It’s a little depressing when a brand you’ve trusted all your life turns its back on what made it great.
I have no inside information on what caused it. But there’s strong feeling of a C-Something person in there who can’t resist the sweet taste of large labour cuts, enabled by shiny new tech.
Like the sweet purple taste of Grimace Shake, there’s an upfront pleasure hit. But the jury is very much out on the long-term health effects.
I speak of McDonald’s, one of the greatest brands that ever bestrode the earth. Snobs can say what they like about McDonald’s, but they’ve been champions at delivering certainty for customers. There’s no risk when you spend your money there. You know what you’re getting with unbelievable consistency.
As Rory Sutherland says, on the scale of dining experiences: McDonalds might not be very good, but they’re very good at not being terrible. Until I watched that video, I did not know Usain Bolt did his last two weeks of Olympic prep on a pure diet of McNuggets.
I don’t eat as much McDonald’s now compared to my young parent years. And it’s a very long time since I ate the entire burger menu in one sitting to win a bet. But I do spend a fair bit of time driving on country highways and McDonald’s is often the only reliable place open.
It’s interesting to see it change recently. You order in the touchscreen forest out front. There are no McDonald’s staff visible. They’re all cogs in the hidden machine out back.
There’s an empty counter, where orders are dropped out in a sort of Whack-A-Mole scene. A nervous-looking staff member jumps out from behind a wall, drops the food, shouts the order number, and scampers back out of view before there’s a chance for human interaction.
Customers dump their tickets on the counter. So the counter and the floor within a five-metre radius are covered in dozens of discarded and screwed-up tickets. It looks like the bookmakers’ ring after a long, drunk day at the races.
Because the staff are all hiding back-of-house, nobody sees the front-of-house mess. It extends to the whole dining area. Tables are stacked with piles of wrappers and used cups. Seats have sticky food spillage. It’s a noticeably grottier experience now.
I’ve asked around the frequent McDonald’s users in my social circle, who have also noticed.
Yes, McDonald’s sells food. But its brand promise for decades has been a clean, reliable place to feed the family when you’re in a hurry. You could rely on sparkling bathrooms and wholesome cheerful staff.
What’s changed? And another clue as to why comes from Uncle Rory again. They’ve worked out the other benefit of the screens. Apart from cutting labour costs, guys buy more food when they’re ordering on a screen. Because there’s no human judging your greed when you order two burgers as part of one meal for yourself.
The data does not lie: sales go up when screens go in.
The demographic most likely to order a multi-burger meal is also the one least likely to clean up their shit afterward.
It’s a male share-house vibe. Lots of mess. Nobody taking responsibility. Fine at home if that’s your lifestyle choice, but very far from the McDonald’s’ brand promise. All that’s missing is a bucket bong on the straws-and-napkins counter.
Have they made a conscious decision to abandon families in favour of the big-appetite bros? Or just an unforeseen side-effect of something that seemed like an obvious profit win?
This is not some nostalgic anti-tech rant. The tech is fine. It’s when the tech becomes everything that other parts of a proven system end up broken.
And possibly KPIs somewhere in the organisation that are being gamed. Every KPI has that potential. Revenue targets that bring in unprofitable business. Profit targets that encourage brand-killing cutbacks in service or reinvestment, with effects that only kick in after the bonus-getter has moved on.
Where you spend money sends a clear message to your staff about what you truly value.
You can have a town hall meeting and tell everyone you value personal service and clean stores. But when you redesign the stores as a direct obstacle to that, it says: what we actually care about is the lowest-cost efficiency of dispensing max volumes of food.
Service and hygiene don’t flourish when you build a cosy hideaway for staff to evade customers.
Will all this damage a gloriously and deservedly profitable brand?
I hope not. It’s not like it’s a problem that can’t be fixed quickly with a few extra staff. I’m sure they’ll sort it out. This is a business that’s been run forever by extremely competent people.
I’m not writing this pretending to be an expert on running McDonald’s, in the same way as everyone’s a Jaguar rebrand expert this week. I’m writing as a customer. And my point, if there is one, is that it’s important to get external perspectives from detached people who use your product. Actual qualitative thoughts, not just the standard satisfaction survey spamming.
It’s easy to get high on your own PowerPoint supply from all those internal meetings, and not see the dirt on your product.
And maybe my clean store issues aren’t a thing for others. Things change.
God knows how future generations will relate to McDonald’s. Why has Grimace enjoyed an ironic renaissance when the Hamburglar and Mayor McCheese languish in the skip-bin of history?
I don’t know, I’m not the meme guy and there is much I am not meant to understand. I was recently briefed by my nieces on guys at school recording themselves chugging an entire bottle of maple syrup. I don’t know why but I find it strangely inspiring.
I love McDonald’s for the essential role it plays in the broader economy. As the spawning ground for valuable future staff in every other industry.
I had an interesting cocktail party chat with a partner at the largest law firm in the country. She was also in charge of recruitment there. She said they are not attracted to any graduate who has spent their holidays working at Uncle Alexander’s law firm. Those are graduates who are likely to be entitled and have no sense of the real commercial world.
She said they will always interview graduates who have worked at McDonald’s, Bunnings or Carlile Swimming School, where my daughter was working at the time. Because they have experience with customers, business systems, processes, and the broader world of business.
We are all the better off for ex-McDonald’s people.
I’m lovin’ it.
(A tagline, by the way, that has worked perfectly since 2003, and respect to McD’s for not fucking around with it.)
This article was first published on the Undisruptable website. Ian Whitworth’s book Undisruptable: Timeless Business Truths for Thriving in a World of Non-Stop Change is out now from Penguin Random House.
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Ian Whitworth is a reformed branding and advertising creative director turned entrepreneur, who co-founded corporate audiovisual company Scene Change.
