That’s common for most businesses – “Hey, you stole my idea!!! I’ll sue you!!!” They’d also have to pay royalties to said person, wouldn’t they?
It has nothing to do with not “caring about their customers.” It’s about not getting their asses sued. And I can’t say I blame them.
Contrapuntal is right - it is stupid to connect that page to them not serving breakfast. They would care very much if customers en-mass rejected McDonalds because they couldn’t get breakfast all the time. If they determined that customers thought it sucked to the extend that it would have been more profitable to reconfigure the stores to serve both then they would absolutely do it.
This is not related in any way to their lack of desire to accept specific unsolicited ideas from the general public - there are reasons unrelated to not caring about what customers want for doing this. However, if their own research told them that most customers did indeed care about 24 hour breakfast, I am sure we will see it.
I have a very vague memory from awhile back of a new McDonald’s executive talking about re-engineering the kitchens so they could do all-day breakfast, suggesting that it really is a matter of equipment and space.
I do think they should treat weekends differently though and have some sort of limited breakfast menu until noon – maybe just McGriddles and burritos, or whatever else requires the least equipment.
That always ticked me off as well when i still ate at McDonalds with a group that stopped for a meal during a trip. I’ll just have a soda please.
Some locations have longer breakfast on the weekends but only an extra 30 minutes.
Jack-In-The-Box serves breakfast all day, but as was pointed out earlier, they make their food to order, so it doesn’t matter much. Burger King still serves lunch food during breakfast time (as does Jack-In-The-Box and Carl’s, Jr., for that matter), presumably for the same reasons.
Along similar lines, I’ve been wondering why McDonald’s is the ONLY fast food restaurant I’m aware of that serves pancakes. I can’t think of any other chain that does this. Lots of breakfast sandwiches and burritos at other places, but only McDonald’s troubles with pancakes. If it’s profitable enough to pull off at the Golden Arches, why not elsewhere?
Waffle House doesn’t have to fill up its flat grill with hamburgers. You can’t cook burgers and eggs on the same flat grill. Not only is it a question of space, but also temperature (burgers are cooked at much hotter temps than eggs and pancakes) and contamination from the burger grease. Joints that specialize in all-day breakfast (and I’ve worked at a couple) usually have a separate charbroiler for burgers and steaks, but those burgers and steaks are not cooked in anywhere near the same quantity that McDonalds would need to cook burgers, and don’t require anything near the same amount of space and energy.
Redesign 30,000 kitchens worldwide to be able to serve Egg McMuffins later? Are you kidding?
The difference between McDonalds and Waffle House is that McDonalds functions like an assembly line, with customers waiting for some matter of tens of seconds for their food under most circumstances, and Waffle House makes food to order taking 5, maybe 10 minutes. If you want to make McDonalds more like Waffle House, the process gets less efficient and it ends up costing money.
Sonic serves breakfast items all day.
Sonic has more kitchen space because it doesn’t have a dining room.
No, I’m not kidding. I’ve watched them tear down perfectly good McDonalds buildings to construct larger volume units. It may seem like personal opinion that people prefer the breakfast menu but go to any McDonalds just before the switch and there will be a huge line of people wanting to get breakfast. It seems pointless to try and introduce a different version of a hamburger when people already show an interest in an established product.
Yes, I pointed out the difference between them. I also pointed out Waffle House uses a smaller grill than McDonalds. It’s an engineering task to alter existing kitchens.
I think the space issue is reasonable. It is not just grill size, but also number of fryers, fryer trays, slider trays between the kitchen and register, etc. All of these things have to scale and it is reasonable to assume that they are already optimized to their full potential.
Look at it another way. If McD’s had the ability to add space for X number of breakfast items, then they could instead choose to add X number of new lunch items. In fact, considering how their menu has grown in recent years, it is possible that this is exactly what they did do.
Funny, I watch them do it all the time at Waffle House. Grills have adjustable heat zones for this reason.
If there is a Sonic next to a McDonnalds then they have already won the breakfast race. They’re currently building Sonics like mad in my area. “Can’t” is not a good business model.
When you have an established menu item that sells well it just makes sense to exploit it rather than try to introduce new products.
You’re correct that McDonalds probably has their kitchen optimized for their current regiment. It would have to be re-optimized.
I used to work in fast food as well. That is the reason.
Different food types are stored in their own packages. We can’t, for example, just keep the breakfast muffin buns together upstairs (our storage and main freezers were downstairs) together all the time. We’d have to allocate room for breakfast foods, rest of the day foods, fries, etc. When you’re limited on the variety of what you’re selling, it makes storage easier. Nobody wants to run downstairs every 20 mins for another package of breakfast buns and nobody wants to overstock breakfast upstairs and have to do many more trips for the lunch food.
Also, we would have to have different cooking areas. We would have fryers for fries, seperate ones for our little corn dogs, and another set of fryers for fried chicken patties and nuggets. If we were to add breakfast to that, we’d have to keep another fryer specifically for our lightly fried potato chunks (sorta like hash browns). They need different frying times so we cannot simply share it with the regular french fry fryers.
Another thing is the garnish we use on the breakfast potatoes. They come with onions, bell pepper, and some other thing. With no breakfast all day, we can store those downstairs. If we had breakfast all day, we’d have to find even more room to put those thing in, not to mention the potatoes. And if things don’t sell within a certain time, we’ll have throw them away and mark it as spoilage.
For us, like for robby, changing from breakfast to lunch is a huge hassle. People who miss breakfast by a few minutes complain a lot, so we ended up sending staff to cut off the lines at a certain point. We would also try to move the breakfast stuff downstairs quickly, but we can’t do that until we know how much breakfast orders were left, so we solicited orders from people while in line to see if they were ordering breakfast or lunch. It was such a pain to do every morning.
I find these simplifications very frustrating. “Can’t” is a perfectly acceptable business model if it allows several more viable “Cans”. Everything is a trade-off and presumably McDonalds’ business staff are executing a plan they feel will continue to make McDonalds successful.
Personally I love McDonalds breakfast and am not fond of the rest of their menu. If they went breakfast-only I would likely gain weight. But I have to assume that McDonalds’ business staff have already factored in that CaveMike loves sausage McMuffins and that Sonic is building a lot of restaurants near Magiver’s house when they came up with their plans to run the $70B business.
There’s a difference between what customers “THINK” would be a good idea and what they actually would buy.
Most people thought New Coke tasted better, but they didn’t want it.
McDonalds does a lot of marketing and research, if enough people wanted it, you can better believe it’d be there. They’d FIND a way to do it.
It’s also not a great business model to toss out your core competencies to chase a few more bucks.
Yes they do, but I have never seen a breakfast flat grill used simultaneously asa burger grill, and I would be surprised if that as going on at waffle house. There would be no way to keep the burger grease out oif the eggs.
Either you’re seeing them cook on separate grills and not realizing t, or they’re cooking so few burgers that it doesn’t matter. McDonalds has to fill the flat grill literally from edge to edge. The loaders are sized that way.
Heh. When I go to McD for breakfast it’s because I’m still awake and I need a cup of coffee and a big mac. They actually have a breakfast menu? 