[tylercubell]

I worked in a franchisee-owned McDonalds circa 2011 and I agree with the sentiment of this article. At the time they were trying to be all things to all people. Instead of focusing on their core strength: burgers and fries, they expanded an already crowded menu by introducing items like the McWrap and Fish McBites that nobody really wanted. Since then I think they've been trying to turn things around by trimming the fat from the menu ("getting back to basics") and actually responding to what customers want by doing things like introducing all-day breakfast.

Also, I got the sense that they don't have a great relationship with their franchisees. For example, there's a special salt shaker called AccuSalt[0] that the McDonald's Corporation requires franchisees to own which costs hundreds of dollars if I remember correctly. It's a total ripoff because the thing is a cheap plastic POS that breaks whenever it's dropped and franchisees aren't allowed to buy a generic one. As a result of this and probably 100 other little things, I once heard that the franchisee I worked for got the McDonald's Corporation to fly out an HVAC tech across the country to fix a thermostat out of spite.

[0]: https://www.sonoco.com/productsandservices/plastics/accusalt...

[pgrote]

It ensures the proper amount of salt in the proper pattern is dispensed. Are there generic ones available?

The idea behind tools like this is uniform product preparation. Fries in one McDonalds are almost identical to fries in another.

[tylercubell]

I understand the supposed reasoning, although in my own experience the uniformity of the fries is very spotty nonetheless. Usually employees don't spread the salt properly or they don't hold the shaker long enough for all the salt to properly dispense anyway. This negates any benefit of the AccuSalt.

Instead there are generic shakers that could get a very similar result with some training, even though they don't have a built-in measure. All commercial kitchen supply outlets have them.

Better yet, when kitchen staff are ultimately replaced by robots (or the salt dispenser gets built in to the fry station) this won't be an issue anymore.