McDonald’s

Went there while on a trip to visit family. Hands down the worst smelling place I have ever been to. No lie, It smelt like Shit in there and it smelt like that through out the place. It was sickening to have to eat in there, So much so that my family and I had to quickly eat our food so we could leave ASAP.
I would not recommend this place at all. If they don’t even care enough about their restaurant to keep it smelling good then how much do you think they’d care when they cook your food? My family and I all unanimously agreed never to go there again.

I had an interesting discussion with some Unilocalers at a meet-​up once about why two-​star reviews tended to get pushed out over time by experienced Unilocalers, so that they were, as a proportion, sometimes the smallest category among those with many, many reviews.
There were some good theories: one was that, it’s true, two-​star places tend to be unmemorable while the atrocious one-​stars stuck out and were worthy of warning others; there’s a lot of self-​filtering, as one uses Unilocal more and one just doesn’t want to go to, much less review, a place one knows to be bad in advance; and that the vast majority of hum-​drum places were chains and the like that were so alike in the first place that writing an individual review seems completely pointless.
All of which I think have some validity, and all of which apply to McDonald’s. But there’s an additional reason that occurs to me after visiting the yuckiest place on earth today: the Unilocal Shame Spiral. Why on earth would I out myself as a denizen of Mickey D’s on Unilocal,when it would only draw into question my competence to review any other place on earth?
So as part of my process here for the Unilocal Shame Spiral Recovery Program, I will start with denial, by pointing out that I loathe everything about McDonald’s, from their destructive influence on the world environment and factory farming to the homogenization of culture to their complicit role in the obesity and diabetes epidemics to their disingenuous marketing aimed at very young children. Which brings me to today’s visit.
Today I had my five-​year old in tow, who having undergone some medical treatment very bravely, which included appetite-​suppressing medication, and whose parents were directed to not focus so much on nutrition per se right now as just getting him to eat, was given carte blanche to pick a restaurant, any restaurant, where he would care to eat, and said very brightly, «Yucky M !» (Which is what we call it.) It’s a sign of how, even without benefit of television or previous visits, the marketing this company does is so effective and invidious. But we were stuck without a plausible excuse, and headed here in part because this location has one of those habitrail-​like indoor play areas.
So insofar as it’s possible to recommend a McDisease, this one is fine in that it’s got a clean although very small habitrail play area that made our child very, very happy, and they were not out of apple slices with the happy meal, as happened in two of the three previous occasions we have ever taken any of the kids to McYucky. And that is my contribution to you, dear reader, who may be in a similar position as we were today, to help you decide among various abysmal fast food options.
Now, it will also be noted that said child ate a mouthful of milk, two fries, and one tiny bite of the corner of his cheeseburger and called it a day, so in terms of actual appetite-​inducing chemical alteration, it was far less successful than McD’s was on me when I was a kid, as I with guilty pleasure gulped a Quarter Pounder (which, although it did not taste good in any sense, triggered all sorts of latent learned chemical reactions in my body from having downed a gazillion of these in my youth). But if he decides the reality of the meal, even with the inducements of a toy motorcycle and a play area, just isn’t worth it, maybe there is hope for the next generation.