Before the e.coli outbreak it was called The Monster Burger, and post e.coli it was renamed The Colossus Burger.
McDonalds attempt at poutine. I’ve eaten bad poutine. but theirs was hands down the worst. Skinny fries do not make good poutine. I’ve managed to block all other memory of the awfulness, so no further details.
So nobody else besides Chronos and me tried the Halloween Whopper? In which they loaded the bun with enough dye to make it look black, but in reality turned your excrement green? Good times.
Honorable mention to Crystal Pepsi.
Since so many of you brought up pizza, does anyone else remember Pizza Hut’s “Big New Yorker”? I loved those! It was bigger, cheesier, greasier, but on a thin crust so you had to eat it folded. I wish they’d bring that back.
Oh crap (heh), I forgot about the Halloween Whopper. That was an abomination also.
As I said above, I’ve tried a lot of the gimmicks and don’t remember a lot of them.
Not sure if it counts as a “gimmick”, but I had a Deep Fried Twinkie on Fremont Street one time because I promised my friend’s kid that I’d try one. I took about 3 bites, sent her a pic, and threw the rest out.
The KFC Double-Down came out after I turned vegetarian but I totally would have tried one if I wasn’t.
Who here remembers the McDonald’s hamburger with pizza sauce & mozzarella? I’m talking 1988 or so.
I eat them fairly often, in fact I had one for lunch today. I think they are fine. It’s really the only place I can get a hot dog in a drive through for a quick bite. I did try the Whopper version once because I thought it might be like a Chicago dog. It wasn’t.
Dennis
Wife, South Side Chicago girl who should know better, bought one on two separate occasions. There is no accounting for taste.
Really? Corporate is across the street so I expect the drive-thru to be up to date, but they still had the signs up, nearly two months past St Pat’s. I was tempted, but with cones at four bits I passed.
Long before Mac’s had soft-serve, they sold premade Neopolitan/van-choc-straw cones. At the time Wife worked next door to Corporate and we’d sometimes meet inside the building at the greatest Mac’s on Earth. They test marketed them there, ignoring false positives because they also sold beer and wine, and released them upon the world. Or the Chicago market. Did you ever let Neopolitan soften, then mix it into a pink slurry? Same thing, refrozen in a conical rock.
For what it’s worth, the McDonalds near me (and maybe all of them, for all I know) is doing table service now, too.
Don’t go dissing the Shamrock Shake! I ordinarily get annoyed by the whole “dye something green and call it Irish” thing, but you’re get my annual Shamrock Shake when you pry it from my cold, possibly-living fingers.
And I haven’t actually had the Halloween Whopper; I just remember their existence. I don’t have any particular aversion to it; I just don’t eat fast-food burgers much in general.
Wow. Suffice to say we disagree.
It’s a limited time thing. My wife’s company handled the national distribution of them and when she brought one home I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. Still do as a matter of fact.
I actually prefer the cheese sauce (they get pretty heavy-handed with the tomato sauce for my taste).
I liked the first iteration of the loaded bacon bread bites better than I like the current version. The bread’s texture worked better with the toppings.
There were a bunch when I worked at Little Caesar’s back in my high school days–
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Caesar Shake-up Salad–a bag of romaine with a package of croutons and a packet of Caesar dressing. You put the croutons and the dressing in the bag with the romaine and shook it up.
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Chocolate ravioli–milk chocolate surrounded by white chocolate in the shape of a ravioli. It was pretty good.
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Pepperoni Crazy Bread–Crazy Bread stuffed with pepperoni. Not bad but a pain in the butt to make.
They were all limited time things.
McDonald’s had some kind of salad that was served in a tall cup, and had diced egg and shredded cheese, which are good on salads, and theoretically meant that McD’s had something I could eat, since I don’t eat meat.
They were wilted and disgusting. The cheese and egg sunk to the bottom of the cup. They were just awful. They don’t exist anymore.
White Castle has a black bean slider that isn’t bad. Deep fried so it’s meatless, but it needs WC (ftr, not lost on me) onions, which are steamed over frying beef. Sorry. 
For what it’s worth, Crystal Pepsi is back, at least in some parts of the country. You can buy it right now at a bunch of the pharmacy/mini-marts here in Oregon.
And the Priazzo was my favorite pizza ever – my wife and I still miss it thirty some years later. Deep dish, layered, very sauced: sort of halfway between a pizza and a lasagna.
Closest I’ve come since is a Papa Murphy’s stuffed: tell 'em to leave out half the cheese, triple the sauce inside, and you’re fairly close. Note they take about 5 minutes longer to cook if you do that. It’s not perfect (or at least doesn’t match my three decade old memory), but it’s close.
I loved Shamrock Shakes as long as McDonald’s shakes had that slightly gritty texture. Don’t care for the newfangled version.
Is this story for real? If so, how old were you, and did it set off a chain reaction?
I’m pretty sure I didn’t hallucinate, but I vaguely remember the McD’s near my house offering fish nuggets for about five minutes. I must have been high when I ordered them one day because that sounded good to me. The idea could’ve worked but I should have known better. I ate one, some fries, and threw most of it out. Nasty!
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Having them slide into one another on a plate is one thing. Slopping them together in a bucket of sad is another. If clinical depression had an official meal, this would be it.
As long as I’m waxing nostalgic about my JITB days, there were a few other gimmick items we did during my time there that were, IMO, just plain awful either in execution or in promotion;
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“Pita snacks”. We did this thing for awhile where, for $1.99, we’d take a pita, top it with your choice of fried or grilled chicken, a fish fillet, or “steak” (a coarsely-chopped, overcooked pile of beef shavings that might at some point have been adjacent to a steak), add some chipotle sauce and shredded lettuce, and fold it in half like some kind of clinically depressed taco. We frequently got complaints after we sold somebody one and they complained about how awful it was, and it’s hard to disagree with them.
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We had a chorizo breakfast burrito for awhile, that came with a thin saucy chorizo, nacho cheese, scrambled eggs, and hash browns. It was actually pretty damn good, but for some reason the company insisted on promoting it as the “chorizo sausage burrito”. We got no end of complaints from people unfamiliar with chorizo about there not being any sausage in it.
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The chicken fajita pita’s continued longevity has always baffled me. We barely ever sold any, to the point where taking a bag of pitas out of the freezer was a gamble because we’d probably end up throwing half of them away. And yet, despite it being a gimmick entrée, it’s somehow stayed on the menu for over 25 years. It requires three ingredients - the pita, the seasoned chicken patty, and the mild salsa - which aren’t used for anything else on the menu, and on top of that it’s a pain to assemble (grill chicken patty under press, grill onions, microwave pita, tear heel off pita, stuff heal with shredded iceberg, insert stuffed heel into pita, chop patty with spatula, add chicken and onion into cardboard boat containing romaine leaf, tomato, and shredded cheddar, and slide contents of boat into pita) that unless the Jack you order it from has the most studious and by-the-book grill cook that you’ve ever met, it’s probably not going to be put together right. (Also, the pitas tear half the time during assembly, and good luck eating one without half of it oozing onto your hand.)
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We had a “nacho cheeseburger” for awhile. It was a plain kid’s burger with nacho cheese and jalapenos poured onto the patty. They were $1.49 each, but they were two-for-one if you ordered them during the graveyard shift. They weren’t very popular and didn’t last long, but this was pretty much the start of Jack’s “The only people who come here at night are drunks and stoners, might as well cater to them” phase that has culminated in the “munchie boxes” they do now, where you get some sort of ridiculous sandwich like a burger where the buns are grilled cheese sandwiches, served with two tacos, a half-order each of regular fries and curly fries, and a drink for $6. (CONFESSION: I do love me the hell out of the brunch burger, which consists of a burger patty, cheese, bacon, hashbrowns, a fried egg, and mayo, on a croissant bun.)
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We had fried mac & cheese bites for awhile, before BK had the idea. They were OK, but nothing special, and you had to be super-careful not to overcook them because they’d leak and foul up the fryer oil like nobody’s business.
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We had smoothies for a few years. It was extremely cost-intensive to have the machine installed, and required me to sit around the store at 2 AM when we would normally have been closed so I could keep an eye on the work crew. It introduced a whole new set of ingredients with limited shelf lives where we were pretty much guaranteed to be throwing out product on a daily basis. Cleaning the machine (which had to be done daily to prevent buildup of coliform bacteria) was an hour-long process that added to the already stretched-to-the-limit workload the graveyard crew had to deal with. They never sold that well anyway, and after a few years they ended up ripping the machines out and doing away with it.
(What follows is less about a specific product, and more a rant about a particularly colorful experience in my Jack career.)
The last year I was with Jack, we did “free taco day”. The Powers That Be had decided that our tacos, which were introduced about 70 years ago, hadn’t changed since, and were bland, Americanized relics of a time when white people thought tacos to be exotic and dangerous, were in need of a reboot. This reboot consisted of doubling the amount of sliced American cheese in the tacos and adding slightly more shredded lettuce. To promote this revival, they announced that on this day, in November 2010, from 2 PM to midnight, every customer would be entitled to request two free tacos, no other purchase required.
The night before free taco day, a freak windstorm hit town. My store’s power got cut off around 9 PM. Since the power was unlikely to come back on overnight, I told the night crew to lock up and go home. At 6 AM, I got a call from the opening manager that the power was still out. I came right over (I lived less than 5 minutes from the store at the time) and we did what we could, with the power out, to start cleaning up the restaurant. Somewhere around 9, I got a call from the manager of one of the other Jacks in town. (There were five at the time.) He hadn’t lost power like we and two of the other Jacks had, and they were swamped as a result, so he was hoping I could come to his store, count his safe, settle his books, and run his bank deposit for the day. I talked to the district manager and she thought it was a good idea, so I put the shift manager in charge and drove across town to deal with the other store’s thing.
I ended up also doing the deposit for the other store that hadn’t lost power. Somewhere around 3 PM, the power came back on. By this time, I already had dozens of people hovering around the front door waiting for free tacos. (The store was across the street from a Salvation Army shelter.) After a few phone calls (and me having to finally do our own deposit), we were finally able to open up shortly after 4. We somehow managed to give away 1100 orders of tacos over the remainder of the day, when I guarantee you we never ever had 1100 transactions in the course of a day before then.)
The net impact on sales as a result of that giveaway? Zilch. Our taco sales didn’t increase at all between then and the time I left the company six months later.