Wabi-sabi.

This is the content I come to orange site for.

Dang! Now I can't unsee it.

I relate McDonald's with the famous movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me And avoid at any cost

This isn't interesting.

Does it imply there is a cultural difference that would make this style more lucrative in Japan than other places? Does it suggest compositionally the alignment of asymmetric shapes in a regular form is more satisfying than a regular arrangement of identical forms? Does it imply that given an array of nearly identical choices it's important to add some noise visually to distinguish?

I'm a cynical person by nature but I'm seriously not understanding what makes this interesting.

We might as well discuss the effectiveness of simulated grime in the most recent Clorox advertising campaign?

But many alcoholics do.

I've seen two in my life vomit while walking without missing a step.

they're all tilted so the new comer don't feel so awkward with that bump on it's head --source: me

*edit: I'd like to also comment on the crazy lighting going on.. if the photographer of this can see this comment, please take a pic of the setup..this look quite intense

Aren't there more strict laws on marketing imagery being similar to their actual products in Japan? Wonder if that plays into it, or if the photography team was just having fun.

I remember in India's McDonalds there was a Maharaja Burger. In Lebanon they have falafel on the menu. This Japanese menu looks really enticing to be honest.

Often (not always) the top bun is the worst offender, but it’s most certainly not just about the buns: if you look closely, the unique characteristic of Japanese McDonalds (separating it both from McDonalds in other countries as well as from other similar chains in Japan) is that in each photo every burger layer (be it bun, meat, lettuce, etc.) is offset by a seemingly-random factor on its X axis.

I’m sure discussions like this is exactly why they did it. Considering other chains in Japan don’t do this, it clearly has nothing with regulations (unless those are really unevenly enforced).

I think some of those 'localised' menu items would sell well in the Uk and I hope McDonald's puts my hunch to the test.

This is doing a bigger number on me than it has any right to.

...why are they all skewed, save for the buns that are already lopsided? Those I'll note are perfectly seated. Some are more skewed than others. Like the Big Mac is only slightly skewed.

Is there a pecking order to how skewed they are? Some social hierarchy of sandwiches?

They're not askew, they're in _italics_

They must get a kick too when they see our stoic, rigid, perfectly postured McWiches. Great post, OP +1

Also look at the breading on that chicken, and I want a "shrimp filet-o" bad.

The sandwiches are wearing their hats, cocked a bit, in a devil-may-care kind of way.

It could be to reduce discrepancy (and the disappointment) between marketing and reality.

Reminds me of this monologue from the 1993 movie Falling Down [1]:

> See, this is what I'm talking about. Look at that. See what I mean? It's plump, juicy, three inches thick. Look at this sorry, miserable, squashed thing. Can anybody tell me what's wrong with this picture?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG8AKdp-GM

Hey! That's not McDonald's! That's マクドナルド！「Makudonarudo」

I need to buy one of these sandwiches so I can correct the alignment

I find it even more fascinating that a few of them aren't.

Is it me or are those prices dead cheap compared to UK / US?

Their menu looks so much better than ours (U.S.)

Silently screaming "Why?!" As a scroll

Another mysterious thing is that McDonald's Japan burgers taste completely different from European or Americans. The spices and sauces there are not the same, I suspect they made it that way to make it tailored to the local preferences!

Why doesnt USA get an egg cheeseburger :(

A lot of odd takes in the comments.

I think the most correct take is that seeing a the top bun slightly off is more realistic and honest.

Respecting your customers, even in advertising, is appreciated.

Adding "trying McDonald's" to my long list of reasons to travel to Japan.

I read this and chuckle because I'm the type to eat at a Michelin Star restaurant for dinner and then get Taco Bell for lunch the next day.

I don't think I'll ever consider myself above most fast food. I'd take a McLaren to McDonald's.

Bite selection is akin to bin packing, now that I think about it.

You're missing a syllable

Please use proper spelling and punctuation if you wish to be taken seriously.

Lower-case is neither cute nor a flex.

Well, they've done it in a way that doesn't irritate me, so kudos to their marketing team.

Biggumakku!

IANAL, so I won't quote relevant text from previous link, but I believe promotional photos need to be of the actual food (ie not substituting shaving cream for whipped cream to deal with melting issue), but it will likely be a very picturesque version of it, though they are indeed (less, but still) askew in those photos. I looked a bit further, and it seem the American BK uses similar (though not exact) photos of their JP counterpart now, maybe it's a trend, but I did find a rather stark contrast with their AU counterpart (naming is another story):

https://www.hungryjacks.com.au/Upload/HJ/Media/Menu/product/...

compared to the Japanese:

https://www.burgerking.co.jp/images/menu/web/main/2025/09/04...

Hackernews sees skewed burger and proceeds to praise itself

Nope! I think especially in professional hands they can produce convincing images of food. Also notice the caveats? It's a subjective impression about what's potentially the case paired with immediate acknowledgement of an alternative.

Gotta throw this one back in the lake I'm afraid.

Because it's not. From another comment: "Being slightly aswew really hard to fight the subconscious urge to reach out and 'fix' them. I almost want to rush out to a nearest McDonald's right now and buy one of these burgers"

Urge to fix something, or tricking one to spend money for a novelty is quite literally the opposite of wabi-sabi.

Not sure about this, given that sufficiently accurate plastic simulacra satisfy the law, right? Is it just that it can’t be digitally generated?

Like the sibling said about plastic models, if the generated image does faithfully look like the food then I guess it's fine. Over time anyway customers won't even know it's AI generated or a real photo as all the hallmarks of AI images are rapidly disappearing.

Yes, exactly.

Here in Singapore the terminals work well! The latency has definitely gone down. Ironically the Japanese McDonald's website loads faster than the Singapore one... so they've got some work to do.

They probably never wash them so there is this insulating layer of grease and grime on the screen that inhibits touch detection.

Is that in comparison to the US? Because US food was cheaper than dirt in the past before all the food processing conglomerates decided to leverage their dominant market position to increase margins.

If you want to pay a lot for food you still can. I imagine this is the case anywhere. If you care to look, you can find an amazing meal on the cheap. If you don't, you may end up paying a few bucks for a single apple.

I mean more like, I'd look for the stuff that's like $300-$400 in the US at various places that would sell it in Japan and generally speaking it was more expensive in the stores in Japan after conversion. I was expecting it'd be like similar price or less. So I opted to just buy the imports in the US.

I'll admit to McDonald's Japan being a guilty pleasure of mine. Most things I get are pretty close to the picture. It's not perfect of course, but it's McDonald's, I'm not exactly expecting gourmet food and presentation. The fries kick ass though, I almost always get them hot and perfectly golden brown.

At least, in Japan, they're generally as advertised.

One of the benefits of the move to app ordering is that I know for certain the order-taker got it right. And I can bookmark the custom order for later reuse.

Now it's just down to the kitchen to fulfill the order correctly, and while it's not 100% it's a lot, lot better.

Once I ordered extra pickles and I got them - in a vertical stack of about 6 pickles.

Imagine ordering online late a night from a hotel room and the MCD missing my required condiment ketchup with the order.

Your causality is backwards. The relatively loose monetary policy is because inflation (and economic activity) is too slow.

Printing does not of its own cause inflation. In Japan it seems that efforts to inject money into the economy end up immediately stuck in low interest savings accounts.

In the US, photos of food must depict the actual product being advertised. So all the photos of burgers on the McD's menu are what is being sold, albeit with carefully selected "hero" ingredients skillfully assembled for the best presentation.

For a product that is only advertising one thing in a photo, e.g. an ice cream cone with ice cream on a package of just cones, I don't think there are any restrictions on what the "ice cream" can be made of. (It's probably mashed potatoes, though.)

I remember reading a book in the '80s where one of the characters was a food photographer and mentioned that some kind of plastic had to be used for the cheese in hamburgers or it wouldn't be realistic.

But also many post 2000 claims that it was all actually real food because of various "truth in advertising" regulations around the world.

The linked Canadian McDonald's video would be one example.

Elmers glue is edible.

Is there anyone who uses the app and orders premium options and uses coupons that don't represent much of a discount... yet, the app STILL takes a long time to load?

Causing delays for unprofitable customers. Any business is going to do it if they can. /tinfoil

(Their margins shouldn't be this bad.)

When I was a lad, 30ms was considered the worst latency allowable for telephony unless you were dealing with satellite links, in which case you taught people to use a simple variety of radio protocol (over).

Nowadays with all our fancy crappy comms, 200+ms is considered normal. Ever noticed the lag on a Teams call?

It feels snappy _compared with most sites_.

That's the point!

It feels _very_ sluggish if I try it after spending some time using a windows 98 VM, or a library catalog from 1990.

Do you think that kitchen was using a robot to build the burgers?

I'm sure these two behaviors depend on each other. Instantaneous response allows the company to spend more of your attention answering questions rather than staring at a spinner.

If you've ever watched TV with someone who gets distracted and sets down the remote after each button press while Netflix's UI slowly loads, you know that three or four UI interactions can turn into a several-minute ordeal.

I have been in elevators in which it does do something. I've timed the difference. This foul rumour must die.

It's choice exhaustion, a common dark pattern. You get worn down and that makes you more likely to spend more than you need

Annoying, for sure, but at least it’s not an unpredictable 800 keystroke, zero agency, chatbot interaction.

I actively seek out such establishments because I'm an introvert and I don't want to talk to people. Japan is a paradise in this way... an extremely large number of restaurants do not require interacting with a human to place your order.

Why do you want them to take your order if you have access to a terminal?

We had a mass murder in Australia a few years ago involving death cap mushrooms. 3 of the 4 victims died, and the 4th required a liver transplant.

Surprisingly the doctors involved quickly identified mushrooms as the culprit, despite that the 75% died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leongatha_mushroom_murders

It was a super interesting court case.

I mean... I could have asked, and they might have been able to transfer, but there's no user accessible way to make it happen, and you can't (or couldn't) make a new order while one was pending. But I was coming back from kid's hockey practice and tired and now mad at mcdonalds, so I wasn't going to wait in line to ask. I have ordered to the wrong Starbucks, where they do start your order when you place it, and they were able to see the order and remake it at the one I actually showed up at, but Starbucks is always super nice whenever anything goes wrong, even if when it's my fault, which it usually is.

Not being able to start a new order is also great when you had a successful order that the app didn't notice and then you have to clear app data days later when you want to order again... but I think McDonalds may have added a button to just order anyway in the past not too long.

Yeah, the app and kiosks are slow and buggy, but I've never had a custom order prepared wrong with the kiosk or app. And as slow as it is, it's still almost always faster than ordering in person because your order is usually ready when you arrive and you never have to wait in line at the register or drive thru (assuming you choose to pick up at the counter, which you should if the dining room is open and you don't want to wait).

Also, when the app or kiosk bugs out and fails to correctly process an offer, or lose an order, McDonald's cashiers and managers are in my experience typically trained to set things right. Not only will cashiers honor "app only" deals at the register when something goes wrong, managers will occasionally comp the entire order.

Probably. Similarly, Walmart has a great eng org for a company of its size.

Hah, old memories unlocked. As a kid I remember using “eatable” to mess with people because it “wasn’t a word”.

Is it edible? Yeah, it is eatable.

Here I am, years later, learning I was right all along.

That's backwards, eatable is the stronger claim that means fit as food while edible just means safe to eat.

> Nothing you've said indicates why the button does nothing.

Let me expound a bit —

The close-door button cannot override the ADA minimum 3-second open time… the door must remain open for at least 3 seconds no matter what you press. But, most are configured to automatically close at 3 seconds. So as soon as the door-close function is no longer overridden, the door starts closing anyway, so pressing the button has no effect. With the door-open button and door sensor, they generally start closing immediately when they’re not active, so since the doors are already closing, the door-close button has no effect. If the door-open button is configured to open the door more than momentarily, the door close button should function.

If the elevator is designed to stay open longer than the 3-second period during which the door-close button is overridden, it will be available after the first 3 seconds. So if it’s configured to stay open for 10 seconds, the door-close button will be inactive for 3 seconds, but will start a door close, when pressed, from the 4th through the 10th second. At 10 seconds, the door will be closing anyway.

If a regular people-moving elevator is configured to be capable of closing the door in less than 3 seconds, it’s out-of-code. Since professional elevator companies maintain and configure most (all?) up-to-code elevators, and they’re probably liable for them to some extent, I doubt that’s common. It’s not like I’ve studied it or anything though.

I’m pretty sure that timing it out with a stopwatch would reveal that no matter what is happening, the door stays open for a minimum of 3 seconds. Anything beyond 3 seconds depends on how it’s configured, but most are configured to close as soon as they legally can.

Cool! I had a friend working there at the time. First time I heard about F#

Yea, fair enough. This is a great point. My experience has definitely been that company size is inversely correlated with ... functionality of engineering org.

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but yes, all I was saying is their eng org. I'm not speaking on their Customer Service or business practices.

I have a half-serious theory that their mobile app is for price discrimination. The best deals are only available in the app, but the experience is so bad that you'll only use it if you really need to.

their app has some very strange flow to it, i cant tell if it feels designed by committee or if there are just so many strange use cases that its somehow the least bad given some arbitrary constraints i cant begin to understand.

even selecting my restaurant is a constant battle. the closest restaurant to my house as the bird flies is not the closest restaurant. even the closest by miles driven involves much more complication than the one i always want to pick. it constantly battles me that i have selected a suboptimal choice. maybe learn that when i am at home, i want to default to my preferred choice, every time, unless i say otherwise.

I gave up on the app completely when I placed an order via the app, was waved past the payment window, then the order window denied it was placed (and paid for). I showed them the phone with the order number still on it. They said it could be a screenshot. After arguing for a while, I drove away without food.

I eventually got a refund after digging throw their web site for an email address, and emailed them the statement showing where it has been paid. With the back and forward while they asked for evidence, it took over an hour of my time in the end to get the refund. It wasn't the money. It was the principle.

The app is by far the slowest, most unreliable way to place an order with them. Period. The next slowest (although far better) is the kiosks. They also unreliable when the printer doesn't work (which is most of the time), and you make the mistake of forgetting the receipt number. Other fast food outlets have solved this problem by getting you to enter your name. That's beyond McDonalds apparently. The fastest, and most reliable way by far is to talk to a human.

The order should be the reverse. It is beyond me how they get it so badly wrong. Maybe price discrimination is the reason. Nothing else makes much sense for an organisation of the size and resources of McDonalds.

I've never once been able to use the McDonald's app over several years and multiple devices. I originally wanted to check the nutritional info of the menu. Download our app, it says. This website is better in our app, it says. The order screen constantly asks me to enter my app code. Collect points in our App! Do you have our App? I give in and finally download the App. "Something's not quite right", you didn't install our app properly (Aurora Store instead of Google Play), you didn't set up your device properly (unlocked bootloader), you did something wrong to upset the App and it will not run. Oh no, we can't let you see the number of calories in your burger with an unlocked bootloader!!! This stupid app has stricter protection than any of my banking apps and I will never be able to escape constantly being asked to use it

The US app is still laggy (even on the iPhone 17 Pro) and constantly logs you out. My theory is that they set the login timeout to a low number to make it harder to accrue points.

Their app also blocks the use of it on GrapheneOS, for no proper reason.

For a while, you could call the mobile api to submit an order with a price of your choosing. No validation.

I actually did not. I launched it to again later and it prompted for an update. So I updated it, eventually.

And that sounds easy, except it wasn't:

1. The Play Store should do better at keeping things actually-updated. There was a time when it would check for updates All The Time. Seriously, that thing subscribed to so many broadcsats that it would trigger updates if you breathed on it in the wrong direction. Leave the house and get in the car and thus switch from wifi to cellular? Plug in or unplug it from the charger? Log into it? Time to download and install all updates in parallel! Your phone will get hot, you'll probably be able to watch the battery indicator decrease at a rapid pace, it will turn mostly-unresponsive to the app you actually want to use, and there's a good chance that it will undeniably use metered cellular data for this.

Which, you know: That was ugly way to do things, but at least apps were kept fresh.

But the current Play Store status of "Lol, wut? You want automatic updates? Yeah, naw dawg. Imma just quietly never do that. Yeah I know you turned them on. Nope, I'm not even gonna give you a shortcut to do that with. You can do the updates one at a time, or you can dig into the buried menu for the button to manually update them all right now. Which I could do for you, but get bent buddy," is also ugly.

(In Google's defense, I do only have something like 20GB of free internal storage space. Except: I also have a couple of hundred GB free on the SD card. Also: This 20GB of internal is more than the total [sd+internal] storage space I had on those phones in the irrevocably-parallel-update days.)

So this first one: We'll classify that as a system problem.

And system problems are not McDonald's fault. Except...

2. After I first ran the McDonald's app and it died in a flash, I did try to run it again shortly thereafter. It wouldn't launch again (tapping the icon resulted in nothing happening at all) until I hunted down its ghost and killed that too. Then it ran. And then it rather quickly prompted for an update, which I applied. That was >3 cumulative attempts to get somewhere with it, with all but one of those attempts being things a dumb user who just wants some fast food should never have to do.

So this version of the McDonald's app that had been capable of begrudgingly actually ordering some coffee when I'd last actually used it. But later, this same version had somehow become incapable of even prompting for an update. This lead me to a choice: I could choose to either give up, or choose to dance around with it and make it work. That's bad.

And since the McDonald's app lives within a system that doesn't reliably deliver automatic updates, and it demonstrably fails to thrive in this condition, then that leads me to conclude the following:

Both things are McDonald's fault. None of these conditions were handled with grace.

Unless the goal actually is sadistic (wherein the suffering is the whole point), then all of this business could have been handled smoothly from within the McDonald's app as a continuous and informative flow from the first launch.

Other apps manage to do this. This one does not.

Score: 0.

That's how it was in the US, too. Sit down anywhere, fire up the app[1], order whatever, enter the table number and they bring it over. That part of the service was consistent and worked well.

The consistency all changed with the covid shuffle.

Now, it depends on the location and their mood at the time. Sometimes, they bring the food out on a tray. Sometimes, they just dismissively put it on the counter at the front in a paper bag and walk away from it without a word. Sometimes they fill the drink for you; sometimes there's a rack of cups and an implied expectation that you just figure it out yourself; sometimes they bring over an empty cup; sometimes you have to beg them for that empty cup. It sucks.

Same with the kiosk. They have these neat table tents with numbers; they're actually BLE beacons that work with tracking hardware inside the ceiling. They help the employees to get a good idea of where you're sitting before they even leave the kitchen. But sometimes there are no table tents to be had (even in an empty restaurant), and sometimes when they do exist nobody gives a damn about them.

As systems, these things work fine. I've seen them work. But I've observed the implementation of them in recent years to have been an unmitigated mess, and this mess is clearly the result of a geographically-diverse problem with bad local-level management.

Buying a cheeseburger and a Coke at McDonald's -- which built an empire around simplicity and efficiency -- should never be an adventure or a guessing game. It should be the most straight-forward process on Earth and completely devoid of surprises.

But it isn't.

[1]: Well, within the app's limitations. I did rant about that in another comment, above.

One rule I had with my kids at McDonalds: you take it like they make it. No customizations; they will just fuck it up anyway. If you don't like pickles take them off yourself.

The cash register doesn't try quite as hard to upsell you as the kiosk.

But yes, the cash register should be able to support the data entry skills of teenagers growing up with TikTok.

The wealthiest person who I know well would absolutely fiddle with an app for 5 minutes to save 30 cents on a sandwich at McDonald's. He's cheap AF.

But even if he weren't that way, making the app deliberately bad to eek a few more clams out of a subset of people is perverse. Deliberately erecting barriers between the products and those who want to buy them is not how business is successfully done at this level. They aren't selling Ferraris here.

"I want to stick it to these rich guys, so I'll make the app terrible!" doesn't make sense. They're neither smart enough to do that, nor dumb enough.

The simplest explanation is that in a world of shitty software, this software is also just shit. :)

Idk, they've all been wanting these kiosks to take off for a long while - maybe ~10 years - and it's just a UX problem keeping most people away from them. Given the labor savings at stake and the simple availability of speech prompted data entry, I'd think they'd take it more seriously.

A dumb easy solution is to just create a call center of sorts and allow the same voice interaction human-to-human while the other person enters in your commands quickly and you just pay the kiosk at the end. They could have done this with very little investment in technology. Could improve the drive-thru experience too (my experience is they can't hear anything you say, I'll have to repeat myself 3x minimum, and chances are I won't be able to understand them if they ask me anything either).

When I visit Shake Shack, it's the one place I see that the kiosk is mandatory. But, at least they are iPads and decently designed. It's still very tap heavy and slow to enter simple customizations. The main thing they did right was put 6 of them out, so it's rare you have to wait for one because if you do have to, it's probably a long wait. It's also when one of them will step up to the register and start to help alleviate the line. The worst thing they did, was prompt for a tip at the self-service kiosk before you've seen your food or even found out if anyone is actually working back in the kitchen.