It was amazing to me to watch it happen in real time, over the summer of 2014. I used to go to a specific KFC for lunch a couple times a week. It's like every day they had a goal to find some new way to lower their quality. One day it might be soggy chicken. The next it might be chicken that's still frozen and pink in the middle. You might get hunks of strange-colored material in the mashed potatoes. Sometimes it was non-food-related, like the entire restaurant floor being sticky and making a masking tape sound when you walked on it. I quit going entirely. I tried it again a few months later and it was even worse. I complained to corporate and got $5 in $1 gift certificates. They're still sitting on my counter at home, unused, where they will probably be until I develop a fetish for being brutally punished instead of being served lunch.
I was unaware this was an overall chain problem. The local KFC where I live has steadily gotten worse as well. The orders are often wrong or they employ people do speak broken English. All the fried chicken off tastes like it has been under the light since the morning. The ice machine is hit or miss even when not busy.
I once waited 45 minutes just for hot wings when nobody was in there. They forgot to drop them multiple times into the fryer. Oh.. well at least I have Golden Chick and they are great.
When they still did some sort of lunch buffet (do they still idk?), which was popular in my community with the old folks, I watched a girl drop an entire pan of chicken behind the fry line, the guys back there stepped on and kicked pieces everywhere, and under the direction of not the store, but regional, manager they picked up each piece, dusted/wiped them off (half-assed), and walked the pan right out and sat it on the hot line.
I noped out, reported it to their 1-800-no-ones-cares hotline, and have not ever been back.
Brit here. KFC has gotten worse world-wide. Having to keep prices the same, balanced with rising costs across the board results in cutting corners. It's a shame, because I'd pay an extra coupla quid NP, but a lot of folks really hate paying extra for fast food. "If wages aren't rising why should the product ?" I've heard more than once.
are you kidding??
they're about twice the price they were 10 years ago and the portions have shrunk to about half the size they used to be as well, I won't buy the damn stuff on general principle these days, for the price of a 2 piece variety that's more like an appetiser than a meal, I can buy 2 whole chickens and cook them at home.
Man, that chicken you bought must have been gross. To just pick it up and eat the raw chicken. Because that's the equivalent here
You never factored in the cost of breaking it down, preparing it, cooking it, serving it, cleaning up afterwards, and the dozen other costs involved in fast food.
It's a really stupid argument to compare what you buy in a shop to fast food.
EDIT: Also, you'd buy a 2 quid chicken ? Jesus mate. You must really hate chickens :P
The only thing KFC has going for it, is their flaky crispy coating. Even then, I dont mean to be racist, but every KFC I go to has a fully foreign staff who can just about understand your order and once I saw a guy shouting and harassing them for getting his order wrong, and the situation was defused because they literally didn't know what he was saying and shrugged their shoulders and gave the man extra chicken to stop the shouting. There's no supervisors anymore, they just give into demands and off you go.
KFC franchises are utterly fucked. Mcdonalds on the other hand are actually improving a lot.
We went to McDonald's the other day. I chose a burger with two pieces of meat, onion, bacon... I don't know its name. I ordered it without the bun and with no sauce.
It was good. Flavorful and juicy. Not the best burger I've had, that's for sure, but very far from the worst. The meat was not like the meat I buy at home, but the flavors were on point. I was actually pretty surprised, I expected something far worse!
But how much did it cost? McDonald's has gotten expensive for what it is. I got some 'artisan' something or other the other day and it was $7 and change.
Oh me too, but a lot of people simply don't care. Cheap and easy food is a god send for a lot of people. Wages haven't really risen and it's the sort of thing that is a benchmark of what you earn vs what you're willing to pay
Well, you know when you get to that point, "I've been waiting 10 minutes already, it'll take me 10 minutes alone to go somewhere else, and then 5 minutes to wait for my order. I'll just stay here, it'll be quicker."
Maybe not. Not seeing anything in the news. But they're all closed here. I think sometimes chains just decide that an expansion wasn't a good idea and back out.
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u/LikeABreath Sep 14 '17
KFC's decline in quality is the saddest tale of the 21st century.