He’d also appreciate it if you’d bring back the McMLT…

It was nearly 11 PM last night when I officially became a rebel. I did what others in America are no longer doing as much as they used to – I ate at McDonald’s.

After a fairly-exhausting 13 hour day at work, I found myself in Tyson’s Corner looking for a bite to eat. It’s clearly late, I hadn’t eaten lunch, and the grumbles in my stomach would have made my hour-long drive back home intolerable. I looked at the Faustian bargain placed before me, and chose the Golden Arches over a slightly-lower BMI.

Apparently, that makes me quite the rapscallion, as McDonald’s sales have taken a decided turn for the worse here in the United States. Domestic sales dropped 2.2% in May. It fell by 4% back in February. They’re closing more stores than they’re opening. This winter didn’t just suck for Boston, apparently.

Please do not get me wrong – McDonald’s is hardly delicious, nutritious food, and goodness knows you can get better burgers nearly anywhere. However, it will always have a place in my heart (and several arteries, much to my cardiologist’s dismay) as my first teenage job where I was treated reasonably like an adult, where my managers treated me decently and with a professional respect. While in high school in the late 1980s, I worked at the McDonald’s in Edgewater, Maryland – sometimes after school, but usually on weekends and on summer vacation mornings. I quickly became the biscuit maker since I could get up at the back-crack of dawn, enjoyed baking, and could stand in front of hot ovens all day and not complain. This is back when McDonald’s actually made the biscuits with real buttermilk, in the stores. They weren’t pre-packaged and shipped from some remote warehouse – a real live person made them in-house. Our biscuit ovens were next to the flat-top where we made the Hot Cakes – from a mix, granted – but they were at least cooked on site, not simply shipped and reheated.

What’s more, I worked at the “good” McDonald’s, and not that “bad” McDonald’s on West Street in Annapolis. Remember when there were “good” McDonald’s and “bad” McDonald’s? Many customers genuinely believed that some McDonald’s were better than others, and they weren’t wrong! Ours was clean, safe, well-managed, efficient drive-through, with solid maintenance and properly stored materials. That West Street location, though – it was a little dirtier. A slower drive through. Maybe not as well-managed. Definitely a staff that cared less.

The good Mickey D’s used the proper amount of burger seasoning, not too much salt on the fries, accommodated special requests, followed the suggested hold times on such things like the McNuggets and made sure fresh biscuit sandwiches were available during breakfast. The bad McDonald’s would let food sit in the warming trays and staging area for hours at a time. They’d simply wipe the onions and pickles off a bun rather than spending the two minutes to make a fresh burger with a clean bun. Those bad McDonald’s wouldn’t use the seasoning for the Quarter Pounders while they sizzled away on the cooking platens. God forbid you ask for fries without salt!

That is not what McDonald’s stands for nowadays. Right now, you can go into any McDonald’s in any state and get a meal that tastes almost exactly like one in another state, which is their worldwide goal. However, instead of bringing up the “bad” MickeyD’s, they simply baselined the good ones down. In their never-ending quest to keep profits up and costs down, they eliminated tons of the in-store prep and cooking variables. The company has automated so much of the cooking process, they’ve taken out much of the human element of cooking.

And I think that’s where their salvation lies – bringing back a more personal experience, and less of a food-factory.

Here’s a few things I’d do, if I had the ear of relatively-new CEO Steve Easterbrook:

1) Add more Mexican/Central American items – in most cities, McDonald’s hires folks from southern countries with varying degrees of English-speaking ability. Which, coming from a white guy, sounds like it could be a criticism, but it’s not where I’m going with this. Instead, I say “let them cook a few things they know how to make from their home countries.” McDonald’s can still offer burgers and fries and shakes and such, but a proper taco or a plantain wouldn’t hurt. Maybe some yucca fries? A McDonald’s cook could throw down a flour tortilla, chop up a McChicken filet, add some lettuce, shredded cheese and some salsa – all easy-to-acquire ingredients, many already in the restaurants – and making a McTostada or McQuesadilla or some such name.

It also doesn’t hurt that the fastest-growing population segment in the US are Spanish-speaking, and offering them more foods that are somewhat akin to their homelands may not be the worst thing. No wonder sales are down in McDonald’s domestically- they’re not making things that are familiar with new residents of the US.

2) Steamed burgers suck. Unless you’re talking about a Juicy Lucy, that is. Bring back the flat-tops or even go with a grill. Burger King’s fake flame-grilled taste is lousy, but it does give more flavor than McDonald’s bland-burger. Keeping those patties in the steamed heating trays is a sure-fire way to kill any flavor other than “meh.”

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