The Oklahoma State Capital

The Guthrie Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting Friday, and long lines of vehicles could be seen filling the restaurant’s two-lane drive-through throughout the weekend and into the early part of this week.

Patrons who ventured inside encountered a stark, box-like interior devoid of overhead menu boards and, at times, an unmanned front counter.

At least one patron could be seen waiting for an extended period before being met by an employee. Another appeared to struggle with his order without the aid of a menu board, leading an employee to acknowledge, “We get this a lot.”

The new design appears intended to steer customers toward one of the freestanding ordering kiosks that greet them as they enter the restaurant.

Also notably absent is a self-service soda fountain. The phenomenon was first noticed in this area when McDonald’s opened its Covell Road and Interstate 35 location in Edmond in 2020.

Customers at both restaurants must now approach an employee to obtain a drink refill — a potentially challenging proposition when the front counter is unmanned and employees are largely working out of sight.

Although otherwise sparse, the Guthrie interior featured red-and-yellow McDonald’s balloons and fresh flowers on each table for the grand opening.

The drive-through side of the building features not just the traditional two service windows, but three. The design appeared to be part of McDonald’s effort to double down on its “4Ds” strategy: Digital, Delivery, Drive-Thru and Development.

The move toward kiosk ordering is not new to the Guthrie restaurant. In 2017, the location was on the leading edge of the company’s rollout when it became only the third McDonald’s in Oklahoma to install self-service kiosks.

At the time, the redesign was promoted as McDonald’s “Experience of the Future.”

Nine years later, the latest redesign appears to take that concept much further. The overhead menu boards and self-service soda fountain have disappeared, the conventional ordering counter has been reduced and the kiosks have become the most prominent feature confronting walk-in customers.

The approach has generated controversy elsewhere.

In March, the Daily Mail reported on a viral video from a Sacramento, California, McDonald’s where customers encountered no visible menu and seemingly no cashier waiting behind the counter. Instead, patrons were directed toward self-service kiosks. Online critics described the arrangement as impersonal and “dystopian,” while others complained that customers were being expected to perform work once handled by employees.

McDonald’s pushed back against that characterization, telling the Daily Mail that the Sacramento example was atypical.

“It’s disappointing to see this inaccurate characterization based on a single video, which does not reflect how McDonald’s restaurants operate across the U.S.,” the company said.

The controversy comes as the company pursues a much broader technological transformation. McDonald’s plans to introduce artificial-intelligence technology throughout its global restaurant system, including AI-assisted drive-throughs, internet-connected kitchen equipment and systems designed to detect missing items before an order reaches the customer.

McDonald’s calls the broader initiative “Digitizing the Arches” and says the technology is intended to produce faster service, more accurate orders and a smoother experience for employees and customers.

At the new Guthrie location, however, the opening-week experience suggests the transition may not always be seamless — particularly for walk-in patrons who expect to see a menu, refill their drinks or find a readily available employee at the counter.

Morrison Construction Co. oversaw a collection of local contractors and suppliers on behalf of the franchisee, the Wagner Organization. Construction moved so quickly that the outside lane of southbound Division Street was closed to traffic. At one point, police were called to the neighboring Walgreens parking lot in response to a complaint about the collection of construction vehicles using the property.

“This was an incredible project and an incredible team effort,” Morrison Construction owner Joe Gilbert told the Guthrie News Leader. “Building a restaurant of this size and completing it in 55 days required an unbelievable amount of coordination, commitment and hard work.”

The grand opening was the Wagner Organization’s second in Logan County this year. Earlier this summer, the company opened another McDonald’s at the Landing at Waterloo development near the Waterloo Road and Interstate 35 interchange.

The new location serves the county’s fast-growing southern exurbs, which have helped propel Logan County to 14th place among Oklahoma counties by population — seemingly a large enough customer base to support not just one, but two McDonald’s restaurants.

Both locations feature the same menu-less, box-like interior, lack a self-service soda fountain and provide only a lightly staffed front-counter space.

The development appears to validate a prediction made by Guthrie-based satirist The Guthrie Man in an Aug. 10 post, which referred to the facility as the “Terry Morgan Office Building” — an inside reference to local resident Terry Morgan’s longstanding patronage of the former McDonald’s.

“For you see, the modern-day McDonald’s is not a welcoming place, as so nicely illustrated by the Freedom Zone’s latest monstrosity down on Waterloo: an ugly, sanitized box, void of personality, and, most importantly, completely void of a soda machine.

This, of course, leaves the trip to 2nd and Bryant as the closest way to get to the 1980s McDonald’s experience. You won’t get quite there, but that location still provides a 1990s experience that is also getting harder and harder to find in today’s world of McDonald’s sans personality."