Wouldn't restaurants (namely fast-food's) make a killing if they served breakfast all day?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve enjoyed following the Weird restaurant policies thread, and it got me wondering - what’s the disadvantage to restaurants only serving “breakfast” during certain hours?

None of these places will ever be featured on an episode of “The Food Channel’s Best Of…”, but if Waffle House, Denny’s, IHOP, Sonic, etc., can survive while serving breakfast all day every day, then why isn’t that more universal?

Stupid example, but why not McDonald’s? Suppose you work hours that dictate that “breakfast” for you comes at 3:00 in the afternoon - are you really inconveniencing the fry-cook that much, to throw you together a couple of Egg McMuffins, rather than a Big Mac with fries? Why do they seem to have a policy that if you show up at 11:01am on a Sunday, you are shit out of luck?

The above-mentioned thread really opened my eyes as to why it can be a pain in the ass for certain restaurants to accept reservations - but is there a logical explanation for why restaurants (that offer breakfast but only during certain hours) don’t offer it all day?

2

Basically, the fast food places don’t have the room for the extra grills, ovens, etc. that’s needed for breakfast foods. Can’t do pancakes, eggs and hash browns on the same cooking surface as a burger.

3

+1, as the kids say. I had a friend who worked a McDs for a while, and he said that the switch from breakfast to standard menu was a fairly big deal.

4

I’ve seen other threads here before that explain why McD’s does not serve breakfast all day. I wish they did, though. There are other fast food chains (Sonic, for example) that do serve breakfast all day, so it could be done.

I wonder if there would actually be enough demand for a “only breakfast sandwiches all day” fast food place? Has anyone tried it?

5

The Sonics here are drive-in/eat in car only. So there’s extra space in the building where the seating would have been.

6

Jack-In-The-Box serves breakfast all day and have for a long time. Seems to work OK for them (and there are definitely times when I appreciate it).

7

Moving over to Cafe Society.

8

I worked at Hardee’s in the early 1990s, so things have probably changed drastically there in the back room, but at the time, we had the main reasons that we didn’t do it was the lack of space on the grill and prep table.

We also had the opposite problem, people wanting lunch items at breakfast.

Some items we could have made easily all day (and if a customer asked, we’d make it): pancakes (which were simply tempered from frozen and kept in the cooler, then chucked in a microwave), biscuits, bacon, and the little country-fried chicken steaks that we sold at the time.

Problematic would be eggs, sausage, sausage gravy, Canadian bacon, country ham, hash browns, omelets with special fillings. The gravy required a bunch of sausage patties to be grilled and chopped up, a pot of water to be boiled, and the gravy made… a process which took about 10 minutes, monopolized valuable grill space, and took an employee away from the prep station–someone who couldn’t be spared from the prep area in the middle of a lunch rush. And gravy got gluey really quickly; the morning batch was okay for a couple of hours, but we couldn’t keep making batches and throwing them out through the day because of the chance that we might get one order an hour for it. Everything else took up valuable grill space-- the process we used would have required us to use 1/3 of the grill for a single breakfast order, grill space we were loathe to give up when we were selling so many lunch items that the grill would be completely full of hamburgers at all times from around 11 AM to 2 PM; a breakfast order would have take about five minutes to make for the customer, and would put us five minutes behind on all lunch customers… and that time can add up quickly, since people don’t want to idle in drive-through for minutes on end.

I get the feeling that customers never understood just how busy we were in the back during lunch rush and dinner rush (5 PM to 8 PM or so). Six people working as fast as they can to keep up; the bun toaster and the entire surface of the grill were in constant use churning out hamburgers, two people were assembling sandwiches non-stop, and there was simply no time to do anything else. I think this is the other reason that so many fast food places don’t do breakfast all day; the backroom turns into a fast-moving assembly line making one primary thing: hamburgers. We literally had no time to stop. The backrooms are actually engineered to minimize walking by employees, so they were purposefully kept small, and there was no way to fit a second grill back there. Breakfast rush was slower, so we could spare the majority of the employees to do all the stuff like preparing biscuit dough, chopping/slicing vegetables, etc., while one grill guy and one prep station guy could handle everything. At lunch and dinner, it’s all hands on deck, and there’s no more time for prep.

Hash browns wouldn’t have been so bad if the customer could wait 3 minutes for them to fry, and we did do it for customers who would wait, though it absolutely killed our order fulfillment times. Sonic gets around this by simply doing only tater tots, no fries, so they can cook up a batch and keep them under a heat lamp with the reasonable suspicion that they will sell most of them.

9

There’s a new Arby’s that opened up down the street from me, and there’s a big banner out front that says “serving breakfast all day!”

I rarely eat fast food, but I do occasionally grab an Egg McMuffin. It’d be neat to be able to get one all day. Anyone had Arby’s breakfasts? Do they have anything vaguely McMuffin-like?

10

Yes, with an emphasis on vaguely. Though I think McD’s is the only fast food restaurant I’ve encountered that has an English muffin option. Most places I’ve been to for breakfast only use buns, biscuits, or tortillas.

11

That was the one thing I disliked about working in a small diner where the entire menu was available all day. When your grill is only 2 feet by 3 feet, there are just some things you don’t want on the grill at the same time. There’s also the problem with the grill (intentionally) not having a uniform temperature over its entire surface. There’s the “hot side” for cooking hashbrowns and meats, and the “cool side” where you cook pancakes … and toast hamburger buns and the bread for grilled sandwiches. So you get an order where one person at the table wants pancakes and another wants a burger or grilled sandwich … you can’t do both at the same time.

When I worked at Arby’s, lo these many years ago, we had croissant sandwiches for breakfast. Dunno what they’re doing now.

12

I’m always half-surprised when the “why don’t fast food places serve breakfast longer” question comes up, because I hate pretty much every fast food breakfast item I’ve ever tried, and I always wish I could just get a burger and fries.

I would of course love it if they could serve both menus all day. I’d never eat another rubbery egg sandwich again (why have that when I could have a rubbery beef sandwich!)

De gustibus non est disputandum.

13

I eat far more fast food than I should, and I usually try to get breakfast on the way to the office, so I like to try out various restaurants just so I don’t get in a rut ordering the same thing all the time.

You’re right that most of it is just pure ass. Taco Bell recently started a breakfast menu, and the cheese was some of the nastiest food product I’ve ever tasted.

There are exceptions, though. I haven’t found anything on Whataburger’s breakfast menu I haven’t liked. They use fresh eggs, and the only reason they come out in circular patties is because they’re cooked in a steel mold. My favorite thing on their menu is an egg sandwich, which is just a buttered bun, cheese, and egg. All the ingredients are tasty and the whole thing is a fresh, non-greasy, relatively light bundle of yum.

And while most of Wendy’s menu is crap, their Artisan sandwiches are fantastic.

Generally, of course, none of it stands up to what an actual sit-down diner can provide, but for fast food it can get pretty good.

14

Wouldn’t restaurants (namely fast-food’s) make a killing if they served breakfast all day?

All they major chains examine these things very, very carefully. So the simplest answer to the OP is “If they would make a killing doing it, they would do it. They’ve done the calculation and realized that it wouldn’t be profitable.”

15

Since I hate fast food breakfasts, I want lunch/dinner all day. One of my local Burger Kings starts lunch at 8:00 AM and I love them for it. From 8 to 10 they have breakfast and lunch menus at the same time.

16

Del Taco around here runs their whole menu from 6am. Breakfast ends at 10am. So if you want an egg burrito at 7:30, you’re good, but if you want a dozen tacos and fries, you’re also good. Makes for a much more varied diet if you tend that way.

17

As a former Jack in the Box manager, I can attest that serving breakfast all day is a pain in the ass. Any time outside of breakfast hours, eggs have to be cooked to order, which instantly means you’re not making your speed of service goal for that order, and it’s damn near impossible to cook eggs on a grill you’ve been cooking hamburgers on for hours and not have it come out nasty.

18

This actually would have been a lot easier to do than “breakfast all day,” provided you were willing to wait for a few minutes. Breakfast was slower than lunch/dinner, didn’t demand use of the whole grill, and the demand for lunch items would have been fairly low, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to use part of the grill to custom-cook a couple of burgers, while tossing a handful of fries into the fryer, and putting a single bun on the toaster. The interesting side effect is that your food would be far more fresh than at lunch/dinner, since you’re guaranteed a freshly-cooked patty and fries, toppings have relatively recently been sliced instead of sitting around all day, bacon hasn’t been sitting under a heating element for hours, etc.

Fried chicken and roast beef would have been problematic, because both were labor intensive and took a long time to cook. But burger and fries? Sure!

19

Didn’t want to shamelessly ‘bump’ this after a day-and-a-half thread-layoff, but thank you for the responses regarding “grill space” - that had never even crossed my mind. And thank you Student Driver for the ‘personal old-days experience’ - very enlightening, and I do appreciate it.

Not sure if this requires a formal contact to a mod to have this thread closed, but my ignorance has definitely been fought.

20

Jack in the Box used to have croissant sandwiches for breakfast, too, and I remember liking them. I don’t know if they still have those sandwiches or not, it’s been a couple of decades back. Around here, there’s several places that are only open for breakfast and lunch, and their food is much tastier than any fast food place, and the price is just about the same. I don’t know how they do it.