Does McDonald's have the best skills in baking the best burgers?
92You can have it your way- oh wait . . .
First, we need to clarify what McDonalds is and isn't. McDonalds is not in the hamburger business. Sure, they make and sell more burgers than anyone else in the world, but that's because they are super good at their first business. Real Estate.
McDonalds is one of the largest owners of real estate in the world! Know what a ground lease is? Ask a franchisee! Once upon a time, McDonald's fried their burgers right there in the restaurant. I remember going on Sundays with my grandparents to the one McDonalds on Main Street and you could smell the burgers cooking from blocks away! Now, they are processed (notice I didn't say cooked), freeze dried, shipped to the store location, and microwaved on order!
Heck, even Burger King used to grill them up on premises, but too many underpaid idiots would get burned on the grill, and some lawsuit hungry ambulance chasers started circling the parking lot, waiting for a grease splatter to happen. Now BK nukes their patties too!
So McDonald doesn't really bake burgers, they make a process. Everything is a system, and if you ever want to open your own business, you couldn't find a better model to follow.
The system is so simple now, that in some McDonald's, they don't even need the greeter/cashier. Walk up to a screen, press your touch screen buttons and your micro-nuked burger, and pressed potato flake fries with the salty crack on them pop out of a slot. And yes, they have to use crack on their french fries. How else could you explain how addictive they are.
Don't get me wrong, I love McDonalds. I like the fact that I can cross this country and get the same taste place after place. Of course, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should, so let me also recommend searching out every mom and pop roadside greasy spoon that still serves up hand patted "patties" (ever wonder where the name comes from) and coke from a bottle, and fries with the skin still on. That's a real hamburger. And if you slap on a slab of cheddar, then you get a cheeseburger from paradise.
So while McDonalds may fall short in the taste competition, they are by far the hands down winner in any burger war. They own more locations, their system is better than anyone else's, and they use subliminal messages in their commercials to subvert my children. It has to be true, because every single time I ask my kid's what they want to eat, they scream HAPPY MEAL! And me being the World's Best Dad (I've got the trophy and coffee mug to prove it!) I have to give in to their screams and entreaties to go. I do make them eat a little before hitting the playland, and as I sit and finish their gnawed discs masquerading as hamburgers, I have to wonder: maybe this company isn't in the burger business after all. They're in the toy business. After all, I've got about one hundred million tiny little plastic movie mementos scattered around the house and in every crevice.
All from McDonald's. A burger joint that gives away toys. A real estate company that makes their business people lease the store that they buy the business in. It's the model for the perfect business . . just not the perfect burger, which you can find on Hwy 61 in Scott, AR at a place called Cotham's, a hubcap burger (yes it's that big) with fried green tomato's and hand cut fries, and yes please, a big old glass of sweet tea.
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McDonald's in India, too, with the little toys!
Loved your hub, with your brand of humour!
Very interesting, 'Microwaved burgers'!
No so tasty but still Great HUB as always
regards Zsuzsy
I would not eat a McdOnald's burger but there is a great place just outside of Edmundston NB that makes a wonderful burger and the best fries i have had in sometime.
Okay Tim here goes. I got the idea they were freeze dried because I have eyeballs that work. When I take my children to McDonalds, I can see through the window where they are preparing the food. That's called a prep area. In the prep area, I watch as they pull my hamburger patty from a plastic tray and put it in the microwave. I then can see them slap together the ingredients, pile it in a box, and shuffle it out to me. Sometimes they thank me for waiting.
As to the process for how a patty ends up freeze dried and microwaved, I won't get into an arguement with you on it.
If you worked for McDonalds sometime in the past, you may have indeed cooked a burger on a grill. Go to the store now. They do not have a grill. There are safety issues with uneducated teenagers who may feel litigious. I don't know. I have never been invited to a McDonald's corporate board meeting where they decided to create everything offsite and ship it to the individual stores for reheating.
The deletion of your previous post was because you seemed like a person hired by McDonalds to peruse message boards and websites, and blogs looking for defaming material, and then responding.
You can't verify gravity, but you can see it. You can see the microwaves in McDonald's. Please report this back to your superiors. And if you are an outsourced worker with nothing better to do than miss every single layer of humor, then please join me in an eat off. You can have a freeze dried and microwaved Big Mac. I will continue to enjoy my freeze dried and microwaved cheeseburger with processed yellow goop on top.
The song says it all Tim. Two all beef patties. Nothing about flame broiled. Nothing about fresh off the grill. Just beef.
Now, if you do have this much time on your hands to post little comments on my hub, may I please refer you to BUSINESSWEEK. They did an article about McDonald's sometime in the past 3 years, and how food is made in one location to be shipped somewhere else. You may also refer to INC magazine, or FORTUNE, I can't remember which, on cost cutting business decisions that corporations make that affect our everyday lives. Again, you're going to have to go back 3 years on this one, because I don't have the exact dates.
If you still have time, Tim, and my guess is that you're billing your corporate employer by the hour (and if you're not, perhaps you should). You can also visit Business 2.0 archives (sadly, they are no longer publishing) and FAST COMPANY. These two publications have also contributed something in the recent past.
Good luck, and happy hunting.
Here's the thing about James, Tim and those other UNVERIFIED posters- they are not members of this community nor do they write.
So now here's my post on big corporations who hire trolls, people who search the internet to post to blogs and articles that present the company in a negative manner.
None of these guys worked AT McDonald's. No doubt they work FOR McDonalds. The reason I haven't posted as much lately is my marketing company is taking off, and guess what one of the services on our MENU happens to be? That's right, its a PR tactic.
But I'll keep these posts up here, because it's part of McDonald's story they are sharing with the consumer: except the only people who keep reading this hub are the guys from McDonalds. Tim, James, heck, they could all be the same person, and that's the BIG PROBLEM with anonymous posting. There's no accountability, no trackback, no way to make sure JAMES can back up what he's saying.
I'm a real person, unlike McDonald's processed "meat" burgers. Sure, they're all beef, but which parts?
James and Tim on the other hand are figments of a corporation's imagination. And like ghosts, you shouldn't pay attention to them, because they are not real.
i currently am being hired by mcdonalds and am being trained and they are pre-frozen pre-cooked patties but we do not microwave them they do get shoved on a grill but we only do it long enough to de-freeze them and heat them up at the same time we throw buns on another smaller grill to warm them the buns come off and we flip the patty then we shove condiments on the buns laying on the wrapper(or in the box) and then we know our patty is done we press it with the spatula and then we shov eit in the bun and voila u have your pre-frozen pre-cooked processed mcdonalds hamburger! BTW the fries are frozen as well th only thing you get there thats fresh is if we are so busy we run out of supplies then we go to the local grocery store and buy fresh ingredients so come just before closing on a busy day u might get something good and teenagers cant sue BTW because when you start there you sign a binding contract saying they arent liable for our stupidty basically
jim.sheng says:
2 years ago
Thank you very much. I have learned a lot from your hub.
Surely, McDonald's is another toys 'R' us. I have a large plastic bag of McDonald's tiny toys, maybe several hundreds of little tiny toys, in my house left by the former tenant, all marked "Made in China". Although they are very lovely Disney animation figures, my 3-three-old daughter doesn't like them very much.