806kB transferred. 766ms to finished. I hit the DFW AWS CloudFront pop from here.
Similar page for BK https://www.burgerking.co.jp/menu
31MB transferred. 6.5s to finished. Hits the DEN pop (but it's a "miss").
I am in Colorado. uBlock is on.
Even if you don't count the 7.5MB of fonts on the BK page, that's wild.
Now if only every other website on the internet would learn that latency matters...
Because it's really bad. And it's been bad for a really long time.
When all I want is to order a cheap cup of coffee, I get to stare at a throbbing box of fries while it tries to figure that out.
Get to the restaurant and signal my arrival? More throbbing fries.
Sometimes the fries never stop throbbing and the only way to get away from them and onto the next step is to force-close the app and start it again.
When I manage to accumulate enough points to order a free sandwich? "Sorry, something went wrong!" This leaves me with no sandwich, and no points. (I guess I was going to be disappointed no matter what -- maybe they're doing me a favor by fucking it up so bad that getting the food is impossible, since reaching the melancholy destination takes fewer steps this way.)
Over the years I've used multiple phones, from multiple manufacturers, with multiple carriers. It's not me; the app is consistently bad.
Oh. And speaking of carriers: Back when I had metered service, I used wifi where I could. The McDonald's near where I lived had free wifi, but their network had this app firewalled. It'd work anywhere but inside of the building where it was most useful.
But, yeah: The touchscreen kiosks are a bit more responsive than they initially were. It's too bad that they're gored up with finger grease and other bodily effluences, though, because they barely work with the layer of filth that covers them.
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.
Can you imagine how complex that must be vs just making like 100 different apps in each country.
But eCoNoMiEs oF sCaLe
If you're balking at makin 100 different apps, then for reference, I am pretty sure my local mcdonalds - just the one restaurant turns over >10 mill a year, so you get a sense of how much they'd want to invest in, idk, the ordering front-end of every maccas in Australia
But when I touched the icon to open the app, a big M appeared on a bright red screen and then it died and returned to the home screen less than half a second later.
(Good work, fellahs! Good work!)
When they first came out, everything was snappy because it wasn't loading recommendations or additional tracking. There were a lot fewer customization options.
Now, you click on something, and you wait a while, and then it asks you what you want to change and if you want to add these other suggested items. When you want to check out, it lags and then pops up another dialog asking if you want to add more items to your order.
I was always proud of the American stores having lots of nice napkins, sauces, etc for self-service but we lost that years ago.
Do you want to add one of [x]?... No. How about now, add one of [x]?... No. Do you want to round up your total to [n]?... No. Do you want to eat in, even though we'll still put it in a takeaway bag so this option is really just the equivalent of a close door button on an elevator in that it does nothing except placate you?... Yes.
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.
Support told me that I was better off abandoning the account and creating a new one.
While I did recover my phone, I decided that it was best to simply stop doing business with Walmart, and I haven’t missed them one bit!
Nowadays with all our fancy crappy comms, 200+ms is considered normal. Ever noticed the lag on a Teams call?
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.
https://boingboing.net/2026/04/08/japans-truth-in-packaging-...
>No Entrepreneur may make a ... representation where the quality, standard or any other particular relating to the
>content of goods or services is portrayed to general consumers as being much better than that of the actual goods or services
It's just much more visually interesting than a page full of perfect burgers. Each one looks like a unique thing from the real world; they don't "look AI", as the kids say these days.
https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/4530/
But others, it's just inexplicable:
https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/1010/
Burger King isn't doing this though (close the two popups to see the menu):
https://www.burgerking.co.jp/menu
Is it some kind of trendy style? It does feel kinda... cute.
- Yes food, as well as alcohol, was quite cheap. Had very few meals that came out to more than $10, alcohol (about $3-4/drink) included.
- I purchased a couple pairs of running shoes that were about 30% cheaper than they were offered for sale in the US.
- I purchased an umbrella for $45 that sells in the US for $75.
- An all-access pass at their premier amusement park, Fuji-Q Highland, was only about $40 - when entry to comparable parks in the US can easily be twice as much.
- I recall the subway came out to around $1.50 a ride, roughly half what the NYC subway costs and the 1 and 3 day passes made it ridiculously cheap (IIRC something like $5/$10).
- I only used capsule hotels, but those were only $15 to up to $38 for a luxury one, almost all in desirable/touristy areas.
- I also took a look at apartments, and in decent areas in Tokyo you can find small apartments for about $1500 that would cost ~$3500 in Manhattan, or maybe $2000 in medium sized US city centers.
> Its best-known use is in certain orders of Classical columns that diminish in a very gentle curve, rather than in a straight line as they narrow going upward. The human eye would allegedly perceive that the middle of the column was diminishing in a concave curve halfway up the column, and entasis corrects this.
Except with pickles. They never get the pickles on the actual burger.
there should be some sort of named law (in the "law of headlines" sense, not legal sense) about mcdonalds and pickles.
i dont like pickles. i ask for no pickles. i always receive pickles. the people that want them? too bad, they put them on mine instead apparently
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.
I suspect that efficiency of layout is the top priority in both cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if McDonald's is also consciously trying to show that their food is human-prepared, both in the store design and in their food photos.
The new ones near me now have touch menu that customers enter and swipe payment instead of cashiers and the grill area is no longer visible.
A Big Mac is 10€ in France...
We are ripped off big time in the US and Europe for nothing.
*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
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?
https://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/en/products/1210/
Big Macs haven't been that cheap since 2008 in the US.
Oddly I could not find any cheaply priced Japanese Whiskey, and I looked around quite a bit. It was all about as much or more than what I could get it for in the states.
Source: I watch a lot of behind the scenes restaurant videos on YouTube and I'm always shocked at the prices. Most dishes are cheaper than if I were to go to the grocery store and cook it myself...
A sweet disorder in the dressing
Kindles in food a wantonnessing;
A bun about the burgers thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lettuce, which here and there
Enthrals the growling stomacher;
A sauce neglectful, and thereby
ketchup to flow confusedly;
A spilling salt, deserving note,
Into the rumpled sandwich tote;
A careless side dish, in whose fries
I see a wild ed'bility:
Do more bewitch me, than when meals
Are too precise in their appeals....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?
The Bai Egg Cheeseburger achieved more than slightly askew, it is defying gravity.
I wonder if it's related to their strict rules on realistic pictures for advertising products
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).
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?