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McDonald's customers unable to order after systems outage
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoAnd global waistline growth stagnates for a day. Sometimes blessings come in disguise.
- Karupan 3y agoI just read on a local Reddit thread that the lines at Burger King and KFC were insane. So, not really I’m afraid!
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI gave up on these garbage fast-food chains after the 2022 inflation skyrocket. A decent burger at McDs or BK in Europe today is now about 9 Euros, closer to gourmet burger prices at fancy local burger joints with red brick walls where the waiters have lumberjack shirts, beards and man-buns. But 9 Euros for McDs/BK is taking the mickey considering it's just some sorry-ass excuse for a burger, thrown together in a pinch from the cheapest possible ingredients, into a paper bag, in a loud, crowded, dirty joint, employing lowly paid migrants from the job center. It was convenient in the days when it was still cheap, but now it's just overpriced slop. If I want cheap fast food I get a Döner Kebab for 4 Euros, and this way I'm also supporting a local business not the fat margins of off-shore shareholders.
- rwmj 3y agoI don't get it anyway, burgers are about the simplest food to make yourself.
- janfoeh 3y ago_A_ burger? Sure. _The_ burger? Not by a long shot. I've been trying off and on for a year to recreate my platonic ideal of a burger, the (German) McD Quarterpounder with cheese of yore before they switched to their "made to order" system. I've yet to nail either the patty or the bun. Recreating something specific at home is non-trivial.
- OJFord 3y agoBut fortunately it's trivial to do better than that specific.
- janfoeh 3y agoNo, it isn't, which was my point entirely. Besides — are you American? If you are, you are unlikely to know what my _that_ even is. I have eaten at McDonalds in the US, and it's not an experience I would care to repeat. So if that's true, I can kinda see where you are coming from, but still - different strokes and all that jazz?
- OJFord 3y agoI thought your point was about exact reproduction? I was being slightly snidely critical of fast food burgers in general, saying it's easy to make better. (If you really want exact, the only helpful things I can think of which I almost said are to add more/introduce sugar to the bun - yet somehow keep it more like a washing-up sponge than brioche - and cook the burger from frozen, it'll change the texture.) No, I'm British, I don't know how British McDonalds burgers compare to German ones, but it's probably almost 20y since I've had one anyway. I did have one in the Netherlands ..10y ago (though gosh, that visit feels much more recent!) which was certainly different to here, but y'know, it's still fast food.
- janfoeh 3y agoAdding more sugar to the buns is an interesting idea, thanks. I will give that a shot for my next batch. The texture of the patty is one of the things I have nailed; that was just a matter of adding salt into the mince instead of seasoning from the outside - that makes them a little denser, more meatloaf-like, like freezing would. And yeah, the regional differences are interesting. I had my last one in the Netherlands.. 21 years ago, and they still served them in styrofoam containers, many years after they had been phased out in Germany. And in Denmark, you could draft your own condiments into little waffle cones. Cute.
- 3y ago
- drekipus 3y agoPersonally, having the buns, lettuce, sliced tomatoes, etc. are a little hassle. I've always find salad ingredients tricky to keep and maintain. Otherwise I would make my own burgers a lot more. (I seldom go to fast food places)
- janfoeh 3y agoI had the very much the same problem, until our fridge died and the replacement I bought came with one of those temperature and humidity controlled vegetable drawers. I hadn't paid it any mind, since I assumed it was just some marketing gimmick. But much to my surprise, those things actually work — vegetables easily keep three times as long in them. Doesn't help with the buns, of course.
- williamdclt 3y ago> If I want cheap fast food I get a Döner Kebab for 4 Euros lucky you. In London, kebabs are routinely >£8 (I've seen >£10), and they are almost invariably terrible. My biggest gripe being that the bread (when it's actually a doner rather than a wrap) is a soft soggy waste of flour. For some reason they also insist on assembling the doner by putting bread at the bottom of a styrofoam box then piling up "fillings" on top of it, making it impossible to eat on the go. It's not like it's hard? They already have the right ingredients, I'm not even picky about quality, just get half-decent bread and you're good to go!
- mytailorisrich 3y agoMost McDonald's are local businesses and probably more law-abiding than random kebabs places (especially if you care about "lowly-paid migrants" and cleanliness)... McDonald's can be cheap-ist. The trick is to stay away from their headline burgers and ask for the simple hamburgers/cheeseburgers instead, which are massively cheaper. For instance, here a hamburger is £1.19, cheeseburger £1.39, medium fries £1.59. Cheap. But of course they focus your attention to fancier burgers which cost £5 to £7.
- Ekaros 3y agoIt helps that there is two layers of oversight. First you have state that want their taxes. But then there is also the McDonalds who want their cut and know pretty much all data. From expected sales, to I think how much raw ingredients have been ordered. So ordering too much waste will look suspicious.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoUntil recently, and since 1980s the cheapest is no meal deal just egg sausage burger.
- jamil7 3y agoI'm assuming you're in Germany. Where are you getting a Döner for 4 euros? Those also got hit with inflation pretty hard, at least here in Berlin. Gourmet burger would also be closer to 12-13 now I think not 9.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoNo not in Germany. In Austria you can find plenty of places with 4 Euro Kebab in less fancy districts. Sometimes even less than 4 if you pick some dodgy places. It's definitely cheap here compared to most of EU. Quality is another topic though. Half of them have been found to have stool bacteria in them.
- sidkshatriya 3y ago> employing lowly paid migrants from the job center Feels a bit like casual vilification of migrants. “Lowly paid” migrants have a high motivation to get the job done properly. They need the money and are grateful for the job that some non-migrants would never consider. If the restaurant is dirty then management is probably to blame. Management in such situations has tyrannical power. They probably just haven’t prioritised cleanliness in the restaurants you seem to describe.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoAh yes, can't even say anything with migrants in the context, before someone does some mental gymnastics to infer you must have something against them. No mate, read my comment again. I was vilifying the employers who focus exclusively on job center migrants because they're the most vulnerable to exploitation. Sincerely, a migrant.
- Karupan 3y agoGiven that most McDonald’s are franchisee run, I wonder if they get compensated for system downtimes which they are not responsible for.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoI think everyone knows the answer to that already :-)
- devoutsalsa 3y agoI'd love to read the terms & conditions in a McDonald's ice cream machine downtime insurance policy.
- seoulbigchris 3y agoHere in South Korea, too. Just checked.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoThe wonders of mass centralisation of systems. yay ;P
- Karellen 3y agoNot having a working backup system of staff taking payments manually is the real issue here.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThat's what they do: "Ted Anderson said he went into a restaurant in Japan to find it "cash only and staff calculating the totals on paper". The issue is that many people don't carry cash at all these days (at least here in the UK)
- LeonidasXIV 3y agoCash is still pretty common in Japan and Germany, so some markets wouldn't even notice a difference.
- lores 3y agoBut people would if outages with cash backups were frequent enough. On a side note, I am baffled by the number of otherwise activist people to whom I expound about the big problems of a cashless society who just shrug to say "hey, what can you do?"
- mytailorisrich 3y agoYeah, always wise to keep a couple of bank notes in your wallet, just in case. The worst I see these days is people who carry neither cards nor cash, just their phones because "anyway I have Apple Pay/Google Wallet for contactless"... and then they use that to buy an electronic ticket on their phone for their commute to work. The day they lose their phone far from home they are instantly stranded and homeless, and they can't call anyone for help because they don't actually know anyone's phone number.
- 3y ago
- lnxg33k1 3y agoUnexpected world's health day
- Paul-Craft 3y agoNah. Wendy's has been advertising $1 singles and $2 doubles if you order through their app for about a week now. Most likely anybody who wants to order a cheap, low-quality cheeseburger online will still be able to do so fairly easily.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoAnd don't try to order during a "surge pricing period" a.k.a "lunch". You'll end up paying $12 for a burger at Wendy's
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeoPanthera 3y ago"Downdetector" is kind of a genius scam. It "detects" outages by counting hits for the service on its own page. If lots of people are checking, it just assumes that it's down. It doesn't really "detect" anything.
- taberiand 3y agoSeems to be a more reliable heuristic than whatever most companies use for their status pages
- tomashubelbauer 3y agoI agree with "genius" but don't see why "scam"? In all but the most theoretical scenarios users checking Down Detector to see if a service is down and the service being down are one and the same.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago> It "detects" outages by counting hits for the service on its own page. If lots of people are checking, it just assumes that it's down Does it? I assume it uses hits to the "I have a problem with xxx" button after you get to the service from the front page.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoYeah, this is always the first one I end up on and the sigh, keeping googling until I find one that actually tries to load the target site from multiple locations. It's infrequent enough that I never remember which one it was, and I'm too lazy to bookmark anything. :)
- Jensson 3y agoIt reliably tells me that others has issues, if downdetector doesn't spike then I know it is just me.
- aaron695 3y agoIf people need to know why you might call it a 'scam' it failed during the AT&T outage and caused most news sites to misreport what was going on i.e. - "Tens of thousands lose cellular coverage from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and more" - https://fortune.com/2024/02/22/cellular-service-outage-att-verizon-tmobile-cricket-downdetector/ https://fortune.com/2024/02/22/cellular-service-outage-att-v... (CNN and most news sites have corrected their stories) You could image some sort of botnet (with AI for the Blackhat VC capital) causing a complex news story for some benefit.
- kredd 3y agoOdds on being a DNS issue, given that it’s semi-global?
- idop 3y agoWelcome to the future. Here in Israel, I have seen multiple instances over the years of either the McDonald's ordering panels being down, the McDonald's website being down, or both. When the panels are down, only the website/app can be used to order food. When both are down, no food can be ordered, and you'll see the employees standing idly in the kitchen, twiddling their thumbs, unable to do anything.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThis is just bad management because nothing prevents staff from reverting to the 'ancient ways' of just taking orders verbally with cash payments. As long as they can prepare food they can sell it if they really want to.
- AndrewDucker 3y agoOf course, that depends on their customers carrying cash. Which is less and less common.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoObviously, but that's a different issue.
- LintBaron 3y agoNot true for the EU. Every invoice needs to be digitally signed. If the computer is down, no sale can happen.
- wil421 3y agoThat’s hilarious. I’m pretty sure every grocery store and most restaurants keep the old carbon copy credit card machine thingys to take payments when the power/computer/internet is down. Years ago I had to use one to take a payment during an internet outage. http://www.cashandcredit.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=319&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgMaThYf2hAMVqTOtBh3w3QJ2EAQYASABEgLUf_D_BwE http://www.cashandcredit.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=31...
- vouaobrasil 3y agoWhile this is a rather trivial event considering that few people need MacDonalds, this is a perfect example of how fragile modern society is. Everywhere, we are building a world that is fragile due to its incredible high-tech dependencies: we've got opaque technologies, global supply chains, and most disturbing of all on many fronts, the dependence on unsustainable and unenvironmental mining and fossil fuels (see [1] for an example of our increasing dependence). No one really knows how it works any more and it's the apotheosis of ugliness. We should embark on an effort to simplify dependencies and remove unnecessary technology from our life, rather than complicate it with more for the sake of useless economic growth. Because when it comes crashing down, and it will, it's going to be ugly. (Before you reply or downvote, just ask yourself, how robust can a system really be if virtually all its innovations succeed or fail based on short-term profits in a brutal capitalistic world.) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-production https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-productio...
- rightbyte 3y agoYe we are leaping into over automation by now. Fragile centralized systems etc. No backup processes. There is this new movie about it. It is quite good, but I don't remember the name. Where the ship drives up on the beach. I honestly think there need to be a "no internet" friday and weekend every year. With the whole internet connectivity closed down to test redundancies.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoThat is interesting. If you can remember the name I'd like to watch it! BTW, I have a "no interet" Sunday (often weekends) where I completely disconnect, every week. It would be great to make it a societal ritual like earth day. Voluntary, but fun.
- rightbyte 3y ago"Leave The World Behind"
- fdsafdsafdol 3y agoTake heed, for this is a sign of the coming Anti-Singularity. Yea, it is coming for us all.
- yitchelle 3y agoI am going to use this as an example for not doing a software release on a Friday.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]