One thing I liked about Wendy’s is that the chain uses/used real vegetables on its burgers. Even the cheapest burger on the menu (the deluxe) has a real slice of tomato, an actual leaf or few of green lettuce, and a couple of rings of onion.
Of the places I’ve eaten at in recent history, they’ve all clearly dropped in quality and increased in price to varying degrees. However, I’m surprised to see people say things like Wendy’s is the worst fast food chain because that doesn’t exactly align with my experience at all. And for the record, I’m not saying it’s great food, either, just that it’s not the worst by far. Obviously it’s a very subjective measure and there’s lots of variation from location to location or even between regions and it also probably depends on the types of things you’d typically order.
To me, the worst offender of all the ones I’ve been to in the South and Midwest USA is Taco Bell, by far. At least for the things I would typically order, the price has gone up the most while the size and quality has gone down the most. While the service is sometimes good and sometimes bad, the food itself is consistently terrible seemingly regardless of location. No, it was never good food, but it’s definitely gone from meh to yuck.
All that aside, Wendy’s doesn’t exactly strike me as the type of restaurant where closing stores makes the remaining ones more appealing. For that to work, it seems like the current stores would have to be too densely placed (i.e. Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks and a Starbucks in the store next to that Starbucks) OR the food would need to be good enough to actually motivate people to drive further away for it. Honestly, I know it’s not the latter, and from my experience, there are fewer Wendy’s than most other fast food chains, so it seems like the former wouldn’t apply either.
KFC is the one that fills that spot for me. They use fresh ingredients but their volume on everything other than the buckets of chicken and salads is low enough that that fresh produce might start to go bad. I used to love their big crunches and chicken bowls, but it’s offputting when the potato in the chicken bowl tastes like it should have been used a few days ago or thrown out.
It sucks because when they did use fresh fresh ingredients, they were stillpretty good, but when they used not so fresh fresh ingredients, they were bottom of the list. And most places can have bad moments, but I found KFC to be more consistently iffy rather than it being a blue moon thing.
But busy locations are probably more consistently good because I’m guessing it’s due to managers/franchise owners trying to keep costs down at struggling locations.
One thing I liked about Wendy’s is that the chain uses/used real vegetables on its burgers. Even the cheapest burger on the menu (the deluxe) has a real slice of tomato, an actual leaf or few of green lettuce, and a couple of rings of onion.
Of the places I’ve eaten at in recent history, they’ve all clearly dropped in quality and increased in price to varying degrees. However, I’m surprised to see people say things like Wendy’s is the worst fast food chain because that doesn’t exactly align with my experience at all. And for the record, I’m not saying it’s great food, either, just that it’s not the worst by far. Obviously it’s a very subjective measure and there’s lots of variation from location to location or even between regions and it also probably depends on the types of things you’d typically order.
To me, the worst offender of all the ones I’ve been to in the South and Midwest USA is Taco Bell, by far. At least for the things I would typically order, the price has gone up the most while the size and quality has gone down the most. While the service is sometimes good and sometimes bad, the food itself is consistently terrible seemingly regardless of location. No, it was never good food, but it’s definitely gone from meh to yuck.
All that aside, Wendy’s doesn’t exactly strike me as the type of restaurant where closing stores makes the remaining ones more appealing. For that to work, it seems like the current stores would have to be too densely placed (i.e. Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks and a Starbucks in the store next to that Starbucks) OR the food would need to be good enough to actually motivate people to drive further away for it. Honestly, I know it’s not the latter, and from my experience, there are fewer Wendy’s than most other fast food chains, so it seems like the former wouldn’t apply either.
They recently switched to shredded lettuce, and their chicken is now inedible.
KFC is the one that fills that spot for me. They use fresh ingredients but their volume on everything other than the buckets of chicken and salads is low enough that that fresh produce might start to go bad. I used to love their big crunches and chicken bowls, but it’s offputting when the potato in the chicken bowl tastes like it should have been used a few days ago or thrown out.
It sucks because when they did use fresh fresh ingredients, they were stillpretty good, but when they used not so fresh fresh ingredients, they were bottom of the list. And most places can have bad moments, but I found KFC to be more consistently iffy rather than it being a blue moon thing.
But busy locations are probably more consistently good because I’m guessing it’s due to managers/franchise owners trying to keep costs down at struggling locations.