Just as a test, check out the picture of a perfect sandwich on this website.  website for comparison.  Notice the giant chunks of chicken (complete with grill marks) practically falling out of the sandwich, the abundant green peppers and lettuce and the melting cheese sitting atop the (as advertised) Black Forrest ham.  We then journeyed to our local Subway and ordered a Chicken Cordon Bleu sandwich.  Here is an untouched, original photograph of the sandwich that was made for us.  We simply brought it home, unwrapped it and placed it on a cutting board for the picture.  On a scale of 1-10, what score would you give to the employee who constructed our sandwich?  Keep in mind that I am not reviewing either the restaurant or the sandwich -- at least in terms of flavor.  I also cannot speak to the quantities of any of the ingredients.  I am only using the sandwich as an example; compare the two pictures and ask yourself: why doesn't the real one look like the picture?!  By the way, if you may be interested in the dietary/nutritional information about this particular sandwich, it can be found here.

So why is that when the commercial has its intended affect - you pass by a certain restaurant that had seen advertised and your car seems to go into auto-pilot and turns right in - and you order that very same burger that you saw advertised on TV... it never - and I mean never - looks anything like the ad you saw.  It really doesn't taste all that good either (certainly not as good as the pictures would have you think it tastes).  So why is it possible to produce an item like that for a television commercial, and seemingly impossible to come even remotely close to replicating it in the real world in which we all reside??  Now be honest with me.  Have any of your meals at these national food chains – even the local places with pictures on the menu - ever looked anything like what was advertised on the big screen?  Did something change in the twenty-four hours or so since you saw the commercial that made you go out to buy that product?  If the food can be cooked and assembled in a kitchen for a commercial, why can't it be cooked and assembled in at least a similar fashion for you at the real restaurant at which you ordered it?  It seems like a reasonable question.  It has, I believe, a simple but not-so-reasonable answer. 

In the real world - most of the time - and in the kitchen at the restaurant where your food is being prepared, the cooks either A) don't feel like they are getting paid enough to try to imitate the advertisement, B) they are poorly trained and don't have the ability to make the food correctly to begin with, C) they would rather just get the meal assembled and get it under the heat lamps - the faster the better - or... D) they just flat don't care about much of anything, especially quality.  Of course any one is, or even all of those answers are valid.  Oddly enough, if the price of the meal is jacked up about 3 000%, one usually does receive the kind of meal that one would expect for that price.  But why cannot it be the case for lesser-priced meals?  The truth is... it CAN!  I know it can because I once worked at a "fast food" place that I thought had some pretty high standards.  I had a simple enough personal goal: to try to reproduce the food shown in the pictures that were on the menus.  Although it was only eggs, omelets, burgers and sandwiches that I was trying to replicate, I found that, especially in a restaurant kitchen... it really was not only possible to do, it was far easier than in my own kitchen!  Unfortunately, we have all become more and more willing to accept 2nd-rate stuff in our lives.  And we generally accept 2nd-best rather than expect the best. 

We do that whether it is in the cars we drive, the homes we purchase, the tasks others perform for us, or in any product we, as consumers, purchase.  Corporate philosophy seems to believe that anywhere they can save a few seconds or minutes, just to get something done, justifies the sloppy work and a poor product.  I am not sure where that philosophy came from, but until we refuse to accept a burger, a sandwich, a pizza, a car, a house, a minor repair job or anything else that is sloppily manufactured, things will only get worse.  And the next time you see an ad for one of those magnificently appealing 'burgers, make sure to take a close look at what you get when you run out and order one: a luke-warm, soy-enhanced excuse for a 'burger, toughened by its stint in the microwave, an unripe and unappealing tomato slice, a cold square of stale, partially-melted cheese and a dime-sized piece of brown-edged lettuce, all squeezed in-between two, smushed and dry, rounds of never-get-stale bun.  Eat it?  I'd rather pay for the shipping charges to send it to the president of the company and tell him eat it.  If they could only have the pride necessary to make it look like the one advertised on TV...