http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6214686.stm
Hmmm… ‘the right restaurants in the right places’ ?
Could this be the humble beginnings of a trend? We can only hope!
Up here we get an International Market on the main shopping street in the city every few months. This thing is great, it sells food from all over the world and all of it is organic and free from processed nonsense. You buy fresh vegetables from france, holland and Italy. Sausages from Germany, all kinds of meat and drinks as well as flowers and various other trinkets. There’s also loads of hot food stands selling the likes of crepes, burgers (ostrich, wild boar, venison or aberdeen angus), bratwurst, paella, falaffels, garlic mushrooms (these are awesome) as well as various stalls selling breads, cheeses and cold meats.
At the same time we often have the more regular farmers market in a side street. This sells fresh meat, fish, vegetables, cheese, craft products etc. all produced locally and without coporate intervention. It’s fantastic. You cna wander around these places for hours just stuffing your faces or taking in the smells.
However, every time I go to these it never ceases to amaze me that there is always a load of people standing with their back to the goodies while they decide what kind of mass produced, processed crap they’re going to buy from McDonalds.
For about £2 they could buy a huge, juicy and healthy venison burger from the meats of the world stall that tastes a million times better than a big mac, but no they choose instead to go with the rubbish that they’re told to buy by their TVs and and the million pound ad campaigns. Idiots.
In my experience, when folks eat at McD’s, especially during the day, it means they don’t have the money right then to eat anywhere else.
McD’s represents a kind of bottom-of-the-barrel choice when you need to eat and have a light wallet.
Now their breakfast is different–some of their breakfast sandwiches are quite good, and they seem to have a little more upscale clientelle at breakfast.
McD’s: a business that prospers by being known for being the cheapest of the quick-n-cheap eateries and by being instantly recognizable anywhere.
–James
Its surprising (scary) how people will gravitate to what they know rather than what may be better, but too new for their psyches to handle. Micky D’s is (supposedly) the same food everywhere at approxiamately the same price, served cheap, fast and (supposedly) hot. Its easy to say all these things make them attractive, and often there is little else available in the off-hours, but this doesn’t explain the hoards who show up to eat this crap when better food at comparable prices is readily available. There really must be, I think, more going on than just the speed of service or availability of McD’s.
djm
Cheap is a cop out. For about the same price as a McDonald’s meal I can go to a decent sandwhich shop (not subway) and get a freshly made baguette with good, healthy ingredients that’ll fill me up just as much as a quarter pounder with cheese and fries.
Or if you really want to be unhealthy you could go for fish and chips. Locally caught fresh fish and freshly cut chips for 3 or 4 quid. You usually get a lot more for your money than at a McDonalds or Burger King as well.
Mmmmm, homemade chips!
djm
When McDonalds first opened in Melbourne, some time in the late 60s or early 70s, I tried a burger—yuk—and took notice that they seemed to be targetting the youngest and stupidest with their marketing and concluded that they were doomed. The local fast food shops made burgers so much better.
Very few of those local burger shops are still in business today. What is the saying: nobody ever lost money undersestimating the taste of the general public?
That would be one of the biggest wrong calls I’ve ever made.
You’re lucky you live where good quality, cheap food is available.
There are some good sandwich shops here, but you’ll pay twice what you’d pay to eat in McD’s or BK.
Not so much an issue for me–there are three universities in Conway, and the fast food places are always filled to the gills with hungry college kids.
One of my favorite places to catch lunch is an Italian restaurant close to my workplace which has inexpensive lunch specials. You can eat there for only a few dollars more than at a cheap burger joint, and get real food. Now, I’ll grant you, good Italian is nobody’s idea of health food, but it’s gotta be better for ya than a McDredge combo.
–James
Go easy on the cheese and it’s pretty healthy.
I’ve been on a health kick for most of this year and pasta with various fillings and sauces now makes up a large part of my diet, it’s superb.
Looks like they’ve gone and proven that true… at least in this case 
Yes, I want to verify what Peeps said. Higher quality food costs substantially more here than McD’s. I can only guess that McD’s is much more expensive in the UK because of taxes or something..
In fact, I have not yet come to terms with just how expensive
locally-grown and supposedly organic food is in the stores as well as the restaurants. California is the leader in so much agriculture and the farms are pretty close, relative to people in other states. Local produce should be very cheap, even if grown with “sustainable methods.”
But I feel like a country hick when I go into the local natural grocery or even Whole Foods and see the consumers spending easily three times as much on any given item. I can’t condemn or resent them, but its hard to open my tight wallet there after a lifetime of wanting to pay common sense prices for things in season and on sale. The explanation is that if you want premium food, you have to pay premium prices. But paying 89 cents a pound for a yellow onion, as opposed to 29, when they look identical is hard, and I am talking about domestically grown in both cases, not NAFTA stuff from Mexico or elsewhere…
FWIW, the Weekender doesn’t eat at McDonalds or any other chain fast-food (and I am too cheap to eat at nice restaurants on a regular basis, unlike many in my area) . I do get tired of washing dishes and cooking but I feel more control about what’s goin’ down the gullet. I am lucky to have a ranching family, because I get all my beef from my folks as well as lamb (and occasionally venison or wild pig). I do chance it with chicken, getting it from the conglomerate (Foster Farms) and infrequently buy pork. But no, I sure don’t want what McD’s has to offer..
Doesn’t it make sense that decent food costs more than crap?
But, seriously, if you don’t insist on eating meat, can’t you get good food cheaply? Even crappy meat is more expensive in Australia than vegetables and grains. Wouldn’t a cheese and tomato sandwich be cheap? Would you need more than one or two for lunch?
I’m telling you Wombly, even produce is high here if it’s organic and sustainably produced etc… A supermarket tomato is less than a buck a lb. At the fancy organic market, we’re talking $3 per pound. Yes, it makes sense, to a point
No, good quality produce is also quite expensive, so much so that people on limited incomes such as college students often find they have no choice but eat fast food.
No, it’s not good for you. No, almost no one with sense would eat it by choice. But yes, it’s better than staying hungry.
–James
P.S. Sorry, Weeks, didn’t mean to step on your answer. We posted just a few seconds apart. 
I don’t think it’s that McDonald’s is expensive, more that we don’t pay over the odds for proper food.
I think a big mac meal is around £3 - £4 (haven’t had one for a while), which includes regular fries and a drink. Today I had a brown baguette (baked that day) with pastrami, mixed leaves, onion and tomato, a packet of amazingly good organic crisps (chips for you yanks) and a diet coke for £4. That was from a particularly good sandwhich shop which charges accordingly. If you shop around you can probably lower that price to nearer £3.
Not at all. I am frankly curious about other states. If its expensive in Calif, it seems like it would be more so elsewhere, in terms of proximity to the actual growing areas (our cost of living is higher, tho).
I go into Whole Foods and my jaw drops at what people are paying per grocery bag. That’s kind of a rough way to assess where I shop. At a discount grocery, like Foods4Less, where I know the produce and meats are of questionable quality, I can get out of there for less than $10 a bag. At a mom-n-pop place with decent produce, more like $14-15. At Whole Foods, easily $25+. I had to buy a fruit variety for a track meet there at the last minute and spent over $30 for a melon, some strawberries, a pineapple, a few oranges and apples and bananas. Unbelievable. For me, it was like going to an expensive restaurant, where you hand 'em the credit card and look the other way…
Apparently The Economist have something called the Big Mac Index which uses a uniform product (a single big mac) that’s available world wide to compare purchasing power and currency:
http://www.oanda.com/products/bigmac/bigmac.shtml
I get downright squeamish that a dang fast-food hamburger is a standard of anything.!! Interesting, tho. If I read it right, you pay a bit more there, but not by much.
Here, a Bic Mac meal is about $6.00
I usually cook for 3 or 4, and make some pretty decent meals…the other day, I made lemon-rosemary lamb chops, garlic mashed potatoes, and brussels sprouts with prosciutto ham. Cost was about $43.00, or a little over $10.00 a person.
If I cook something a lot less fancy, say parmasean chicken or chicken cacciatore, or just about any meal with ground beef, I can make the meal for about $15-$20 (about the same price per person as Mcdonalds), and it’s a lot better than Micky D’s.