what an austere dumb cheap fucking company. i went in last week and there wasn’t anywhere to get my own soda or ketchups or anything, just a plain dining room. i loved waiting 10 minutes for the 1 guy slaving away back there to get my drink with the food as well instead of having cups by the order kiosk, which WORKED FOR YEARS AND YOU STILL PROFITED HANDSOMELY YOU FUCKING CHEAP FUCKS GOD IT MAKES ME SO SICK IT NEVER ENDS
next they’re going to phase out menus, it’s just 1 button you hit it and it takes $20 from your checking and they give you berder and 10 grammes of french fries
what a fucking dogshit world. companies used to actually give a shit about UX, but now they’re making it as shitty as possible out of attrition
It makes sense to just have one machine that employees have to maintain and refill. Sounds like you can still ask for a refill.
Go to 7/11 if you want to make your gross soda combos lol
As a former fast food employee, I promise you that it’s much better having to clean an additional machine once a day and occasionally attach a new box of syrup than it is to have to constantly refill drinks for customers, especially considering how annoying the general public are to serve
I think the corporate goal here is that most customers won’t bother asking someone to refill their soda because they don’t want to wait for it.
Why are soda combos gross but alcohol combos are not?
People will spend $15 on a cocktail with olives and shit in it, but no we gotta draw the line at people putting a splash of Mr. Pibb into their Coke Zero…
(I love self-serve fountain drinks and I’ll die on this hill, motherfuckers.)
I’m gonna die on this hill with you! 👍
Edit: Where TF you find Mr. Pibb these days?
People constantly steal from self-serve fountains (walk in off the street with their own cups), so this is inevitable.
Won’t sombebody think of the 0.000000001% of corporate profits being lost to rogue refillers off the streets?
I don’t disagree, but, I mean, this attitude is kinda exactly why they are going away…
Fountain soda costs a few pennies per gallon, the lost earnings of which would ordinarily be counted as small beans compared to the wages saved by reducing the bodies you need to pay to run your restaurant. The pandemic taught companies though that you don’t need a body for every job, you need only as many as it takes to keep the door unlocked. The single person whipped and frantic doing the jobs of eight people will just have to work harder and maybe next year they’ll get a fifteen cent raise
that’s an individual store problem. it isn’t one at most stores with self-serve fountains.
many mcdonalds even put self-serve cup dispensers next to the self-serve kiosks, which would make it even easier to grab a freebie.
eliminating 1-3 fountains from every store reduces the maintenance part of their coke contract by a not-insignificant amount. that’s the primary motivation here. the somewhat long time frame would be required to accommodate terms of existing contracts and changeovers would happen as those are renewed or renegotiated.
Bottom tier food. Bottom tier company. I don’t know why anyone eats this level of trash anymore. Inflation has hit fast food harder than other types of restaurants, or groceries. It doesn’t make sense justifying paying these prices for this when you can get better food for comparable prices now. There used to be an expectation that this food would at least be cheap.
This food was never cheap tbh
The point was convenience - a hot and ready to eat meal that you can grab at any time and don’t have to prepare yourself.
It used to be cheap. It wasn’t that long ago there was a dollar menu. Now a cheeseburger is $2.79.
You could always make a cheaper burger yourself. Yeah a pack of buns and and pound of burger would cost more, but per burger it was always cheaper.
They had a thing called the dollar menu for decades.
During the 90s-2000s, they’d have hamburger Tuesdays where you can buy a hamburger for like $0.29 cents.
They had ads where families would come with “a few bucks” and feed everyone.
during that time, you could get whopper or jumbo jack or big 'n tasty, etc. for 99c just about everywhere. 3 bucks was all it took to eat lunch…
even less if you ordered the ‘all american meal’ at mcdonalds: small hamburger or cheeseburger, small fries, small drink. was only $1.79 or $1.89. wasn’t always on the menu board, but i never encountered a store that didn’t sell it even if it wasn’t.
its almost 12 bucks just to get a whopper ‘meal’ here now.
I survived on one meal a day at McDonald’s when I was stuck doing day labor in Seattle around the 2002 crash.
Back then it was actually cheap to get enough food to survive on for under 5 bucks. I remember the 20 cheeseburger and hamburger deals they had twice a week.
The price increases to cheeseburgers really hurts, when that was usually my main dollar menu deal.
I used to get 3 double cheeseburgers and a large tea for $4.20 including tax. McDonald’s and Little Caesars were by far the cheapest meals I could buy unless you want to count ramen noodle packs. Groceries were way more expensive. Now both are expensive LOL.
You could get a pound of ground beef and a pack of burger buns and I think the one time I did the math it came out to 80 cents a burger.
But Mountain Dew isn’t served at McDonald’s. Taco Bell has it. You’re good.