What The Heck Has Happened to McDonalds?

prime minister

prime minister

Site Owner
Staff member
As a kid of the 70s, it sure is sad to see what has happened to our beloved McDs. The food wasn’t necessarily good for you (though no where near as bad as Supersize Me tried to show. From what I heard, the guy was a raging alcoholic and the liver damage shown was caused by that), but it was cheap, convenient and engineered to taste good. Plus, it was consistent in quality, the service was fantastic, the food was delivered quickly, and the smiles were free. The design of the restaurants, both inside and out, was meant to make it all seem fun. What could be better?

Well, something had certainly gone wrong. There stores look like generic office blocks now. The play places are gone. The inside is just generic grey, like a bad IKEA kitchen. Food and service? Meh. The free smiles are long since removed from the menu. And you are now supposed to order from a vastly oversized iPad, that is designed, and very effectively at that, to squeeze more money out of you.

Oh yeah. Money. Have you seen the pricing? I checked the price up here recently, and found that it would have cost me almost $18 to walk out with a large Big Mac meal. $18?????

How clueless is their executive team to think their customers will be good with this?

And speaking of clueless executives, anyone wanna bet that this guy has never eaten at McDonalds before? “Oh yeah. So good”. Before taking a bite.






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The Extra Value Meal menu was from the mid 90s apparently. So I ran the Big Mac meal price through the inflation calculator, to see what that translates to. Using 1995 as the base year, corrected for inflation, that Big Mac meal should now cost $6.33. Yeah. Good luck with that.

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A friend posts on FB the other day that she ordered a Quarter Pounder with no onions via the drive thru. When she got down the road and open up the sandwich, it was two buns with ketchup slather on them........nothing else!!
 
Profits over quality. It’s the modern corporate executive culture. Short term profits designed to boost stock prices at the expense of long term well-being of the company. There’s even a word for it. Welchism. Many blame Jack Welch and his disciples with starting the trend. We had one at Chrysler for a while. Robert Nardelli did nothing but cut costs, including laying off gobs of folks from engineering when we were owned by Cerebus.
 
Last edited:
JoeThePop said:
Profits over quality. It’s the modern corporate executive culture. Short term profits designed to boost stock prices at the expense of long term well-being of the company. There’s even a word for it. Welchism. Many blame Jack Welch and his disciples with starting the trend. We had one at Chrysler for a while. Robert Nardelli did nothing but cut costs, including laying of gobs of folks from engineering when we were owned by the Cerebus.
Click to expand...
From what I’ve read, it started before Nardelli. The Daimler Benz folks pulled as much money out of Chrysler as they could, stave off their own possible bankruptcy. They turned what was the world’s most profitable auto manufacturer on a per vehicle basis in the mid 90s, into the basket case that Cerberus bought. And then proceeded to totally run into the ground. Very sad.
 
prime minister said:
From what I’ve read, it started before Nardelli. The Daimler Benz folks pulled as much money out of Chrysler as they could, stave off their own possible bankruptcy. They turned what was the world’s most profitable auto manufacturer on a per vehicle basis in the mid 90s, into the basket case that Cerberus bought. And then proceeded to totally run into the ground. Very sad.
Click to expand...
Yes i should have added that. They called it Material Cost Management (MCM). It was in all of our goals for years, and all the groups were graded on how many ideas they input for cost savings, and how many ideas were adopted. They cheapened the interiors of all our vehicles (not Mercedes of course) until our interiors became the laughing stock of the industry. All cheap, hard plastic. Something very noticeable to the reviewers and the customers. Other things not so noticeable to the customer led to their own problems. I was working on powertrain wiring at the time and we removed little red locks (known as connection position assurance) that made sure a connection was fully seated. Whoops. We started experiencing faulty taillights that was traced back to poor connections. A safety item! And we saved a couple of pennies per harness by removing the safety lock. Idiots!!!

And then after all this they dumped us and the billions of dollars that was in the bank when we “merged” was gone.

Oh and the Chrysler CEO (Robert Eaton) when we merged took his golden parachute and was never heard from again.

Again, I’m not bitter.
 
So I stumbled across what is the most likely reason for McDonald’s buildings (and other fast food places) looking generic. It’s all about real estate. McDonald’s is a huge landowner and what is easier to sell if you close a store. Yep, a generic box. Saw other examples like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut that also used to have very distinctive stores that are being replaced by generic boxes.

 
JoeThePop said:
Yes i should have added that. They called it Material Cost Management (MCM). It was in all of our goals for years, and all the groups were graded on how many ideas they input for cost savings, and how many ideas were adopted. They cheapened the interiors of all our vehicles (not Mercedes of course) until our interiors became the laughing stock of the industry. All cheap, hard plastic. Something very noticeable to the reviewers and the customers. Other things not so noticeable to the customer led to their own problems. I was working on powertrain wiring at the time and we removed little red locks (known as connection position assurance) that made sure a connection was fully seated. Whoops. We started experiencing faulty taillights that was traced back to poor connections. A safety item! And we saved a couple of pennies per harness by removing the safety lock. Idiots!!!

And then after all this they dumped us and the billions of dollars that was in the bank when we “merged” was gone.

Oh and the Chrysler CEO (Robert Eaton) when we merged took his golden parachute and was never heard from again.

Again, I’m not bitter.
Click to expand...
Yeah, and the CPAs that were used break the first time you try to remove them!

Dan
 
JoeThePop said:
So I stumbled across what is the most likely reason for McDonald’s buildings (and other fast food places) looking generic. It’s all about real estate. McDonald’s is a huge landowner and what is easier to sell if you close a store. Yep, a generic box. Saw other examples like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut that also used to have very distinctive stores that are being replaced by generic boxes.

Click to expand...
I think it’s worse than that. $10 days there was an MBA in there who decided that the new designs would appeal to a new and larger demographic.
 
JoeThePop said:
Profits over quality. It’s the modern corporate executive culture. Short term profits designed to boost stock prices at the expense of long term well-being of the company. There’s even a word for it. Welchism. Many blame Jack Welch and his disciples with starting the trend. We had one at Chrysler for a while. Robert Nardelli did nothing but cut costs, including laying off gobs of folks from engineering when we were owned by Cerebus.
Click to expand...
Yep. Quarterly profit over long-term gain. Got us where we are now.
 
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