Dodgy McBurgers

Sunday 25th May 2008
We had a lie in this morning, the Man Flu which Ian is battling bravely against at the moment is refusing to go away, but he is refusing to let it beat him and is soldiering on manfully.
We went to one of the local markets today, because we were a bit late getting there it was starting to wind down. There was someone there selling puppies and puppies are cute aren’t they? They were Labrador crossed with Retriever and black as a sack of soot, Carolyn was sorely tempted but saw sense in the end and we left puppyless.
We did make contact with a biscuit supplier who we might be interested in using for the Café, Carolyn is going to meet up with them to sample their range of biscuits at some point.
We are toying with the idea of putting a Burger offer together at the Café, something along the lines of what we used to do in Axbridge, so we went to the only place in town that specialises in burgers, you guessed it, McDonalds.
Obviously we are not expecting to sell the same quantity as them, but we feel that we do need to ensure that what we sell is better than them so we went in for a sample on Sunday lunchtime.
This is the part where political correctness goes out of the window I’m afraid; to put it bluntly, it was CRAP. Don’t get me wrong it was very busy but the organisation was dire, the staff consisted of two adults and about twenty kids no older than thirteen. It took ages for our order to come, when it did the Fillet of Fish with no sauce had more sauce than Heinz, that got sent back, the Big Mac was fractionally smaller than a Jammie Dodger but without any flavour, at one point Fraser went into a Paddy because he couldn’t find his Big Mac, fortunately we found it hidden under a chip. The box that was clearly marked Double Quarter Pounder only had one Quarter pounder in it, while Ian went off to berate the staff about their cock-up and to get it replaced Carolyn opened a box which was clearly marked Quarter Pounder to find that it was in fact a Double Quarter Pounder, we didn’t bother to tell them about that bit. The smoothie that Marisa had ordered arrived carefully disguised as a Strawberry Milkshake, when she realised that you got more in a milkshake than you do in a smoothie she decided to keep the milkshake. Always looking for value for money that girl, she must take after her mother.
All in all the experience was not good to say the least and we are confident that we can do it better than them, unfortunately though we don’t have their advertising budget otherwise we would run them out of town.
In the afternoon we went for a walk along the Foreshore before stopping for a Gelato and then taking Fraser to the Salvation Army HQ, the voluntary work he volunteered himself for was to go out collecting money door to door, they managed to get about $150 in an hour and a half.
While Fraser was doing his volunteer bit, we went down to the Foreshore and had a coffee in the afternoon sunshine, Kristian played quietly with the spinning top thing that he got from McDonalds and Marisa went into teenager mode, asking to do everything that she knew we would say no to so that she could sulk and be grumpy. It worked.
It’s been a long week and Ian is determined not to let this man flu beat him so we had an early night.