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The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

mcdonalds.co.jp

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Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#231

Post by jimmydorry »

Barbing wrote: post #217
jimmydorry wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the Maccas app in Australia is atrocious for me. Takes >30secs to load the huge ad that pops-up before you can get to the menu. Close the ad and the menu takes another eternity, then inside each sub menu, you wait another eternity for the pictures to all load. Meanwhile, all of this content could just be downloaded in the background and cached for future loads... And the app continues to get worse each update. Th…

Is there anyone who uses the app and orders premium options and uses coupons that don't represent much of a discount... yet, the app STILL takes a long time to load? Causing delays for unprofitable customers. Any business is going to do it if they can. /tinfoil (Their margins shouldn't be this bad.)

I don't want to touch their greasy in-store touch screens that thousands of other people touch. And those "deals" are way cheaper per user than large marketing campaigns, and probably more effective too.

I wonder how slow you can make an app before a significant number of people will just order elsewhere? Give it a few more years of downgrades to the app, and I'll have reached it.

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#232

Post by rschiavone »

glenstein wrote: post #111
rappatic wrote: post #57

OP, I love not just that you noticed this, but that you thought to post it here too. HN is the best.

Yes! It's genuinely fascinating, and it's the kind of thing I trust this community to talk about in a reasonable way which is not quite always the case (Mozilla, many politics topics). But this feels like, potentially, AI prompting or even more interestingly an intentional stylistic choice.

In Japan, pictures of food are legally required to faithfully represent the actual food you get, AI-generated pictures wouldn't fly with their laws.

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#233

Post by a2128 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #120
bcrl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McDonalds actually seems to have learned to take latency seriously. When their touch screen ordering systems were first deployed, the delay between tapping on an item or button was quite noticeable. These days the systems respond nearly instantaneously. I'm very glad there are people inside such a large organization that pay attention to that aspect of usability. Now if only every other website on the internet would…

If that's true, then their mobile app team must be both completely separate and isolated from all communications. Because it's really bad. And it's been bad for a really long time. When all I want is to order a cheap cup of coffee, I get to stare at a throbbing box of fries while it tries to figure that out. Get to the restaurant and signal my arrival? More throbbing fries. Sometimes the fries never stop throbbing an…

I've never once been able to use the McDonald's app over several years and multiple devices. I originally wanted to check the nutritional info of the menu. Download our app, it says. This website is better in our app, it says. The order screen constantly asks me to enter my app code. Collect points in our App! Do you have our App? I give in and finally download the App. "Something's not quite right", you didn't install our app properly (Aurora Store instead of Google Play), you didn't set up your device properly (unlocked bootloader), you did something wrong to upset the App and it will not run. Oh no, we can't let you see the number of calories in your burger with an unlocked bootloader!!! This stupid app has stricter protection than any of my banking apps and I will never be able to escape constantly being asked to use it

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#235

Post by roncesvalles »

Barbing wrote: post #214
lostlogin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in food photography (in an admin role). Sprayed on glycerine for condensation on cool things. cigarette smoke for steam. It was super nasty, but the photos looked good.

I was told once everything in those food photos in the United States had to be edible. You could substitute sour cream, but not glue, for whipped cream. I wonder if that was true.

Elmers glue is edible.

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#236

Post by zarzavat »

SoftTalker wrote: post #152
jml7c5 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want them to take your order if you have access to a terminal?

Because it's 10x faster. In can say "big mac meal" and be done while the kiosk ordering machine is still loading the first screen.

Just wait until you have to make a complicated order in a country where people don't speak English very well, you will be very thankful for the kiosks. Even the US has two languages.

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#238

Post by ButlerianJihad »

Lucasoato wrote: post #237

Another mysterious thing is that McDonald's Japan burgers taste completely different from European or Americans. The spices and sauces there are not the same, I suspect they made it that way to make it tailored to the local preferences!

This is not so mysterious, when you consider the state of any ethnic food in the United States.

It is basically expected that any foreign chef must adapt their idea of cuisine to fit the available ingredients and processes in the host country. It is simply a fact of life that there are many fruits and vegetables, to begin with, that are rare or nonexistent here in the USA. And centuries ago, Chinese food as we know it originated in San Francisco, based on ingredients that could be readily acquired in San Francisco on an immigrant's budget.

Some produce and even animals can be cultivated stateside by immigrant communities, but it's simply prohibitive to try and exactly reproduce foreign cuisines here. You will basically find that American fruits, vegetables, and animals are adopted and "Western fusion" cuisine rules the roost here.

It may be surprising that a "Three-Ring Binder" franchise like McDonald's should have local variation, when their pride is being completely uniform and predictable in the USA. On any American highway I can pull into a McD's and count on having exactly the same meal as anywhere else. But if you cross an international border, a hemisphere, into new climates and terroirs, you should expect significant variation.

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#239

Post by seanhunter »

roncesvalles wrote: post #235
Barbing wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was told once everything in those food photos in the United States had to be edible. You could substitute sour cream, but not glue, for whipped cream. I wonder if that was true.

Elmers glue is edible.

Surely all glue is edible, you just have to commit a bit more to some glues than others.

It's like that saying about mushrooms: "All mushrooms are edible. It's just that some mushrooms you only get to eat once."

Re: The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

#240

Post by JSR_FDED »

glenstein wrote: post #111
rappatic wrote: post #57

OP, I love not just that you noticed this, but that you thought to post it here too. HN is the best.

Yes! It's genuinely fascinating, and it's the kind of thing I trust this community to talk about in a reasonable way which is not quite always the case (Mozilla, many politics topics). But this feels like, potentially, AI prompting or even more interestingly an intentional stylistic choice.

It’s clever, it makes the burger more “accessible” - you’re not thinking “how am I going to eat this tower of food”.
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