I am a vegetarian and I cannot eat eggs for religious reasons. On road trips there is always a McDonald's at every corner and so I went into one. I was going to order the veggie wraps that they have there. I wanted to try a different combo that they had and wanted to know the ingredients. I know that the McDonald's have an ingredient book that they can refer to, but this employee refused to get it, saying that "we're not allowed to give out that information." Of course, I was fuming mad because I know that they CAN give out that information because I've always gotten in and I could actually see the book in the corner. Honestly, her answer made no sense. If you want customers and they have an allergy, you need to be able to tell them by viewing the ingredients. This was unacceptable and I complained to the manager. Finally, they got the book. I didn't look at it, I just said that I don't want to waste my time their any more. Have you ever had a similar experience?
Not specifically with McDonald's, but I have that kind of experience at a store that I frequent often, it has started to be quite funny (after the fact) to me actually. On a regular basis I go to a certain store to get money orders to pay bills. Depending on who's behind the counter, I'll either be given an envelope to put my money order in, or I won't be given one, and get told with absolute certainty that envelopes aren't provided here. Well (I think to myself), I know that's not true, because I was here just the other day and right after the lady printed up my money order, she gave me an envelope to put it in. Some people just don't know how to provide good customer service these days. Yesterday I was in a store, and the magnet on my credit card wasn't working. I ran it through a couple times, but it wouldn't work. I asked the lady behind the counter if she would enter the numbers into the register by hand. She acted like I had just asked her to scale Mt. Everest, she had made up in her mind that my credit card wasn't going to work anyway, so why try? She started telling me why she couldn't enter the numbers in. I told her to please try anyway. Sure enough, she entered the number and gave the card back to me. "No, it doesn't work." I took the card and went to another register, and the lady there knew what she was doing, and the card went through. Some people just go to work for a paycheck, and I get that, but it still sucks when you run across someone who just is defiant about doing something a little out of the norm to provide good customer service.
My sister has a peanut allergy and we have had bad experiences with waitpersons who did not want to bother checking with the kitchen about what kind of oil was used for fries and things like that. We would often ask, " what kind of oil are the fries cooked in?" And some waitpersons would say "oil". They weren't even listening, and then they act like its a huge pain to check for us. Well, if you can't assure us the food is safe for one member of a 4-6 person table, the whole party is going to get up and go elsewhere.
I do feel you pay peanuts, so that's the service you get. I don't think it's limited to McDonalds as my local one is very helpful and friendly, but places where the working conditions are tough and pay is low, the results are this. It maybe a lack of training or people have little incentive to work. Of course it's not right, but let's be honest the standards aren't high in McDonalds so what did you expect?
I think the customer service McDonald's is drowning. The McDonald's in my neighborhood is doing this thing where they have complete your order at the drive through within a minute or you get a free burger. What is the point in getting your order in one minute if your order is all wrong. They want you to drive off as fast as possible after they give you your order because they have to get to the next car and it doesn't give you a chance to check your order at the drive through. I know that McDonald's is suffering in terms of profits and they are trying to do a lot of things to change that, but the bottom line is that gimmicks are not going to work if you can't maintain customer service. They should learn that from Chic Filet or In N Out where people wait in line for an hour and still keep coming back. Your food has to taste good and be of quality and you should serve it with a smile.
That is terrible, you need to know what is in it for health reasons it is not just like you were being fussy and even if you were, you would still have had a right to see the ingredients. Some things contain eggs that lots of people don't even know about but you would because of your allergies!
It's awful when that happens. I recently had a slightly different experience at a new Asian restaurant that everyone's been raving about. We finally decided to try it and the service was impeccable. I explained I had a shell fish allergy, and I was assured that my meal would contain calamari in place of the prawns. When we got home, there were prawns in my food We went back about two days later and brought it to their attention. Luckily they apologised and offered us a free meal on the house for our next order
McDonald's can be very hit and miss for me. At times, the service is speedy and polite whilst at others, you seem to be hanging around for ages. That's one of the problems that franchise businesses have - there never seem to be similar standards of service all across the board.
When a business is losing profits and struggling, you look at what their competitors are doing right, and you know what? MsDonald's is messing up in a lot of ways. Burger King opens an hour earlier than McDonald's. So they get all the customers who need breakfast at 5AM before they rush to work. Taco Bell has exciting new breakfast options that are cheap and taste good. McDonald's has the same old overpriced pancakes. Burger King lets you buy hamburgers for breakfast if you want them. My local Burger King has tons of electric outlets for people to charge their phones and tablets. McDonald's covered all their outlets so that no one would linger too long using the WiFi and they posted a sign saying that people have to leave in 30 minutes or else it's loitering. McDonald's comes off as cheap and unfriendly when all these other places let you charge your device and use the internet. Plus, I actually order more food when a fast food place lets me hang out and surf the web. By blocking their outlets and chasing people out after 30 minutes, McDonald's is chasing money out the door.
Oh my, that's not very good customer service at all. I work in a clothing store myself, I don't know if this applies to that situation, but we are told to never enter in the card number in the computers because we had a few fraudulent cards like that and they stole thousands of dollars worth of merchandise because we entered in the card numbers. I know that it does make the customers pretty upset telling them that we are unable to do so, but if we do it and something goes wrong, its our jobs that are on the line and the thing is that we can never tell the reals from the fakes. Maybe there are just cranky people out there? I don't blame the franchise for their poor customer service, I blame the workers honestly. I think that they have such a huge franchise that they cannot keep track of who has good service and who doesn't. Wow, that's actually kind of drastic putting up a sign like that. Honestly, whose idea is that? When people are traveling or their wifi is down, they should be able to sit for as long as they want as long as they've purchased their products.
I try not to get too fired up over the minimum wage employees at these places because a lot of it has to do with them not being trained properly, the manager not hiring the right people in the first place, the fact that they are being paid awful wages, and the overall bad morale in such places. Also, perhaps the McDonalds franchises aren't publishing as much printed materials these days with regards to their ingredients since much of this information is available online and just about everyone has a smartphone these days that they can look this stuff up on. I would also warn you that not all restaurant employees have access to 100% of the ingredients in their food. When I worked at TGI Fridays, I started out as a cook, but eventually worked as a server there - so I knew all their ingredients inside-out. That said, some of the stuff came in pre-mixed in plain white packaging with no ingredients listed on them. So for people with nut allergies for example, I couldn't say with 100% certainty that some of the pre-made products did or didn't come in contact with nuts.
My simple and straight forward answer would be to stay away from MacDonald's in general. It's well known that their methods are unethical. Next time you get hungry, why don't you go and eat at some vegetarian restaurant, some snack bar, or even buy something tasty at a deli? I am sure that in those places you will most likely always get the exact information that you are after. Not telling a person what ingredients are contained in a certain food can be potentially deadly, such as in people with severe peanut or wheat allergies.
Yes I am a vegetarian too and I really struggle when my friends want to go to Mcdonalds because I dont want to support such a disgusting industry. Anyways when I went inside the shop I was talking to one of my friends about being a vegetarian and I noticed that the staff were listening to me and laughing at me. I gave them my order of a vegeburger and when I took it out of the bag i discovered that they had given me a regular cheese burger!!! I was so so angry with them that I told them to get their manager to come out and those 2 particular staff responsible and got fired from the job!
I haven't had so far experiences like this, maybe because I'm not a vegetarian and I never ask about the ingredients, but you should've call in the manager and ask her or him to explain the situation and if there really exists a rule that forbids the employees telling you the ingredients, even if you had one telling you about them before, maybe he or she broke a rule in order to do that.
I guess you're right, pretty much anyone can work there, you don't have to be highly educated. I wonder why it is that some pre-mixed ingredients don't come with an ingredients list as well. I guess you're right about everyone having access to the information online, but I still think it should be a company's responsibility to be able to say this information if a customer asks, they cannot just say "look online" or something along those lines. Its very hard for a vegetarian to find proper veg food, as much as I wish, there just aren't as many restaurants out there. But yes, it can indeed be very harmful. Greetings fellow vegetarian! Wow, that was a sick joke they did. How did you know that it was a regular cheese burger? And they got fired? If that was their first job, its going to be difficult for them to find more because they would need a reference. I did indeed ask for a manager, but they were conveniently not there at the time.
It the manager wasn't there, you should've asked for a complain book or something like that, I know for sure every major franchise has one, you could've wrote there everything you were pissed about and from my knowledge they had to give it to you.
The reason why I didn't make a bigger scene is that this McDonald's was basically a pit stop on the way to New York. My family and I were driving down to NYC and we were trying to get there before the rain started pouring. So if I did continue on my way with them, we wouldn't have gotten out at all haha. Though, if it were a McDonald's across the street from me, well, they better prepare an escape route!
