Posts Tagged ‘McDonald’s’

What happens if you buy a load of food from McDonald’s, re-package it, and tell a bunch of foodies that it is organic food? Well, two people in The Netherlands did that, and it turns out they all say the food is delicious.

Probably best to turn the sub-titles on if you do not speak Dutch.

Ray Kroc is founder of McDonald’s Corporation. I found out he had written an autobiography, entitled Grinding it out: the making of McDonald’s, when I was listening to one of Mark Knopfler’s songs. “Boom, Like That” was obviously about McDonald’s, so I did a little reading up on it and sure enough, it was inspired by Kroc’s story, this book being cited.

The book itself is short and simple. At under 200 pages it only took me a week to get through it without much perseverance. In some ways this was a little disappointing as the book never really goes into much detail. You do not feel like you are gleaming so many secrets to success as you might feel you were if you were reading Duncan Bannatyne’s or James Khan’s autobiographies. But there is valuable content in there and given the length, comes at an easy price. Kroc did always place an emphasis on value as well as quality after all.

It has somewhat dated. It was written in 1977, Kroc having died in 1984, and the ages shows. He finishes up by talking about how he now has 4,000 restaurants and is dreaming of 5,000, maybe even 10,000. McDonald’s now has over 34,000 restaurants worldwide. Similarly, at the time it only had 21 restaurants outside of the United States, now I would be very surprised if the majority are not elsewhere in the world. Not that this detracts from the reading much.

The real take-away message from the book though is that Kroc only founded McDonald’s when he was 55! Too often we hear about the success of irritating people like Sebastian Vettel who is now a four-times Formula One world champion, despite being younger than me. I haven’t even won one yet. Kroc however, spent his whole life grinding out a living, and it was only after many would consider you are past your prime (especially in 1954) that he built a multi-billion dollar business empire in less than two decades. It is comforting to know that there is a possibility, however slim, that I could spend the next 30 years of my life messing around and still have the chance to make it big.

On Thursday I finally got up with some old friends who worked with me at The D.

It was somewhat disappointing that Elina didn’t instantly fall in love with Nando’s, but we had a great night away heading up to the much loved Cuthbert Brodrick afterward and finished the night at Revolution.

Another short drive away was Verona though perhaps not an easy drive – while most of Europe seems pretty sensible on the road, the Italians are very different. Things like coaches overtaking on bends, randomly pulling out and best of all, not being able to get into the other lane so simply pulling out and driving head on down your lane until someone lets them in were common place.

Luckily we eventually made it to Verona alive and found our hotel which was just off the main square and best of all – had a McDonald’s on the ground floor!

Once settled in to what was a nice hotel albeit it not offering wifi in our rooms and even in the lobby at a reasonably heavy price we decided to go for a wander and explore the city.

It was very nice – the pavements looked new and well maintained and all the shops were beautiful – it was basically an entire city which looked like the Victoria Quarter in Leeds. Of course, we couldn’t afford to shop in any of them.

We ended up on a square where we decided to have dinner paying what I think was a record of €7 for a beer and being served by a crazy waiter who when I asked for a white wine soon reappeared with a glass of red insisting I would prefer this one. Mental.

Still the food was very nice and on the way home we stopped by Juliet’s balcony, which was unfortunately closed. It’s also a bit of a joke, it’s not even made of the same colour stone as the rest of the building, it’s not even like they have pretended it was originally there – not that you really can for a fictional character.

The Saturday before last I worked my last McShift.

It’s very depressing because it’s a clear sign I’m getting older. Not that the fact that many of my work colleagues were 6-7 years younger than me wasn’t a constant reminder of my aging but somehow getting up and moving on with my life really drives the message home.

I’ll miss the place, I’ll miss the people. The people really were fun. I like most of my work colleagues but there is something about the fun and the energy of all been stuck in a crap dead on job (not that I was stuck there, essentially working for laughs but anyway) and making the best of it.

Still, onwards and upwards. I have exciting new work commitments now and new challenges ahead with my charity. This chapter may be over but the book has just begun.

I ended up back at Ikea on Monday to pick up some more stuff.

I have to say I really don’t like the place though. Aside from the main reason which I will come on to, they charge £30 for home delivery which seems crazy, Tesco are delivering my bed – on a Saturday – for like £6 and a lot of the stuff they currently have in the show room isn’t even available to buy anymore.

The main reason I don’t like Ikea however is how smug they are about how awful their customer service is. As if it is something to be proud of. They have big boards up saying “we aim to serve you within 8 minutes.”

8 minutes? Are you having a laugh? Even if you hit those targets, that wouldn’t be something to be proud of. It’s not like they even really have a Total Experience Time, that 8 minutes is just the time you spend in the queue just to get your stuff scanned through a till.

I know McDonald’s is a world leader in such areas but do you know what the target time for a customer queuing before they get to the till is? 0 seconds. A lot of the time they hit it as well, and most of the time a customer will be served within the target Total Experience Time target of 3 minutes – and that is to provide a full meal, not just to take payment for a few boxes.

It’s not like they can’t cope with the demand either, they have had 3-4 tills open despite having over 20 tills they could potentially open, both of the times I have been there recently.

Not impressed.

I went round Oakwood drive-thru on the way home to grab some food last night and noticed this notice in the window.

If you can’t read the notice it says…

For the Safety & Security of both our customers and staff this restaurant is remotely monitored with a direct contact to the Police.

This means that they have a security office somewhere monitoring the cameras to make sure there isn’t someone up to no good. My question is though, what is a “direct contact to the Police”? I mean, that implies to me they can contact the police directly.

But, I can do that. The Police gave me their phone number too. I would imagine most people have it actually, it’s quite easy to remember, it’s only three digits.

Last week was No Vices Week which was a week (well, 5 days lol) in which we avoided takeaway and alcohol and donated the money we saved to Rationalist Week. There wasn’t a huge uptake but some of us actually managed most of it.

It almost killed me to be honest. Day after day I was like “aww, I can just get McDonald’s on the way home” and then remembering I couldn’t. I drove Norm to work on Tuesday morning thinking I could just go for breakfast to fill the gap before I started work and then realised I couldn’t so I headed for “non-takeaway” breakfast – which was closed! Needless to say, I was not amused.

The other worry of course was that with me and Lil not eating McDonald’s we would put on a lot of weight (we are of course living proof that McDonald’s keeps you thin). Luckily Lil came up with the answer in us just sugaring our bread and eating a loaf a day. Seems to have worked.

Having already gotten up at 5am yesterday only to discover I didn’t have to be up quite that early I headed off to get some breakfast as I figured a 20-30 minute powe nap would leave me feeling worse than I already did.

We headed down to Heckmondwike which is somewhere near Birstall, Batley, Cleckheaton, etc to drop my car off for repair and ended up getting back to Leeds with loads of time to spare. At which point Damien suggested we get some breakfast from McDonald’s.

I mean, what was I supposed to say to that? 😀 . Bit of a breakfast overload in the end then, I didn’t need to eat again until late afternoon, maybe it really is the way to start the day.

We headed over to Oakwood McDonald’s for dinner this evening.

As I pulled in I found a BMW parked across the pedestrian crossing which then started to reverse and almost went straight into me. I presumed he was just picking someone up and was about to leave so I thought nothing of it.

However as we walked back round we saw the guy in the car talking to some youths and hand them a small bag of something.

We headed inside and having been asked what I wanted I replied, “you know, there is someone selling drugs outside.” The shift manager then disappears off and doesn’t return for 10 minutes. I went out to see if something bad had actually happened – no sign of the shift manager but the car was still sat there and greeted me with a

what the fuck you looking at?

Luckily, having gone back inside the shift manager re-appeared 5 minutes later so I don’t really know what happened there. Maybe he actually did get killed and replaced with some kind of evil clone. Who knows. The important thing is I didn’t get stabbed, which I think is a line I’m going to end most of my stories on from now on ;).