This Restaurant Has the Absolute Worst Customer Service in America

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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This Restaurant Has the Absolute Worst Customer Service in America

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What makes a good fast-food restaurant, at least from the standpoint of the customers? Menu? Price? The technology used to take orders and to pay? When they are open? The answer is all of the above.

Widely followed research operation the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has just released its “Restaurant Report 2018-2019.” Among other things, it polled the opinion of people who go to 18 fast-food restaurants. ACSI polls 300,000 consumers each year and looks at 400 companies in 46 industries.

McDonald’s, by most measures the largest fast-food company in the United States, ranked dead last in the poll. Out of a potential score of 100, it received a grade of 69. The chain has been among the American companies that pay its workers the least.

Moreover, the McDonald’s score is not getting better in the annual poll. According to the report: “[T]hus far, guest satisfaction has not budged as McDonald’s stagnates at the low score of 69 for the fourth straight year.”

The primary drivers of the opinions about the fast-food companies were the accuracy of order, staff courtesy, layout and cleanliness, variety of food and beverages on the menu, and speed of check out. The ACSI also looked at online customer service factors, which included the restaurant’s website, the quality of mobile apps and whether the app was reliable (mostly app speed and downtime).

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Its customer service has not hurt the McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD | MCD Price Prediction) lead in the fast-food market — these are America’s favorite regional fast food chains. The National Retail Federation puts its revenue at $37.6 billion and its store count at 14,036. None of the top 15 retailers based on sales of any kind tops the McDonald’s location count. Walmart, for example, has 5,328 stores. McDonald’s was founded in 1940 and is the second largest private employer in the world after Walmart.

Chick-fil-A was at the top of the list with a score of 80. Chick-fil-A, which is expected to be the third-largest fast-food chain by sales in the country in 2019, has been listed in another major research report as one of the best fast-food chains.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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