Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 611 posts

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#481

Post by nakedneuron »

auggierose wrote: post #214
goku12 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service. I don't know if HN is the place to say this. But, it's just infinitely better these days to cook your own meals. With some modest initial investment and planning, you can minimize the average time and cost of doing it, while still having access to a reasonaly healthy and delicious menu, though slightly repetitive. But if you real…

Yup. Something really simple and cheap, and definitely not worse in nutrition than McDonald's: Buy a pack of chicken legs, marinate them to your liking (for example: olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked or unsmoked paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, chicken or veggie bouillon cube), let them sit for an hour. Put it into the oven for 50min to an hour at 160 degrees Celsius. Cook rice on the side. After chicken legs are…

How about some vegetables?

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#482

Post by hackable_sand »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #475
fragmede wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being against lockdowns from day 1 wasn’t some principled pro social stance. Day 1 was when we had no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments, and hospitals were already buckling from basic spread. Opposing mitigation at that moment wasn’t foresight, it was ignoring exponential math. You can absolutely argue the execution was messy and the fallout was real. Lots of people agree with that. But holding up early blanket op…

[flagged]

Man, you are telling on yourself something bad right now :(

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#483

Post by hackable_sand »

lewiscollard wrote: post #190
FerretFred wrote: post #21

I can only speak for the UK but for quite a while now, McD's has become an uninviting experience, with miserable staff, menu screens that visibly tell you to hurry the f*k up and choose the product. Not to mention customers vying with delivery drivers for orders. I think the problem applies to all-income customers.

From the UK too, and your experience is matched by mine. The last time I was in one (I mean "the last time" in both senses of the words) I waited over 20 minutes for my food; I do not know how long it would have actually taken because at that point I got bored, wrote it off as a loss and walked out. No sense in complaining to anyone because that would have consumed even more of my time. McDonalds is not food and it i…

It is not apparent that we are ambivalent because of compensation.

I would argue an inverse corollary. I would argue that the most qualified people for the job are applying.

What I am noticing in my own work is fatigue from processing volume.

It's not personal. You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal. Only then we can actually solve your issue because we have a person to relate to.

I am curious about this notion that fast food workers don't care. I see it a lot. We absolutely care.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#484

Post by cheschire »

pjc50 wrote: post #352
goku12 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service. I don't know if HN is the place to say this. But, it's just infinitely better these days to cook your own meals. With some modest initial investment and planning, you can minimize the average time and cost of doing it, while still having access to a reasonaly healthy and delicious menu, though slightly repetitive. But if you real…

It always was? These discussions imply the existence of a large class of people subsisting primarily on restaurants and takeout, who surely are only a few percent of the population? Restaurants are for special occasions. McDonald's is, or used to be, a cheap "treat", or standard food for travellers.

Yeah in the documentary “supersize me” the subject says, while he ate 30 days straight of McDonald’s, that the restaurant considered a person who ate there once a week to be a heavy consumer.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#485

Post by auggierose »

nakedneuron wrote: post #481
auggierose wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Something really simple and cheap, and definitely not worse in nutrition than McDonald's: Buy a pack of chicken legs, marinate them to your liking (for example: olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked or unsmoked paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, chicken or veggie bouillon cube), let them sit for an hour. Put it into the oven for 50min to an hour at 160 degrees Celsius. Cook rice on the side. After chicken legs are…

How about some vegetables?

Feel free! Above recipe is simplified from this one, which includes veggies, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dooNCNUroWY

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#486

Post by HumanOstrich »

jltsiren wrote: post #402
johnisgood wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home. Cooking a stew of lentils or any other legumes is very easy and does not consume that much time either, and you can cook for 3 days easily. Why are people not doing this?

Cooking takes time and effort, which many people lack. You need to make an initial investment in utensils and appliances, which poor people can't always afford. And if you don't already know how to cook, learning it on your own can be risky. If you make a mistake, you may end up losing the food, which poor people again may not be able to afford. And learning it takes time and effort anyway. In many cultures, men trad…

I've been hooked on fast food before, and I still grab some on occasion, but I don't understand these common excuses for why people HAVE to consume fast food.

It's far cheaper to 1) buy unprocessed foods at the grocery store, 2) spend $20 a few times for cookware that will last plenty long enough, and 3) cook for 20min a day or do more preparation on the weekend. It doesn't require becoming a professional chef or buying appliances.

I think the main problem is that fast food is addictive and those who are vulnerable to that tend to make excuses for why they can't stop.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#487

Post by sillyfluke »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #475
fragmede wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being against lockdowns from day 1 wasn’t some principled pro social stance. Day 1 was when we had no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments, and hospitals were already buckling from basic spread. Opposing mitigation at that moment wasn’t foresight, it was ignoring exponential math. You can absolutely argue the execution was messy and the fallout was real. Lots of people agree with that. But holding up early blanket op…

[flagged]

Your comment above was sufficient, nothing here added additional meaningful information, it's not worth your time or the parent's to go down this road. It wasn't believed to be a flu in the beginning and I think the excess death stats bear that out. Once the people tracking it think it's equivalent to the flu, rigid policy makes less sense.

I wish people would just accept that public policy need not align with what's right for them personally based own their health own situation. I can simultaneously understand why a public policy of lockdowns on Day 1 makes sense, while at the same time fight for exceptions to the rules due to my personal situation. Everyone I think is aware that the future is personalised medicine, that we're at the very beginning of that awareness, and that the current state of the art in medicine is very crude from that perspective.

Hell, if we had infinite money we should have just sent anyone 60 plus or in ill health to Florida, Texas, SoCal and Mexico for a 6-months/year vacation and mandated that they try to spend most of their time outdoors.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#488

Post by HumanOstrich »

inglor_cz wrote: post #478
ragequittah wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get good enough cookware for the price of a couple of McDonald's meals too. We don't all need $100 pots and pans. I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. Watch a YouTube video and throw a couple of eggs in a $10 pan already.

"I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. " I am one of those people and I am arguing in good faith. I have seen it with my own eyes. It is not "just" skills or "just" kitchen or "just" utensils or "just" unfamiliarity with the basics or "just" being tired after getting home late (poor people often work bad schedules). It is a bit of everything, and the resultin…

Maintaining a fast food habit is both expensive and non-trivial. For the people who have to drive to get their fast food, at least you know they are capable of learning something more complex than cooking.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#489

Post by lvl155 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #37
jswelker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally... No they are not. My middle school daughter says many of her friends just eat ramen packets every night.

So even crappier food. The people have to be blamed for this at some point. Lower income Indian and East Asian families cook fresh food every night that probably costs less than $0.50 a plate. Beans, lentils, rice, eggs, pork and chicken can take you very far.

You just listed eggs, pork and chicken. They will run you way over $0.50 a plate. Even if you shop at absolute dirt cheap groceries, it’s more like $4-5 per plate when you factor in all the costs not including labor.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#490

Post by lvl155 »

fragmede wrote: post #362
epolanski wrote: post #358

I never understood how can eating at McDonald's be cheaper than cooking your own meals. I'm not from US, but checking US grocery shops, you can eat meals made of chicken breast, bread and vegetables well below 5$ per person, well below 20$ in total for a family of 4. Yet every time I see those discussions, fast food is always presented as a cheaper option?

Simple conomy of scale. McDonald's buy chicken in bulk from vendors, and get a better deal than Safeway/wherever you shop does, they get industrial bulk handing deals and yeah they have to pay for employees to cook the food, but that's amortized over all the other customers. So it can be cheaper, the same way that it's cheaper to get oil out of the ground, refine it, do a bunch of chemistry to it, form it into plasti…

Just a small note worth mentioning: McD do not buy things from anyone. They literally do it all from scratch. Vertically integrated.
Post reply on HN