McDonald’s has the technology to fuck people via delivery.
It seems self-evident to say this, but you don’t go to McDonald’s for the service. Nor do you go there for great-tasting food. #obvious
Wait a minute. Why the fuck do you go there?
Oh yeah. Now I remember. Because you’re in a hurry and you need to cram something barely edible in your fucking eat hole because you think you’re hungry. (Even though that’s a sensation you’ve never really experienced.) Yeah, it all comes back to me now.
I’ve been vegetarian for over eight months now, so I seldom go to McDonald’s. However, they are still an option for breakfast.
A meal consisting of an egg, a slice of American cheese, an English muffin, butter, hash brown and a coffee is mostly harmless. Like an idiot, for most of the past eight months, I ordered the #1 breakfast combo, the “Egg McMuffin” meal, and said, “No Canadian bacon.” They happily charged me $3.99 per visit and never bothered to tell me a cheaper option was available. Not once.
At McDonald’s the concept of “let the buyer beware” is very much motherfucking in play.
Why should a business give a flying fuck about the customer of all people?
Recently I became aware (from a source other than McDonald’s) that you can order a “egg and cheese biscuit meal” and it’s only $2.50. This includes the sandwich, hash brown and small coffee. I actually think this is a fair deal. As such, you won’t find it on the fucking menu. I vastly prefer an English muffin to their shitty biscuits, but at that price, I don’t quibble over the kibble.
In other words, all those times I ordered the #1 without Canadian bacon I was financially slitting my own throat to the tune of $1.49 per visit. Call it the McDonald’s “We Shit On Our Customers” tax.
Since I ate breakfast there about a thousand times during the last eight months I figure McDonald’s owes me a rebate of about $1,490. I won’t hold my breath.
As a vegetarian, I’m used to being charged full prices when forced (due to a lack of vegetarian options on the menu) to order something and say, “No meat.” You think, in the name of good customer relations, they would automatically lower the price a bit (still in their favor) or allow you to make a simple substitution.
“Instead of two pounds of solid sausage could I get extra mushrooms?”
“Fuck you.”
Well played.
But that’s not my beef with McDonald’s that prompted this post.
Sometime during these last eight months I became aware of a disturbing aspect of the drive thru process. During the part of the process where you provide payment (pit stop #1) you are unable to engage in the act of actual conversation with the human being because they have been transformed into a part of the machinery. It’s part Death Star and part pod ala The Matrix.
The human being is even adorned with pieces of technology. (The communication headset.) This aspect is more like the Borg and serves to make them impersonal and unapproachable. The McDonald’s approach to customer service in the drive thru emphasizes the concept: “NO TALKING!”
This is reinforced by the fact that during the entire time you are interacting with this drone employee, they are engaged in the act of talking to someone else. Namely, the person in the car behind you.
The entire interaction is designed to prevent you, the person handing over money, from being allowed the basic human right of speech.
Actually, I have to marvel at the system they have come up with. I tip my hat to you, McDonald’s. It is fiendishly elegant in simplicity and in the depths of evil.
I came up against this phenomenon the other day when I ordered off-the menu to get my little vegetarian breakfast. (Eggs don’t count since I practice ovo-lacto vegetarianism.) The order taker seemed confused and the little computer display said $2.69 when she ordered me to pull up to the next window.
I was concerned. I wanted to make sure she had taken my order correctly. So I needed to ask her a question. Gasp! She was busy chatting away with someone more important than me so I wasn’t allowed to speak. So I waited patiently. Thank you, Ghandi, for teaching me the trick of passive resistance.
Finally after enough time had passed she realized something was amiss. There was a stuck cog on the assembly line. She turned to me with a look of extreme irritation and asked, “Is there a problem?”
I merely wanted to ask a question. Who said anything about a “problem?”
“I’d like to confirm my order please.” I felt like Oliver asking for more gruel.
She read back the litany of items that would become, at some point in my immediate future, a gross approximation of “breakfast.” The list was correct.
“That’s odd,” I said. “Last week it was $2.50. Have the prices changed?”
My curiosity was rewarded with the verbal equivalent of a sneer. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “Prices change all the time around here.” Ah, yes. I see. This must be one of the helpful people who didn’t bother to mention how I was being ripped off the last eight months.
The rest of her helpful response was implied. “Look, I’m just a monkey. I like bananas. You say what you want. I push the button on the machine that has the matching picture. Somehow it worky. Then you give me a plastic card. I do the magic thing with the plastic card. The green light goes on and I give it back to you. Then you leave. Then I get my banana.”
By the way, another point of this story is inflation. Yes, my waistline. But also the prices at McDonald’s. A jump from $2.50 to $2.69 turns out to be a whopper (heh!) of an increase. 7.6 percent. That’s not too shabby in a shaky (heh!) economy, eh?
They ought to print “let the buyer beware” on their straws, napkins, wrappers and cups because I’m sure as hell not lovin’ it. For price increases like that you’d think they’d roll out the red carpet rather than shit on you.
Shouts from the Abyss 
I find that the better the part of town, the nicer the staff. We here have a McDonalds where the staff are rude (my side) and at the other end of the road a place where the staff is far nicer.
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Perhaps you are onto something there. My experience it seems more hit and miss, even within the same restaurant.
I only have four McDonalds within a three-mile radius so it’s difficult for me to compare. Not. 🙂
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I have alot of weird food allergies,one of which is dairy, and whenever I order something there with no cheese, do you know what they do?? Do you? THEY PUT CHEESE ON IT. They are trying to kill me, I swear it.
And?I have a great Vegan cookbook called ‘How It All Vegan’- you **need** it.
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Asking for ANY modification to the food item is what I like to call “ordering off the menu.” It’s basically asking for them to butt f*ck your food.
I already told the story, but I’m never averse to telling it twice. My wife and I were going on a road trip. We decided to get a snack at Taco Bell. I told her I wanted a bean burrito. She asked if I wanted it with the red sauce. I said, “Yes. That’s how they come.”
At the drive thru she ordered my bean burrito and added, “Please make sure there is red sauce in it.”
Yep. You guessed it. Back on the highway I bit into that sucker. It contained NO red sauce. It was the worst burrito of all time.
I don’t care where I am or what I order. I never go off the menu. I can’t handle that much anger.
It’s too bad about cheese. Once it melts I imagine that’s a bitch to get out of there. Maybe you should have been allergic to pickles instead. Those would be a lot easier. Think about that next time you pick out your allergies!
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[…] to limit my exposure to a few times a month when I was running late and had nothing else to eat. I documented earlier how I started by ordering the Egg McMuffin meal with no meat. McDondald’s happily charged me […]
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