McDonald’s Removing Big Mac, Apple Pies And Eliminating Large Size Options
- Thread starter OntarioVanMan
- Start date
McDonalds is just another rest stop for civilians with kids because most of them have playgrounds and as you well know, one must constantly be entertaining the kids or you are a bad paraent...anyway, real expediters eat at Whataburger......................
Real expediters MaY eat at Whataburger, real people eat at home.
Eliminating two of their staple products? I guess their sales numbers will justify it, but still seems pretty odd to do. My very first "real job" was working at McDonald's during the lunch rush making BigMac's. I think I was making like 20 of them at a time. That great experience lasted for a whole 3 days before I quit
Yeah, there's no way they'd eliminate not only their Signature Sandwich, but the best selling sandwich on the menu. They're eliminating 8 items, and getting rid of some ingredients. Meaning, instead of 9 different Quarter Pounder variations, you'll have 1. Instead of 16 different Happy Meals, you'll have 11. Instead of 6 different Doubles, you'll have 1.
They are also starting a "Create Your Taste" thing where you order from a kiosk (like at Sheetz) and build your sandwich any way you want. That cleans up the menu a lot. They'll almost certainly have an app where you can oder right from your phone, too.
No tellin' which 8 items are the ones to be eliminated, but the Big Mac, Quarter Pounder, chicken and Fillet-O-Fish ain't on the list. I can see wraps going, along with the smoothies.
They are also starting a "Create Your Taste" thing where you order from a kiosk (like at Sheetz) and build your sandwich any way you want. That cleans up the menu a lot. They'll almost certainly have an app where you can oder right from your phone, too.
No tellin' which 8 items are the ones to be eliminated, but the Big Mac, Quarter Pounder, chicken and Fillet-O-Fish ain't on the list. I can see wraps going, along with the smoothies.
That's good. I thought something sounded errr fishy.
Snopes is on it
snopes.com: McDonald's Removing Big Mac, Apple Pies and Eliminating Large Size Options
I dunno the small wraps are pretty healthy calorie wise....the grilled chicken especially....
Just place your pointer over the pic and read the calorie and fat stuff.
Full Menu Explorer :: McDonalds.com
Full Menu Explorer :: McDonalds.com
At first blush it might seem like that, but no. As their menu has grown, so has the service times both inside and at drive-thru. Wendy's is still by far the fastest at drive-thru with 138 seconds. But 10 years ago, when they're menu was also much smaller, it was 116 seconds from menu board to getting your food. McDonald's has just crossed the 300 second barrier for inside wait times, which is no longer fast food, or Quick Service and their drive-thru times are 263 seconds.
McDonald's has added 40 items to its menu over the last 7 years (not including breakfast and the limited time stuff like the McRib), creating a more complex preparation, longer wait times, and more customer complaints. And over the same 7 years, customer counts and gross sales have been down 4 percent per year. That may not sound like a lot, but that's hundreds of thousands of customers who chose to go elsewhere to eat.
Dropping 8 items from the menu and consolidating the 9 different kinds of doubles you can get (difference between a double cheeseburger and a McDouble cheeseburger? Anyone? It's a slice of cheese) won't do what they need. They currently have 145 items on the menu. It needs to be below 90, and below 50 would be better.
They need to just kill off the Dollar Menu completely. Instead of being a loss leader, drawing people in so they spend on other menu items, it's just undercutting combo and other more profitable items. Not only that, the Dollar Menu guarantees that more people will judge McDonald's by its cheapest items and will judge the entire menu's quality by the Dollar Menu.
They want a cleaner menu board to make it easier for customers to figure out. Have you seen the menu board at Five Guys Burgers and Fries? There are more letters in their name than there are items on the menu. 23 in the name, 18 on the Menu. There ya go.
They don't sell very well, though. They're on the menu for PC reasons as much as anything. They probably have 15 or 20 items that are PC items. For that reason the wraps probably won't go away, but instead of having 3 different wraps (some locations have 5) they'll have just one.
And that's exactly what they're doing at the test locations (the ones Waco and Bakersfield, for sure, so I'm assuming the other locations are the same). They've cut down the Premium Chicken and the wraps down to one. The Quarter Pounders down to one. No more of the Bacon Habanero Ranch Bacon and Cheese Deluxe BBQ Bacon Angus Guacamole Quarter Pounder nonsense. It's a Quarter Pounder, and "What do you want on it?," kind of thing.
80 percent of McDonald's sales come from a whopping 44 menu items. They should concentrate on making those 44 items the absolute best they can be made. They rolled out a premium Angus burger and the execution (care in preparation and presentation) was no different than that of a Dollar Menu hamburger. One of the very first things I learned when training as a chef in a French kitchen was, "Always start with the best ingredients, and then don't **** it up!" McDonald's managed to **** up an Angus. I didn't know that was possible. So instead of fixing that, they replaced the Angus burger with three new Quarter Pounders, because that's the best they could do.
Remember the Big N' Tasty? It was a Quarter Pounder disguised as a Whopper. And they had 11 different variants of it. The same burger. It's a classic restaurant mistake. They almost all do it to one degree or another. Like the old Flying J restaurants where they had about 25 different ingredients, and tried to figure out how many different ways they could prepare different combinations of those ingredients, rather than try and figure out one or two ways to just nail it. They had 12 or 13 different dishes that used marinara sauce, but no matter what you ordered, they used the same pizza sauce on it, and all of them tasted the same - like pizza. Pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce are not the same. Their meatloaf, meatballs, Salisbury steak, and chopped beefsteak were all the same meat, which they also used as a pizza topping. The goal isn't good food when you have a bloated menu, the goal is to give as many choices as possible in the hopes that more people come. What happens is, the quality of everything then suffers, and people go elsewhere.
McDonald's need to drop to about 50 menu items, and do every one of them very, very well. And they should go back to deep frying the French fries in beef tallow like they did when they had the best fries on the planet (before 1990 - it was 93% tallow and 7% cottonseed oil), instead of the tasteless gritty golden cardboard they serve now. What they do now, is the fries and hashbrowns are processed with beef flavoring derived from hydrolyzed wheat and milk and fry them in a blend of 4 oils and 3 chemicals. The uncooked fries themselves contain 16 different things besides potato. Cooked McDonald's fries now have 24 ingredients plus salt. They used to consist of potatoes, tallow, cottonseed oil, and salt.
Or what gets reported in NRN and QSR, and from personal experience.
I have not had a Big Mac, or any other fast food hamburger, since March. I don't miss them at all!