Why McDonalds fails.

As a kid, I grew up eating McDonalds. My mother was a busy working woman, so I don’t blame her for thinking that those bright yellow and red restaurants with that friendly (albeit slightly freaky) clown was a franchise that designed good food which catered to the nutritional needs of a growing young boy. This, was a mistake.

Much like this film.

Of course this comes to no surprise since McDonald’s have been targeting young kids ever since 1963. They even teamed up with Disney because they knew that the way to get to your parents’ hard earned money was to get you to get it for them, by enticing you with a figure of Winnie the pooh or Power Rangers that comes with a fillet-o-fish.

Sales were so good back then, it made a whole generation of kids fat that even in 2006, Disney was concerned about the rising numbers of childhood obesity so they called it quits and left. As for me, one sexless high school experience a decade later, I realized that my mom should have never gotten me those darned Happy Meals, and should have done what Bruce Lee did to his kid when he asked for one.

No you may not have a Happy Meal. Have a kick to the face instead.

Today McDonald’s stands as the single biggest chain of Hamburger Fast Food franchise in the world, and I’m personally offended that we let it grow that big. In an age where kononnya we take our food seriously, and have tons of blogs dedicated to food pornography, how did we let one of the biggest slackers in the food industry become a mega conglomerate?

Seriously... how?

McDonald’s food is shit. Possibly one of the worst foods you can get in Malaysia, I’m going to rate McDonalds just slightly above an overpriced, badly served mamak meal (and when I say badly, I mean a fried chicken with fly eggs in it – no, really, true story).

This, but only hidden underneath the crispy chicken skin of your drumstick.

Here’s why McDonald’s fails:

1) Mcdonald’s is detestably expensive

Maccas are some of the most overpriced foods in Malaysia. Now I know in places like America where proper, nutritious food is expensive, McDonalds is breakfast, lunch and dinner. But here, there’re literally tons of cheap foods to be found at every corner of every street. Cheap, as in, less than half the price of a McDonalds meal.

For example, the price of a Nasi Goreng Pattaya, or egg coated fried rice which is available at any food stall here averages to about 5 ringgit. To put it in perspective for you, here’s what you can get for 5 ringgit at McDonald’s.

This. And no, you don't get fries or coke with that you poor bastard. Now go and cry in the corner over your pathetic life.

While 5 ringgit at a mamak stall could get you any of these;

But why is McDonalds considered cheaper in other countries? Well because in most of these countries, the standard of living is higher. Agricultural produce is sold at higher prices which make food in general, expensive. But because McD gets their raw supplies in bulk, they can afford to undercut all these other restaurants and sell you your McDiet for cheaper (though ‘cheaper’ really means trading your liver, heart, and self respect over the next 5 years).

Same thing here really, except in Malaysia, we have plenty of independent food operators that sell food for next to nothing, because they’re not out looking for large profit margins like big greedy franchise dicks. So sure, in America, McD’s is the only thing Americans can afford, but here we can have a whole range of better value-for-money food, and sometimes with a side of greens too, if you know where to look. Walk into any McDonald’s store with 5 ringgit, and I bet the workers are going to be wondering if this is the first time you’ve begged enough money to enjoy their food while you squint and do mental calculations of what you can get, while holding up a long line of fat angry customers behind you.

Pictured: Where you can go if you don’t have the money for McDonalds, but still want all the prestige associated with it.

But maybe it’s not really about the money and maybe you’re just the kind of douche that needs some sort of social validation from going to ‘classy’ places like starbucks. Which brings me to my next point,

2: Mcdonalds isn’t classy, and the quality of food is crap.

Now I get how some places are trying to come up with a branding strategy that tells people what kind of person you are when you buy their products. Buying Starbucks for example earns you a social status that says, “I am a proud, money making member of urban society” whenever you go around asking for a ‘tall’ or ‘venti’ and paying more than 10 ringgit for one SMALL cup of coffee.

To everyone else, you’re this.

But despite this fail, Starbucks does take the quality of their coffee seriously, which warrants the charge of the extra ringgit for quality of product and service. Aspiring baristas are trained to know how to make all sorts of coffee blends, operate machinery and I have to give them credit; most of their Starbucks personnel look like they are estatic to see you, although you know they’ve been spitting and putting crap in your coffee.

Bullshit. You are not this happy if you’re sober and earning 5 ringgit an hour.

But with McDonalds, the quality of food is really the stain on your toilet paper after you’re done wiping. They’re making food fast enough to meet rush hour volume, so there is no way that they can ensure the quality of the food individually. In fact what happens is that every component of your McValue Meal goes through an assembly line food production that is made by at least 3 different people, which is why sometimes the burger flipper just really doesn’t give a crap whether the cheese he tossed onto the bun landed, or whether the burger looks good enough to be edible after everything has been said and done.

Added with the fact that they throw out any food that’s been left out for more than 10 minutes because you know, afterwards it just morphs into this.

Now all this would be fine, if we accepted the premise that whether you’re eating crap food at a mamak, or eating crap food at a franchised restaurant, you’re still eating crap food, but the fact is there are people who think that eating McDonalds is a step above going to the local gerai or food stalls and visit these places every day, just because other urbanites eat at these places.

Speaking of crap food...

3. McDonalds food is crap (part deux)

See what I did there? I just made a title redundant and added a French word just to be more of an asshole. But you knew that already, so we’re moving on.

You probably already know this, but McDonalds food really has about as much nutritional value as a Hollywood starlet has confidence in the size of her tits.

No, not this one, I meant Tara Reid.

For example, let’s take my favourite meal as a kid from McDonalds. Typically, this would be

1 x Large Fries,

1 x Large Coke,

2 x Fillet-o-Fish. (Those burgers are tiny as hell)

Added up together, a normal satisfying meal for me would amount to 1470 calories, with 61 grams of fat. To give you an added perspective to this (and to not make me look like a dieting pussy) I would have to run twenty five kilometres in two and a half hours to completely burn all of that off.

25 kilometres. 2.5 hours. For about 20 minutes worth of half-assed satisfaction of a McDonalds meal.

Oh Fuck that.

Even if half of the rumours of McDonalds are untrue, like how McDonalds uses cow eyeballs and mutant laboratory meat as part of their beef, (McDonalds actually has one of the most stringent security checks for their raw products) it’s a fact that kids everywhere are turning fat because of their McDiet, so much so in fact that some of them even sued McD’s for the reason they’re not getting laid in high school. While I believe suing a company because of the way you look and your eating habits has about as much logic as you creating an awareness about breast cancer by putting on a sexual innuendo as a status update, it still doesn’t change the fact that McDonalds is kryptonite for your health.

Sure, McDonalds is convenient in a lot of ways, like home delivery, having an internet connection at most of their restaurants and being open 24/7; but being expensive and providing nutritionally deficient food that fills you with regret like a night out with some floozy from Zouk is definitely not enough to make up for it.

And plus,

What would happen to us if we switched from McDonalds to Subway. We turn blue and can run around naked and people would think you’re awesome. Oh, and we have superpowers.

So does McDonalds fail? Yes, it does, with the exception of curly fries and Prosperity burger. Damn that shit is good.

Fail rating: 5/10