Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac

I think people used to say this about Starbucks, where you might pay close to $8 for just the drink.

Fast food can probably save itself by going premium (as Starbucks did, although I don’t know if they are still considered premium) and raising prices and quality. McDonald’s has made that play in the past with the pivot to McCafé and the nicer restaurant design that is now predominant.

What may have to go away is the idea of fast food as something that is attainable for just about everyone. I remember when I was much younger and McDonald’s was a treat - we didn’t have much spare money but my parents could make McDonald’s happen occasionally.

Nowadays I’m totally price insensitive and happy to pay for DoorDash to deliver McDonald’s and tip handsomely. The people who don’t have software jobs or a similar tier probably can’t. Big business will be fine regardless, and if they can’t make it work, the leadership is not worthy of their overpriced MBAs.

I worry about the lower classes though. An under appreciated (for the wealthy HN reader) aspect of the relative success of American development is the broad accessibility of luxuries to the masses. Even the poor masses. If you (dear reader) don’t recognize a fast food meal as a luxury, you are blind to the real consequences of what is unfolding. I understand the desire to cater to labor, but ultimately there are far more consumers than laborers (by definition - all human laborers are also consumers). The grand economic experiment of yanking away the _one_ aspect of the American project (abundance) that has until now been continuing to succeed will have consequences. Not for me, but for the people you think of when you think of labor.

There is a whole class of premium "fast casual" places. Five Guys, Shake Shack, In-N-Out (whose prices are a bit lower), etc. As well as Panera and a whole bunch of chains in that general category.

I rather like them especially when traveling and needing a quick meal (while mostly hating most traditional fast food). But not really places where you take the family for a cheap meal. Heck, I'm in tech and I think the prices are pretty steep a lot of the time. Not that the big fast food chains are exactly dirt cheap if you don't make a lot of money yourself, but maybe doubling their prices for a better product--even if the McD fries are probably still better :-)--pretty much puts them out of reach of many.

This also starts to shade into just regular takeout once the prices get high enough. I rarely order from places like Five Guys unless I have a specific craving for a burger, because once I'm paying $10 for a cheeseburger, I have a whole range of takeout options in a similar price range. More often than not, I end up going for my favorite local Indian place that has excellent entrees priced around $11-13.

Definitely. I don't eat out much at home in part because I don't have a lot of options and I'm mostly fine with cooking myself. Five Guys-class stuff tends to be for places like airports or late night traveling when I don't have a lot of other decent alternatives. For a regular mid-price dinner in a city, some ethnic meal is probably my go-to option.

Burgers also just aren't a good actual takeout option. While takeout/delivery doesn't help any food, Indian/Chinese can usually tolerate it better than burgers. Chicken is another semi-regular go to for me; a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket is something like $5 and fried chicken works pretty well too.

I honestly don't get how Five Guys is an option at all. It's like a half sized burger that has too much on it and it's smooshed up usually and not well put together so it ends up just coming apart on me half the time.

For basically the same price I could get a pub style burger on a nice brioche bun with twice the beef.

I think the value add in Five Guys is in the fries. Apart from the obvious generosity of the amount of fries they give you which completely dwarfs any other restaurant, they go through a serious effort making them taste really good as well. They soak the cut potatoes in running water for 5 hours before frying them in peanut oil with a special double dip method to give a good consistency of fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside.

I agree the burger itself is pretty mediocre for what you pay. The “all ingredients included” mantra also encourages people to make burgers that fall apart as you pick them up. There’s also nothing really special about it - the company even actively advertises that they use common big box grocery vendors to source their ingredients and anything you eat there is mostly available off the shelf at your local grocery. When I worked there all of our stuff came on a Kroger truck.

I actually really don't like their fries so maybe that's part of the problem. I used to work at Chick-Fil-A and would always fry my waffle fries a second time right before my lunch break. That's pretty much the only thing I miss from that job. Being able to make the perfect fried chicken and fries meal for myself in about 5 minutes.

As a Brit I don't understand the fascination with Five Guys. Greasy, gross, mushy nastiness that is way overpriced.

They're pricing themselves against the likes of Honest Burger or Byron here and not even close in quality.

In my (entirely US) experience they haven’t done a good job making sure quality keeps up in restaurants far from their home site.

Their corporate HQ is in Northern Virginia, and the restaurants in that area are excellent (especially the one actually owned by corporate). The same cannot be said of the Midwest. I’m not surprised they didn’t cross the pond very well.

Yeah, I've had this experience with Five Guys here in Britain - the few times I've had one in London, it's been great. Slightly expensive, but quality 'plain, old fashioned burger'.

Visited one in Harrogate on a stay up there a couple of years back and it was ... bad. Given it was a wee treat for myself after a long day, very disappointing.

5 Guys is a certain type of burger. It’s a high fat burger that is literally smashed into a griddle and usually served with a buttery bun. It’s not trying to be a gourmet burger.

Five guys is great, if I am getting a Togo burger they are the best option I can think of… go maybe once a month or so with the family.

I brought up Five Guys, mostly because they're one of the bigger and more geographically distributed chains. But I generally agree there are other chains in this general category that are better, sometimes significantly--not that I eat enough at them enough to have a strongly formed comparative opinion. Five Guys is also one of the more expensive and, as someone else mentioned, all their "free" toppings encourage people to toss on a bunch of stuff that makes the bun soggy.

If forced to choose, I'd probably go with In-N-Out though they don't exist around where I live and McDs fries are still better.

>They soak the cut potatoes in running water for 5 hours before frying them in peanut oil with a special double dip method to give a good consistency of fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside.

FWIW, this is standard procedure for pretty much any place that makes their own fries on location. It might be a step up from most big chains that use frozen fries, but there's probably dozens of small eateries in any decent sized town that do the same.

Five Guys is good, but it's pricey.

If you ignore tips, you can usually get a (chain) steakhouse burger and fries for about the same (i.e. about $14-15.

It's affecting them, too. The Five Guys near me, which still advertises hours of 11am-9pm 7 days a week online, is actually only open 11am-3pm M-F, and about half the time is randomly closed for no reason. When I am able to go in, there are half a dozen or more people working.

I'm not sure if it's scheduling or wages or what but this thing seems to be happening across the board, not just places like McDonald's and BK. But those are similarly affected - BK's quality has dropped significantly just in the last 2-3 months, and McDonald's has kept the quality at the expense of closing the dining room more often than not and long drive-through lines.

I cannot trust Uber Eats to deliver food that has fries without the driver dipping into them. Twice in the last few months I've gotten a hand off from a greasy fingered driver and a short order of fries.

I give myself a break from cooking on the weekends and order out, it's been a pretty fast decline in the service offered AND the price has increased.

There's not much recourse either. I can remove the tip, and report the interaction, but haven't gotten my money back. A lot of the stuff I liked to get take out I just can't order anymore, and my trust in the system has eroded.

They really need to seal the bags.

That's us. My wife is an excellent cook, I'm completely spoiled. But she wants the weekends off cooking, and we end up looking for easy food. That's what led me down this path of 'what in the world is going on?' and similar thoughts. We're currently spending like 25 a hit(family of 3) for bland to mediocre food and inconsistent service, which just feels wrong.

It is good news. The people that used to have to work for low pay in bad quality of life jobs like restaurants have better options life, so $8.3/person/cooked meal is not possible anymore.

Although, where I am in the US, it has been $15+ per person per cooked meal for years.

A Five Guys about a 20 minute drive away is one of my few delivery options. Whenever I'm tempted I close the computer and maybe call my favorite local pizza place and drive 10 minutes to pick up the order. Burgers want to be eaten right away.

McDonald’s has always had sealed bags when I’ve ordered, with large tamper-evident tape. They’ve also got advanced stay-fresh fry technology to prevent them going soggy, according to a planet money episode I vaguely remember: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-o...

The bags: https://images.app.goo.gl/pmB85VGi5zqamitn6

> large tamper-evident tape

Which depends on how hard the employee presses down the tape. Often, the tape is hardly attached and would be trivial to "remove"/open, and after grabbing what you want, putting it back

> Fast food can probably save itself by going premium

Here (California) it seems fast food has priced itself into premium territory already but the food is the usual lowest possible quality.

I used to eat lunch at fast food chains way too often for the usual reasons: fast, consistent, cheap.

These days it is pretty slow (for the issues covered in the article) and nowhere near cheap, so they have priced themselves out of relevance to me.

I used to get a handful of tacos as Taco Bell for $5 but now it is $11. Right across the parking lot there is an authentic taqueria with better quality food, happier service and the owner works the counter (so not some chain) and the price is the same. So now I go to the taqueria every time.

Same with sandwiches. There's a very nice local sandwich shop but I didn't go very often since it was somewhat expensive. So I'd go to Subway or Togos for a $6 sandwich. Last time I went to Togos I paid $12 for my usual! But the much higher quality local sandwich shop is $11. So now I go there every time instead.

A burger combo at the various drive throughs is also up to the $11-$12 range. So if I want a burger I'd rather go to one of the many semi-upscale local burger places for a far higher quality burger for around the same price of just a bit more.

Aside from the large cost increase of my lunches, I'm fairly happy with the decline of the fast food convenience. It has driven me to higher quality food and supporting the local businesses instead of the big chains.

American abundance is built on trillions of government debt and cheap Chinese/Asian imports.

American relative[1] abundance was also a thing around 1940 after the Great Depression was over and before Perl harbour lead to increased government debt.

At this time there was low government debt and roughly no cheap Asian imports. Therefore, I don’t really believe your hypothesis.

[1] I mean relative to peer countries in Europe before the war—obviously abundance in 1940 could be attributed to the impact of war on those European countries.

Perl harbor was indeed a great tragedy.

Fortunately the US was able to reclaim control of the C

Reply on news.ycombinator.com