Now that is a hamburger at Hamburger Heaven in West Palm Beach.
I was researching a story for a local magazine here in Florida and it finally dawned on me why McDonald’s is struggling and why they’ll never figure it out. The story I was working on was finding the best burger in South Florida and, even though we have many McDonald’s down here, they were never on my list in the hunt for the best burger. They wouldn’t make anyone’s list for the best burger and that may well be the nexus of their downfall.
That fact is both significant and a bit ironic. Significant because it means in my mind, and probably the minds of millions of other Americans, McDonald’s does not qualify as a burger joint. It’s ironic because McDonald’s started out life as a little barbecue restaurant in California in 1940. In 1948 the operators, Richard and Maurice McDonald, transformed McDonald’s into the original burger stand.
Over the years McDonald’s grew into a multinational corporation and started adding more and more food items. Over time McDonald’s got away from their core business and morphed into a fast food restaurant and away from being strictly a burger stand. As McDonald’s became more and more vertically integrated, their products became more uniform. That perfection in consistency is what you’re paying for today, not the food. McDonald’s doesn’t serve food, it serves sanitized sameness and flash frozen consistency and they are masters at it.
BurgerFi crushes McDonald's at their own core business. That's why they'll never understand why they're losing.
As McDonald’s got larger they grew away from and gradually forgot about their core business. They still served burgers but they’re burger patties that could have been grown in a petri dish rather than on a farm. A consistent grind blended with precisely measured additives formed into a flash frozen meat patty with all the visual appeal of a hockey puck that they mass produce by the billions.
It wasn’t long before boutique restaurants started beating McDonald’s at their own game and carving out a niche for themselves as actual burger restaurants. These establishments, like BurgerFi here in Florida and In and Out Burgers in California, crushed McDonald’s at what used to be their core business. The success of just those two chains illustrates that America still loves a good burger, they’re just not going to McDonald’s to get it.
This is also a real burger from Grease in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida.
So, when you’re out hunting for the best burger in South Florida you don’t even think about the golden arches or their Canadian competitor Burger King, you go to Hamburger Heaven in West Palm Beach. The owner, Cindy, uses her own formula of three different cuts of beef, custom blended for her by a nearby processing plant. That custom blend of beef comes to the table in a big slab cooked to a precise internal temperature and served on a toasted bun with lettuce, big slabs of tomato, onions and pickles. If you get a shake at Hamburger Heaven, it’s made with real ice cream and milk. If you get a shake at McDonald’s you’re getting some stabilized dairy product loosely resembling a milkshake but lacking any kind of soul.
That, I believe, is why McDonald’s will never recover. Their food has no soul, just like the company has no soul. The sanitized sameness of their food and starvation wages that have taxpayers picking up the tab to feed some of their employees combined to make McDonald’s invisible to a large segment of potential customers.
People still go to McDonald’s and they have the dwindling sales numbers to prove it. But McDonald’s has lost their first love and grown into something stale, sanitary and cheap. If you’re craving a real hamburger, McDonald’s doesn’t even make the list.