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Comment by kevindong | Hacker News Reader

I actually went to their new midtown Manhattan branch a couple days ago.

All in all, I liked it. I got a very generously sized falafel quinoa bowl for ~$7 with an iced tea for an additional $0.95. For midtown, that's actually an incredible value. The food itself was good, nothing to rave about though. Concerningly though, when I went in around 2:30pm on Friday, I was one of the two customers there. The rest of the store was deserted.

There's no cashiers, just a bunch of self serve iPad stands with an clerk walking around looking to see if I needed help. The app on the iPad used for ordering was fast and fluid. My food was ready 2 minutes after I ordered.

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> around 2:30pm [last] Friday

That's fairly late for lunch in midtown (other midtown counter-serve locations like Dig Inn and Chipotle seem sparsely trafficked when I show up at 3 PM), plus it was the Friday before Christmas. I wouldn't call low traffic under those circumstances "concerning" -- I'd say wait and see what things are like on a more regular date.

Willing to bet this is another case of VC money subsidizing low unsustainable prices for consumers.

Eh that experience sounds way too lonely.

Very much so. I was originally planning on eating there, but when I saw the emptiness, I picked the 'to go' option.

Why would it make a difference? If I'm eating alone, an empty dining area is infinitely less awkward than a packed one.

Lonely was the wrong term. It sounds too sterile and empty to ever pull in the revenue they're hoping to capture. If you want people to be going there in large volumes then it probably needs to not be empty, duh. But it sounds like they missed some sort of key factor.

Most fast food experience is lonely when you're by yourself. The idea seems like it would work well as a drive through service.

These concepts should eventually compete with McDonalds drive thru to correct American health woes, not act as a coffee shop.

McDonalds isn't as bad as it used to be tbh, it's reputation is somewhat undeserved these days

Would you mind elaborating a little? Last time i grabbed a cheese burger at MCD (2 months ago), the menu looked the same except for the addition of a few salads.

The biggest change imho is not on the menu. They don't market aggressively to children anymore, nothing like when I was a kid.

There's heaps of unhealthy fast food joints, the difference is the marketing. A Chipotle burrito has over 1000 calories but is perceived as healthy. That's twice the calories in a Big Mac.

I don't think Chipotle is just perceived as healthier, you're eating real food rather than meat mix from McDonalds.

Real food that's so calorically dense and heavily salted that a single burrito contains as many calories and as much sodium as a person is supposed to eat over an entire day.

Organic is good, responsibly sourced is good, but neither one automatically equals healthiness all by themselves.

I'm not so worried about the calories. It's the insane amounts of salt in everything. No one even seems concerned about it.

> No one even seems concerned about it.

Sure people are. Not enough according to you perhaps.

Sugar (not slow carbohydrates), and salts are the two main concerns.

I have never considered running out for fast food an "experience".

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