Seems like a contradiction in terms.
I don’t usually eat fast food. Only once in the odd days when the choices of trusted regular food have exhausted, I would take a quick bite. Nowadays, when everyone’s trying to lower prices to attract more customers, many have failed miserably in loosing the usual quality of their service and or their products.
It is so sad that when there must be hundreds of restaurants around 10 minute walking distance from work, there are now only about 4 left that I would usually go for lunch. That means in a week’s time, I could either repeat a couple of them or forego lunch all together. Today is one of those days that I don’t know what to have and didn’t feel like staying in the office. McDonald’s come to mind, so there I went.
McDonald’s have now, and apparently for quite some time now, started timing their service with a stopwatch, where if they could not fulfill your order within 59 seconds, they would give you a free coupon of some sort. Today’s coupon is for a free medium soft drink - they didn’t have a double burger ready and had to make one up on the spot for me.
It took them about 5 minutes to have the burger “delivered” to my table, and I get a hot fresh off the grill double burger with fluffy buns, and the free coupon, which is a lot better than a luke warm burger with soggy buns, I thought.
A while later, a young lady with a big smile on her face and a basket full of katchup, spices, and napkins etc., walking around asking everyone if they needed any or anything else. Wow, this sort of service is not even available in a proper full service restaurant where most of them won’t even give you any water!
While this kind of service would not make me go for McDonald’s any more often than I have been, it is sure nice to see someone did make an effort to better serve their customers.
Mind you though, their better service might not have come for free. McDonald’s have been quietly increasing their product prices continuously here all along. Their latest product, Chicken Focaccia, which is basically a chicken burger with spiced buns, costs some HKD$22 a la Carte! Just to give you a comparison in prices, half of a cooked chicken around this area is HKD$20-$25. A boxed lunch - Chinese bento, is around HK$10; $12 with soup.
Oh well, at least McDonald’s food tastes pretty well the same all over the world, which is a lot more I could say for this other restaurant in Ho Chung, Sai Kung, where they couldn’t even get the taste of a new regular can of Sprite right! Amazing!
WhaUSay?!