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.
For basically the same price I could get a pub style burger on a nice brioche bun with twice the beef.
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.
They're pricing themselves against the likes of Honest Burger or Byron here and not even close in quality.
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.
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.
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.
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.