The McDonald's chain has been struggling with falling sales for some time and everyone seems to have a theory as to why. Mine is a combo of new and better places to get a burger plus the notion that the whole concept of a McDonald's makes a customer feel like they're going into a childish place to buy toy food — and not particularly healthy toy food.
Once upon a time, one of the appeals of the chain was that dining there was utterly predictable and dependable. No matter where you travelled, you could find a McDonald's and you knew what you were going to eat and that the quality would be consistent and the price would not be outrageous and the restrooms would be clean and they wouldn't waste your time, etc. Back in the seventies and eighties when I was in strange towns, I usually would go to Breakfast at a McDonald's. My stomach isn't wild about unfamiliar food…and since Lunch and Dinner were (usually) at unfamiliar places, it seemed to make the ol' tummy happy to start the day with a Sausage Biscuit with Egg.
But these days, wherever there's a McDonald's, there's probably a Burger King or an Arby's or some other fast food place that provides the same safety…if that's what you want. And more and more people don't want that because fast food is more and more becoming what you eat when you care about cheap but don't care about good. It's no longer Your Kind of Place.
According to this article though, there is some good news for Ronald McDonald: Sales are up significantly since McDonald's finally bowed to consumer requests and began offering All-Day Breakfast. (Hey, how about that? Listening to customers! Why didn't anybody think of that years ago?)
Apparently, this complicates the food preparation process at your local McDonald's but it's turning out to be worth the trouble. If you ask me — and of course, no one ever does — what they need to do is complicate it a little more: Make it possible to go in and get a substantial hamburger — say, a third of a pounder — made to order and dressed the way the customer wants it. As it is, to get what you want, you have to select from the pre-fab menu and tell them to leave off the cheese or add more onion or some other alteration that seems to throw the counterperson and the cash register into a frenzy of confusion. I usually ask for a quarter-pounder-with-cheese without the cheese and they seem to think that runs contrary to some law of physics.
Or at least they did. I've pretty much given up Mickey D's because I felt bad creating a problem for those underpaid employees…and then creating another one when they give me the burger and I have to tell them it's wrong.