Are you joking?
Gotta throw this one back in the lake I'm afraid.
Compare for example with the UK images which are much more symmetrical:
It seems there are definitely some interedssting nuances between food photography in different countries.
Sprayed on glycerine for condensation on cool things. cigarette smoke for steam.
It was super nasty, but the photos looked good.
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.)
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.
I don't think I'll ever consider myself above most fast food. I'd take a McLaren to McDonald's.
If you notice, it's mostly the higher priced burgers that seem to be 'askew'
maybe by eating your way into the problem...
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.
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.
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.
Germany btw
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.
Just low end uncustomised NUCs overheating behind the screen
No idea if that’s still the case
And the app continues to get worse each update. The checkout process used to be quick and responsive. They've since made it require additional clicks and take much longer.
Causing delays for unprofitable customers. Any business is going to do it if they can. /tinfoil
(Their margins shouldn't be this bad.)
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.
McD's is readable with JS off, because the "meat" of the content is plain HTML. I also like how the other links here are to URLs of the form "/en/products/nnnn", which further reinforces the fact that the pages are server-side.
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
[0] https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/2303/e...
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...
Probably it’s some sociopathic psychologist working for McDonalds that find out that askew buns makes them sell 0.2% more units per year, which is around half a gazillion dollars in increased revenue.
Urge to fix something, or tricking one to spend money for a novelty is quite literally the opposite of wabi-sabi.
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.
> 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.
Having food askew is probably messing with the eater's qi.
For a deeper look at this philosophy of craft you won't do much better than The Beauty of Everyday Things, by Soetsu Yanagi: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-beauty-of-everyday-thing...
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.
- 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.
(That being said I tried to calculate the ratio of hourly wage to McChicken sandwich and Japanese workers came out with a better deal than Canadian ones)
> ... I tried to calculate the ratio of hourly wage to ...
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.
We (it's a similar story in the UK - 14 EUR minimum wage) are indirectly paying a lot of extra taxes
Not forgetting 20% VAT of course
And our governments doing all they can to ensure property prices stay high and rise even higher (don't listen to what they say, look at the data)
the actual difference is more than 60 percent. hk is not really known for cheap rent and taxes cant fully explain the rest. what im trying to say is the insane prices in europe and usa are a choice.
Lower-case is neither cute nor a flex.
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.
> Oddly I could not find any cheaply priced Japanese Whiskey
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.I wonder if it's related to their strict rules on realistic pictures for advertising products
The US site doesn't use this placement strategy, though. The Japanese one looks better. No surprise there.
The Bai Egg Cheeseburger achieved more than slightly askew, it is defying gravity.
McDonald’s Germany has a Philly stack.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/de/de-de/produkte/alle-produkte/bu...
I find these annoying. I guess they are going for organic/realistic rather than too perfect, but every other aspect of the photos - the aesthetically melting cheese, etc - follows the norms of fake fast food photography, so why bother?
*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
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).
...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?
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?
Literally zero people do what Spurlock did in that film.
I've seen two in my life vomit while walking without missing a step.
It is basically expected that any foreign chef must adapt their idea of cuisine to fit the available ingredients and processes in the host country. It is simply a fact of life that there are many fruits and vegetables, to begin with, that are rare or nonexistent here in the USA. And centuries ago, Chinese food as we know it originated in San Francisco, based on ingredients that could be readily acquired in San Francisco on an immigrant's budget.
Some produce and even animals can be cultivated stateside by immigrant communities, but it's simply prohibitive to try and exactly reproduce foreign cuisines here. You will basically find that American fruits, vegetables, and animals are adopted and "Western fusion" cuisine rules the roost here.
It may be surprising that a "Three-Ring Binder" franchise like McDonald's should have local variation, when their pride is being completely uniform and predictable in the USA. On any American highway I can pull into a McD's and count on having exactly the same meal as anywhere else. But if you cross an international border, a hemisphere, into new climates and terroirs, you should expect significant variation.
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.
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?
You've also listed a few questions that seem pretty interesting to me, from a curiosity perspective.