A friend sent me this horrifying online ad. What is happening to that poor woman? Burger-inappropriate pain? Or pleasure? Or is she gazing overhead at an incoming phalanx of special-sauce laden pelicans?

Of course, this is a company known for letting ridiculous advertising stuff get through, so this is maybe par for the course?

You can see another in the series here and a funny rant about the complexity of their product naming system is at Naming a Chicken Sandwich in Thirteen Syllables or Fewer.

A new film, Me & Mickey D, is by a filmmaker who ate at McDonald’s for 30 days and lost weight.

NRO: Would you recommend anyone eat McDonald’s for 30 days?

Whaley: Actually I think a lot of people do, at least for a few meals a week. Tens of millions of people eat there every day without ill effect. As for a 30-day diet to lose weight? That’s up to the individual. This was not intended to promote a McDonald’s diet for losing weight, it was meant to demonstrate that some of our current belief systems are incorrect.
…
NRO: Besides the obvious, Super-Size-Me-is-wrong/be responsible/McDonald’s-can’t-make-you-fat,-only-the- choices-you-make-can message, what is the overall point of your documentary?

Whaley: Simply to encourage people to take more responsibility for their own lives and to appreciate the concept of freedom of choice that we have in the U.S. I also hope to inspire people to get out and move around more. Forget about ‘exercising,’ just get out there and celebrate your life by staying busy and productive. ‘Eat to live, don’t live to eat.’ – Moliere

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FreshMeat #3 from Steve Portigal

               (__)                     
               (oo) Fresh                  
                \\/  Meat

Give the gift that reeks of love…give FreshMeat!
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Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the cheese
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Recent news reports state that McDonald’s
“now has another problem: customers turning away in
droves because they don’t like the way they are
treated…the problem could be responsible for $750
million in lost sales every year.”

Now, if this were a talk show instead of email, I could
slowly lower the paper from in front of my face, and
raise my eyebrows in a look of sardonic significance.
But we’re stuck here, aren’t we, so rather than defining
a new emoticon for the reaction one has to really obvious
news stories, let’s look a little deeper.

I don’t think any of us are surprised. Customer service
at McDonald’s (indeed, all QSR chains — Quick-Serve
Restaurants, industry jargon for “fast food”) is
terrible. If we’ve patronized those places, we know the
story. The frightening question is how can McDonald’s
seemingly just be figuring this out?

In my work, I’ve interviewed QSR staff, store managers,
regional managers, and corporate folks. The higher up
the organizational ladder you get, the less focus there
is on the customer, and the more there is on the food.
They gauge their own success by such factors as speed
(kitchens feature overhead countdown timers and alarms),
temperature, and consistency. The customer focus may be
as simple as “clean.” One regional supervisor told me
that their best employees work in the kitchen. All a
counter employee has to do, they said, was be able to
count (since they handle the money).

In the space we have here, I think the point is this:
There but for the grace of God go each of us. Every
company has made specific, often implicit, choices about
what to be excellent at. And neglected others. McDonald’s
chose food over customers. Now they are realizing that
they have been paying a price for that. Many
organizations never get to that point of self-awareness,
and may continue to neglect something crucial that is
holding them back. The humor in the news story comes from
the fact that we could see what McDonald’s wasn’t able
to. Have the laugh, because you deserve a break today,
but maybe we can apply the lesson here to our own
companies.

—

Postscript: check out “The Deep End” starring Tilda
Swinton to see a current portrayal of customer
service. Often it is played for comedy, but here
the difficulties of getting help over the phone turn
into horror.