Did you know that Arby's got rid of their potato cakes? They were a menu option for as long as I've been going (occasionally) to Arby's, which is maybe twice per non-Pandemic year. I assume it was not my lack of patronage that caused them to ditch this long-standing menu item. We live in a world where almost everyone loves french fries and if you ask them if they'd prefer an order of potato cakes with their roast beef sandwich, most would tell you, "I don't know what the hell potato cakes are but they couldn't possibly be better than french fries!"
And you know something? They weren't. But as I recall back in the Pleistocene Epoch when I began going to Arby's, they didn't have french fries. They had potato cakes so I ordered potato cakes. Later on, they offered your choice of potato cakes, seasoned curly fries or regular french fries and I kinda went eenie-meenie-minie-mo and then got the seasoned curly fries. But sometimes I'd opt for the potato cakes, which tasted a lot like what some other fast food places serve at Breakfast and call "hash browns."
Apart from when Scott Shaw! and I produced some giveaway comics for Burger King, I've never been employed by a fast food restaurant…although I did work for Hanna-Barbera for a number of years. If I was ever in charge of the menu at one of those chains, I think I'd pay me a lot of money and acquire my mother's recipe for potato latkes. They might turn out to be too labor-intensive for the industry…although that industry did manage to dumb-down Eggs Benedict into the Egg McMuffin. But if you could find a way to mass produce Mom's Potato Pancakes in a drive-thru environment and price them modestly, no one would ever order fries or hash browns ever again. And certainly not potato cakes…the side dish no one will ever miss.