I think McD’s gets a lot more hate than is warrented. I hadn’t eaten there in a while, but now I have a 2 year old, so every once in a we go to get him a Happy Meal. It’s a decent fast food burger. I’m not saying it’s the best thing ever, but it’s miles better than at Burger King, for instance.
Yes this. The point of McDonald’s in the '50s was not to compete with Delmonico’s; the point was that you knew what to expect and got a consistent experience and did not risk food poisoning like you did at a random roadside diner.
Came here to say this exact thing. Consistency works for them.
Also, a big draw for McDonalds is kids. Kids don’t have a vey sophisticated palate so it doesn’t matter. Parents get drug along.
When I was single, the play structures at McD was a great place to meet single moms.
I don’t hate their food, but I do appreciate the consistancy.
I disagree completely with your premise. You are using a common debating tactic to sway opinion by saying that most people would agree with you. I have been eating at McDonald’s since they first opened in Ohio. June 1960 to be specific. I was 14 at the time. I was the oldest of six children and when we went out to eat it was never for hamburgers. Hamburgers were sold at diners for truckers and drive-ins where older kids gathered.
McDonald’s changed all that. We watched the sign on the front telling how many burgers had been sold. 100,00, 300,000, a million! I don’t eat a McDonald’s burger that often but every so often I want one and I am transported back to the 1960s! We ate there yesterday (Filet o Fish) and I pulled a beautiful 5" fry that was only seconds out of the fryer and slowly ate it. They just do not come any better!
Since those times burgers have become a featured item at many restaurants and bars. I don’t expect a McDonald’s burger to compete with a $12-$15 masterpiece. But when I do need a quick bite, that McDonald’s burger delivers the same perfectly seasoned taste it has done for 60 years.
Serious question – compared to what, exactly, at Burger King? You mean their kid’s burger? I don’t think I’ve ever had one. But BK’s standard Whopper with cheese at any decent BK (they may not be as consistent as McD’s across different establishments) is miles better than any of McD’s classic standards like Big Mac or Quarter Pounder w/cheese.
The Happy Meal cheeseburger is a funny kind of thing. It’s not really a hamburger in any meaningful sense of the word, but they’re tasty in their own junk-food way and I can see why kids like them. I’m sure I bought McD’s Happy Meals for my kid when he was little, and I know that I’ve bought three or four individual McD’s kid’s cheeseburgers at a time back when I had a Bernese Mountain Dog, and Bernie and I would share them! 
In terms of adult burgers, I’d consider Burger King to be among the better of the big mass-market chains, but not nearly as good as some of the places aspiring to upscale burger status. But I’d put McDonald’s pretty much at the bottom of the mass-market chains.
I don’t know where you’re located, but in Ontario I generally find McDonalds has at least a few fancier sandwiches on the menu (like Angus burgers or sriracha chicken sandwiches or whatever) compared to the bog standard Big Macs and McChickens they had when I was a kid.
They definitely cater to local tastes internationally. I love the Brazilian-flavored beef in their Quarterão (oddly named because in a metric country it’s a quarter of what?)
Last time I was there they still served fried fruit pies and had cane sugar in the soft drinks.
I don’t remember if the fries tasted like the amazing 1970s version though; I was to focused on the garlic and seasoning in the burger.
Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Kroc discovering McDonald’s, and the appeal was all in the fries, hardly any in the hamburgers: Gladwell’s article.
1973 Menu when I was in Junior High.
Quarter pounder went national in 1973.
Loved the prices. My $5 allowance went a long way.
I loved McDonald’s back then. I never liked the secret sauce on a Big Mac. I get the quarter pounder.
There’s no chicken offered.
The problem in those days was that it was impossible to get a burger without the condiments. Hence Burger King’s campaign “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”
It was many years before I returned to McDonalds, once I discovered BK
Something very similar. White Castle had the system of laying out ground meat on the grill to be cut up into smaller burgers after cooking. Like modern ‘sliders’ there were tiny burgers. The McDonald’s burgers were larger but possibly even thinner so they would cook fast. Too thin and cooked too fast for decent flavor IMO. But efficiency was the key business-wise.
Also recalling that White Castle is credited with making the hamburger popular in the 1920s. Ground beef was considered kind of sketchy at the time after notorious revelations about the conditions at meat packing plants.
I remember being able to order a plain hamburger at McDonalds back then. In fact, it was a life hack for making sure you didn’t get one that had been sitting under the warmer waiting for a buyer.
It really varied. But as I recall, it was usually a royal pain. My cite is Burger King capitalizing off the hassle and making special orders easy.
Not impossible, as I ordered hamburgers at McDonald’s without most of the toppings back in the 1970s, but they obviously had to be made to order, and that took extra time, versus the restaurant having pre-made burgers, with the normal compliment of toppings, sitting at the ready (at least during peak hours).
Exactly so.
Granted, not impossible. Poor choice of words on my part. But difficult and they often screwed it up.
In the mid fifties burgers were served in a disparate range of places that usually had a spring loaded screen door and strips of fly paper hanging from the ceiling. One night in 1954 my buddie and I pulled in to such a place in central Indiana. I ordered a burger medium with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato and onion and a coke. It took a while so we talked and listened to Hank Williams on the juke box. The food was served on a ceramic plate with metal utensils, the coke in a bottle with a glass of ice. The burger was a locally made bun, some market brand of mayo, a meat patty. a leaf of lettuce, a slice of tomato and a thin slice of onion. A pickle and some chips on the side. It looked like the ads you see today. I enjoyed it and it was obviously memorable. The bill was probably less than fifty cents and we each left a dime tip.
I first ate at McDonalds in 1974. It was bright, clean and colorful. I could get in and out fast with the kids and they thought it was neat. But, it wasn’t good. It seemed to be a study in tokenism. They kept telling me what I had. The box of fries said they were greater or bigger or something. The burger had a wrapper with a picture of a real burger on it that didn’t look anything like what was in the bag. The bun was compressed. There was a sprinkling of chopped iceberg lettuce and some pieces of tomato and a note that said mayo was someplace else. It was about like eating a greasy blotter although a plaque on the table told me how good it tasted.
Recently I had to rely on burgers for a while. I tried McDonalds again and found some places to be very upscale with bright lights and multiple ordering stations. I ordered some of the burgers with high prices and fancy names but I did not find them remarkable. Just SOS with fancy sauce and a new illustrated wrapper.
I don’t see that McDonalds has gotten worse. But I also don’t see that they were ever anything but an over hyped vendor of a sub standard product. How do you get worse than that?
In reflecting on this it occurs to me that when I ordered the burger in Indiana, the guy in the stained apron listened to my order and understood what I was anticipating. That’s what he put together and it met my expectations. Sounds simple and it actually is. But, at McDonalds I was selecting a product. Like a car or a vacuum cleaner. A thing in a box. When I placed my order the girl kept moving my expectation to match one of the boxes on the steam table. The order she repeated to me didn’t sound exactly like what I thought I had asked for. But I had to give her the money before I got to open the box. Then it was too late.
McDonald’s used to try to appeal to children and families, but not any longer, I don’t think. I can’t remember the last time they were doing movie tie-ins with the Happy Meals, and the advertising doesn’t feature Ronald McDonald, the Hamburglar and so forth. I think nowadays, their market is primarily adults.
I think McD burgers taste exactly as they did when I was a kid in the 70s. And that’s why I like them.
Like the joke about Taco Bell, sometimes you don’t want a “gourmet” burger, you want a Big Mac.
McNuggets and the Spicy McChicken were two of my favorite additions. The Spicy McC has actually got some bite for a family-friendly place known for its blandness.
I do think the McRib tasted better in 1984, but really, all I have is a fading taste memory to go by.
I loved it when they went full Carl Sagan and showed “Billions and Billions Served”.
There’s an old joke: “The great thing about McDonald’s is you know what you’re going to get from Maine to California. The bad thing about McDonald’s is you know what you’re going to get from Maine to California.”
I don’t know if it was better when I was in high school over 40 years ago, but I certainly loved the burgers then. Now, I think they’re mush (same for BK – I like the taste well enough, but the texture is soft, soggy, and unappetizing). Wendy’s is the only junk/fast food I can stand, and I’m borderline on that these days.
My brother absolutely hated onions when he was a kid, so he’d order his burgers without them. The only problem was that we usually went to McDonald’s at busy times, and they would try to hurry it out, so he’d end up with a burger that was raw in the middle. He took to ordering it without onions and well-done, and that usually worked.