Not that long ago I was raving about how great it was to have a McDonald’s just outside our neighborhood, and how great the service was. The location is very convenient; if I go west coming out of my neighborhood in the morning, the McDonald’s on Mustang Road is right between my neighborhood and the interstate. With a 24 Hour drive-thru, it’s one of the few places I can grab breakfast on the way to work at 5:30am.

Unfortunately, things seem to be going downhill. I would say my order has been wrong at least five of my past ten visits. Usually, it’s the drink. Although I always order the same thing (large Diet Coke) there’s no telling what I’ll actually get. Sometimes it’s regular Coke (which now tastes horrible to me). Sometimes it’ll be a Diet Coke with no carbonation; once it was a Diet Coke with no (or very little) syrup. And it’s not like I’m digging back ten years for examples, this happens pretty much every other day. My three options are to sit at the drive-thru window, open a straw, take a drink, and ask them to fix it before I drive off (which isn’t going to happen), to quit ordering drinks and just buy one when I get to work (which I am starting to do), or order a drink, take my chances, and gripe about it on the Internet when they screw it up (which I am doing right now).

Currently this location has a better ratio for getting my food right, but just barely. I guess early in the morning not enough people come through drive-thru to justify having someone planted at the drive-thru window, so instead when you pull up to order you have to wait and then someone takes your order who is obviously not standing at a register. This leads to the inevitable “I’ll have your total at the window,” which translates to, “I have your order in my head and there’s no way I’m going to remember all of it, even if you only ordered two items.” This morning they screwed this up: two sausage biscuts for $2, and a large Diet Coke. I got one sausage biscuit and a flat Diet Coke. That’s one for three, folks.

I don’t know if this is how they really do business, but it seems like they brought in a good, friendly crew and worked really hard to get people to start visiting this new location — and now that they have regular customers, the good, friendly crew has moved on to another location, leaving behind a bunch of people only half-interested in doing a good job.

I see a wave of breakfast Hot Pockets and Pop Tarts in my future.