The last time I ate McDonald's it was during a long road trip and it was late at night. Inside the store, everything was being handled by 3 teenagers and that blew my mind.
My children are still young, but I've long thought I'd want them to work a basic job for a large employer (fast food, supermarket, etc) as a teenager to get an appreciation of how small cogs working to a fixed formula can create something massive.
this is the actual genius of the McDonalds' franchise. It's not the menu nor the food recipe, but the formalized business process. Every step is listed, there's a manual for everyting, and training is sufficient for anyone with a brain to get it.
It makes every maccas exactly the same everywhere.
You don't go to Maccies for a good coffee but fucking hell, they were the only place we could get it from. Drive through was closed but I could order inside. Some tough guys hanging out and flexing but they're just waiting for their mate to finish their shift.
24 hour coffee is a total boon when you've got a 2 hour drive ahead of you after a big gig.
Well, IIRC, they had upped their coffee game a lot in the past decade or so, to compete with the coffee incubents.
Besides, it's not like e.g. Starbucks coffee is anything but artificial piss for a European coffee drinker.
> Besides, it's not like e.g. Starbucks coffee is anything but artificial piss for a European coffee drinker.
To Australians the difference is even more pronounced.
It is seriously as good as coffee from nearly any anywhere else, and consistently so.
Many snobby people from Melbourne will protest.
But it's true. Especially compared to coffee elsewhere in the world.
I’ve been working in Japan for a decade and one of the things that made morning Roppongi much more tolerable was being able to slide into a Maccas and quietly drink a coffee before going to work.
I’m heading back to Aus now and the thought I wouldn’t be able to do that was actually a little depressing.
It really isn't that cheap tbh. A coffee at McDonalds is gonna cost about the same price, and starbucks is like $0.5 more.
Also, they build Tims in some very rural areas that Starbucks would never bother with, and keep them open pretty early/late (sometimes 24hrs), making them one of the few places to congregate at those hours in small towns. Tims (and A&W, oddly) are where you'll find the seniors who can't stop getting up at 3AM, sitting and reading the paper.
I try to support small remote gas stations & buy stuff there, but the coffee is often undrinkable.