their interests. Only a parent of unacceptably low strength and competence would try to blame a restaurant for their children’s desire for something. If it wasn’t McDonald’s, it would be a pony, or a new doll, or whatever.

UnuMondo

37

Jeez, what’s with the attacking of UnoMondo’s eating habits? The guy doesn’t like to cook, get over it.

Any type of cooking takes time and effort, even crock pot cooking. Chopping veggies, trimming meat, seasoning, browning, cleaning knives and cutting boards all that stuff takes time. When you’re done, you also have to deal with the cleanup, and storage of leftovers. The idea that this is as easy as picking up a bag at McD’s is silly.

I can go into my McD’s and get a McChicken ($1) and large fry ($1.70) for about $3 including tax. That’s a pretty decent amount of food for a low price. It was even better when they had the Big n Tasty on the dollar menu.

38

My god, who has the time and energy to sit around worrying about how someone else chooses to eat or spend their time and money?

I’ve got a newsflash, folks. Different people have different priorities, and they make different choices based on those different priorities.

So some folks prefer to spend their time and energy cooking, so they can save their money for other stuff. Big fucking deal. So some folks prefer to spend a bit more money to save their time and energy for other stuff. Big fucking deal. Neither choice is better than the other, because neither set of priorities is better than the other. As long as it doesn’t affect your life, it’s really none of your business either way, so everybody shut the hell up about everyone else’s eating choices.

For some people, cooking is fun and creative. Personally, it ranks up there with scrubbing the toilet on the list of things I like to do, a necessary evil I must endure if I want to eat. I could buy a lot of convenience foods at the grocery, but that wouldn’t be much cheaper or healthier than stopping at McDonald’s on the way to work. Luckily, I still get to eat a lot of tasty, homecooked, healthy stuff because I went out and found me a foodie to marry. Unu, I highly recommend it for those who hate to cook.

39

Cite?

40

They were better when they were fried.