The menu at McDonald’s is a fairly static thing. I know they have tried to change this in the last few years by adding premium chicken and fancy salads and mixed coffee drinks, but if you want any of those things, there are better options elsewhere. Most people I know who eat at McDonald’s get the same one or two things everytime they go. People go to McDonald’s for double cheeseburgers, Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, and french fries. The things I order when I got to McDonald’s have been on the menu since before I was born. The McDonald’s menu offers an anchor of stability in this ever-changing world. I appreciate that.
On the other end of the spectrum is Taco Bell. Every time I go to Taco Bell, their menu seems completely different since the last time I was there. One week they’ll start grilling burritos, the next week they’ll start putting potatoes in everything. The interesting thing about these “new” menu items is that they’re usually just a rearranged version of something they already had. First they added gordita and chalupa shells. Then they mixed it up by adding something called “ranchero” sauce to the gorditas. Once we get tired of that, they’ll take the sauce from a ranchero gordita, put it on top of some nachos, and you have the new and exciting Ranchero Nachos! I get the feeling that most of the new items originate in the back of the kitchen sometime around 3 a.m. when the minimum wage employees get bored and start mixing things together in weird ways.
Today when I went to Taco Bell, they had a new “blackjack” taco. It’s a regular taco, but it has a blackish shell and some pepper jack sauce. Previously, they featured tacos with orangey red shells and something called “Volcano” sauce. If the Blackjack sauce is a hit, I’m sure it’ll follow the same path as the Volcano sauce and start showing up on nachos and burritos. Sometimes I feel like I’m being conned into getting excited about this stuff, but I have to give credit for their ingenuity.
