Hi Lynn! I happen to live practically across the street from the local JitB, and am a happy regular customer of the place. They have no croissants, as far as I can see*. But you say a “couple decades back”, which is about how long it’s been since I did the croissants at Arbys.
But I do love me some Jack. 29 years in the restaurant business, starting in fast food and working my way up, and this local Jack has been a welcome return to the quality and service I remember from all those years ago.
*to “see” would require my walking over there and inspecting the menu, but it’s 3AM on a Saturday and I’m full of beer (holy crap, even drunk I’m able to catch my typos before posting… damn I’m good)
There’s a local burger joint that I love. I used to think that I’d lost my taste for fast food, but it turns out that most chains have just been lowering the bar, slowly but steadily. A quality burger with fresh toppings on a good bun is still a joy. Too bad that most chains don’t offer this.
I love a good hamburger too, and I like the way my local Jack makes 'em. I’ve been meaning to write a letter to the owner of the place, identifying myself as an near-30-year veteran of the restaurant business, congratulating him, his management, and his crew. Having started my restaurant career in fast food, back when I was 17, I’ve recognized this “lowering the bar” you mentioned. This JitB opened about 4 years ago, and I’ve not ceased to be impressed with how the place operates.
I understand the problems with most items on off times, but I think McD’s could/should provide at least a standard Egg McMuffin at anytime, utilizing a small plug in grill for the eggs to order.
I doubt there would be a rush on them, only like 1 an hour.
The average McDonalds would probably literally only sell one or two McMuffins an hour (if that) after the noon hour, and for the minuscule amount of profit they would generate, it’s clearly not worth the hassle.
For me, as someone who doesn’t eat meat, an Egg McMuffin–hold the ham–is one of the only things McDonalds offers that has any kind of appeal, (even though I only have one every five years or so) so I personally wouldn’t mind if they were available all day, but it makes no sense from a business perspective…
I read an article about 5 years ago that said McDonalds was testing 24 hours breakfast at some stores. If they haven’t rolled it out nationwide, I’d assume the test didn’t go well.
All I will say is I hate it when I’m that guy waiting in a slow-moving line at McDonald’s just before 10:30 and as soon as I reach the speaker the menu boards flip around to the lunch menu and I get greeted with “Hi, welcome to McDonald’s, we are now serving lunch!”.
Noooooooo!!!
There’s a scene (if I’m remembering right) where he gets to the head of the line only to be told they’re no longer serving breakfast. Rampage ensues. Scene.
Unless things have changed, McD’s uses fresh eggs. They did in the mid 90’s when I worked a stint there. The pancakes were also fresh made from batter on a special pain-in-the-ass grill we had to wheel out and plug in and then scrub clean. I burnt many a knuckle scrubbing that ting right after the breakfast shift so we could put it away.
Burger King had a “burgers for breakfast” promotion years ago with their entire standard menu available. I think these days it’s just one burger option but I never eat there anyway to know for sure.
It’s not a matter of “inconveniencing the fry cook that much”. McDonalds is like a food factory. More accurately it’s a complex supply chain and manufacturing and distribution network that takes inputs from cows and …other stuff..and produces a burger like object at the other end. And that hamberger basically looks and tastes exactly the same no matter where you buy it and you always get it in a few minutes or less. The fry cook is less of a cook and more of a biological factory component, assembling Mcburgers and McChickens and whatnot.
For you it’s a minor inconvenience to request a special order, but if all of a sudden every third order is a special one, across all ten billion mcdonalds restaurants, the entire system breaks down.
And basically the reason McDonalds doesn’t serve breakfast all day is that the executives, probably at on the advice of McKinsey management consultants backed by Gartner industry analysis, and leveraging data collected from SAP systems installed by Accenture have determined that not enough people want breakfast after 11:00am to make it profitable to run both the breakfast AND the lunch process.
I can’t believe I missed that reference as I have seen that movie, but when I think of it all I can think about is the golf course scene. In fact, my brother and I still say “get off my golf course” to each other every so often.
Just now saw a TV commercial that said McDonalds (at least the ones around here) have now begun offering breakfast items starting at midnight and serving them up until 10:30 AM.
I didn’t realize that McDonalds are now 24 hours, but I guess they must be…
