McDonald's coffee creamer inconsistency

I have discovered a flaw in McDonald's quality control.

This is no idle discovery.  You don't get an opportunity like this; to critique McDonald's quality control; every day.  McDonald's is famous, or possibly infamous, for their quality control.  The burger that you get is almost always the same as the last burger that you got.  The same amount of ketchup.  The same amount of mustard.  The same amount of pickles.  The same cooking of the patty.  The same temperature when it is served.

McDonald's even went so far, when it opened a restaurant in Russia, as to build its own supply chain, creating farms, slaughterhouses, butchering facilities, and so forth, so that they could get the same consistent quality as they were used to getting everywhere else they had opened a restaurant.

(I do not, you understand, say that the quality is good: only that it is consistent.  The big Mac that you order will always be put together just as sloppily as the last Big Mac that you ordered.)

There are some minor variations in McDonald's around the world.  In Germany you can get beer with your burger.  In France you can get wine with your McFlurry.  In England, the soft ice cream is ... well, just order a cone in England.  Even if you don't like ice cream, order it.  You will be pleasantly surprised.  Pleasant surprises is not what McDonald's goes in for.  You might as well get one while you can.

In any case, not to belabour the point too much, McDonald's is consistent.  They serve the same thing, the same way, all the time.  Even the Big Mac has a weird consistency.  The Economist magazine has been using the Big Mac as an index to judge local currency, and whether it is over or undervalued on the world market, for many decades now.  It's an oddly accurate index.

But I have found a flaw.  This is no mere bagatelle.  It has taken me decades to find such a flaw.  So I have checked my data, and duplicated the experiment.

I would not have discovered it, even now, were it not for coffee.  As noted elsewhere, recently I have started to drink more and more coffee.  I am not exactly sure why.  Possibly it is the stress of being a grieving widower.  Possibly it is the stress of being a stranger, displaced from my marriage, my friend, my home, and even my job (since, for the last decade or so, I have essentially been Gloria's caregiver), and have turned for comfort to a warm and widely available beverage.  With a lot of sugar in it.

Since I don't actually like coffee, I have had to do a lot of research on the type of blend that different fast food places brew.  I have had to determine, for different sizes of cups, how much cream, and how much sugar, makes this vile stuff palatable.  Since McDonald's is so widely available, and has such a reputation for consistency, I have been drinking a lot of coffee at McDonald's.  I have determined, for a size small, and a size medium, and a size extra large, how much cream I have to order, and how much sugar, in order to be able to drink the stuff.  Generally speaking it is consistent.  McDonald's coffee is not the best blend available, although I do like it better than many others.  But, I have found specific sets of numbers that deliver me a drinkable cup of coffee.

Until recently.  I went to the McDonald's at Scott and 70th.  I gave them the same order I have been giving everyone else.  When it came (abominably late, as everything at 72nd is), I went to pick up the cup, and felt that it was stone cold.  I pointed this out to the staff (when I could get a staff person's attention) and got a warmer cup of coffee.  Which didn't have enough cream and sugar in it.  So I ordered more cream and sugar, and doctored it to my taste.  I figured it was possibly a one-off.  (The McDonald's at Scott and 70th is that weird.)

(When I talked to a staff person about the coffee being cold, she blamed it on the amount of sugar.  I am a physicist.  I know about specific heat, and also the latent heat of solution.  There isn't enough, even with all that much sugar, to make that coffee stone cold.)

Today, at the Queensborough Walmart, with the embedded McDonald's in that store, I ordered a cup of coffee.  Using the same numbers for cream and sugar.  Again, I got handed a stone cold cup of coffee.  I complained, once again.

This time the staff person blamed the cream.  She said that, when you put that much cream into the cup it feels it almost to the rim.  I said that was ridiculous.  I said I've been using the same numbers for coffee, for that size of coffee, at a number of different McDonald's, and most of the time it was fine.  She pointed to where, on the cup, putting that much cream filled it up.  She was right.  That much cream only left enough for a couple of inches of coffee to be poured in.  No wonder it was stone cold.  So I pointed, on the cup, to the amount of cream that I wanted.  She said that that was two creams, according to the McDonald's dispenser.  So, I said fine, give me two cream.  I watched her while she did it.  She punched "2" into on the machine, and then punched dispense.  The machine poured and poured and poured.  I wondered if it was ever going to stop.  It finally did stop.  She brought over the cup.  She was absolutely correct.  There was almost exactly as much cream as I had told her I wanted.  So, she put in the sugar, and then the coffee, and stirred it up, and it was fine.  With only two cream.  According to their machine.

So, a great big fail to McDonald's.  On something that must be one of the most common orders.  Coffee with cream.  A small double double, at some McDonald's, must be very creamy indeed.