Fast Food Blogging #2

Last night I stopped by my favorite, McDonald's, on the way home from class. I went to the one on Peachtree in Brookehaven, right across from the MARTA station. For those of you who aren't familiar with my strange, yet predictable, eating habits, I like to get the #3 with only mayo and ketchup. In laymen's terms, that means two quarter pound burgers with two slices of american cheese, one sesame seed bun, a squirt each of may and ketchup, and a healthy dose of grease. Fries and a soda are included.

This particular McDonald's has a 24 hour drive-thru, but runs out of monopoly pieces way too fast. And when they do have them, they tend to conveniently mess up your order so you don't get as many pieces as you were supposed to. I ordered the chicken selects value meal large sized once, which is supposed to net you 6 pieces. After waiting like 5 minutes so they could cook the chicken, they tried to foist a medium fry on me, saying I had oreder only the drink large. WHy the hell I would take a smaller fry when I've paid the same as for a large fry is beyond me. This is like the time I was charged like $4.11, so I gave the lady $5.11, and she gave me $0.99 back. I looked at her like she was nuts and asked for a dollar. She said I never gave her the extra penny, which was total BS, but even if I hadn't, isn't it logical at the point to ask me for a penny? I obviously wanted a whole dollar, or I would have just given her a five dollar bill.

The other thing that's different about this McDonald's is the drive-thru setup itself. Ever since Dave Thomas put a drive-thru in a Wendy's, fast food chains have realized they can utilize the technique to raise sales and lower costs. Now McD's has decided to try some double drive thrus. I've been to two locations with doubles, one in serial, one in parallel. I ahven't figured out the point to either. When it's parallel (two seperate order lines that merge to one past the microphones), they tend to get confused about which car ordered what, which seems like a pretty obvious reason not to set it up like that in the first place. When it's serial there two order boxes in the same line, so your car and the one behind can both be ordering at the same time, except for another obvious problem: There's only one person taking the orders one the other end, and they can't listen to two different orders at once! They may do it different when it's really busy, but as yet I've never seen the serial system actually being used.

My food last night was pretty good. Well the burger (double quarter with cheese, of course) was good, even though the patties were offset from each other instead of centered on each other and the bun. I'd like to hope that's because they slid around in transit, but maybe the burger maker couldn't stack well. My fries were slightly undercooked, but mostly just cold. Oh well. The burger is the most important part anyway. And the drive thru? Nowhere close too fast, but still way faster than the last time I went to that McDonald's and they comitted the cardinal sin of fast food. They decided to wait until they were completely out of cooked fries and my order was all ready to go except for the fries before they put more in the fryer, so I had to wait first for my burger to be completely made, and only then did the timer begin on the fries being cooked. I think it takes between 3 and 4 minutes to fry a bag of those things. In the long run that's not much time, but when you'r sitting in car without a radio, and you're really hungry, it seems like forever. I'd think that someone could have noticed they were about to run out of fries and done something about it before they were completely out and needed more, but I guess that's too much to ask.

I've got more insight in to fast food, garnered from years of experience, but I don't want to give up all my secrets yet! Someday soon I will have an interview with my friend Aron Katz, a former McDonald's employee who shares both my love and knowledge of the franchise.