Admiralty Centre’s branch of McDonald’s has gone through something of a facelift recently. The 6,000ft2 store now boasts a large salad bar, table service for all after 6pm, and perhaps most importantly, phone chargers and free WiFi.
The shiny new Maccas is actually the world’s first ‘McDonald’s Next‘, a concept store created to mark the 40th anniversary of McDonald’s in Hong Kong. The new look is markedly different from McD’s familiar colour scheme of red, yellow and white, and instead sees the fast-food restaurant decked out in a more muted palette of grey, brown and metallic tones (it is still the Golden Arches, after all).
Touchscreen menus provide the much-touted Create-Your-Taste option, as well as an integrated McCafe menu with Belgian waffles.
Some 70-odd seats come equipped with charging stations and micro USB cords, Apple Lightning cords and pre-Lightning iPhone cords.
Unfortunately, the changes come at a rather steep mark up. You can expect to shell out up to HKD60 for a salad (provided you opt for meat).
One customer told Apple Daily that the build-a-burger cost him around HKD60-70, and said the real draw of McDonald’s Next is the phone charging option, which gave it the edge over similarly priced, but better burger restaurants.
However, amidst all the flash and fanfare of the McDonald’s Next launch, the 30-year-old branch of “old school” McDonald’s (a.k.a. Ghost of McDonald’s Past) in Sha Tin’s New Town Plaza quietly closed its doors.
In a press conference, a McDonald’s spokesperson detailed the company’s plans to hire between 8,000 to 10,000 new employees to ensure more “direct” customer service, and carefully said they would have to consider “a number of factors” in regards to menu pricing in the near future.
Guess that free WiFi won’t really be free, after all…
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