Aside from marketing, which you mentioned, the quality McDonald's pays for is standardization.
Standardization is why chain restaurants exist at all. They give people a way to get a meal they know is going to be of a certain quality at a certain price with a sufficiently low probability of being surprised. Surprises are, on the whole, generally negative: Good restaurants are few and far between, especially at the fast food price point, and a sufficiently bad surprise can have health implications. There's a reason one of the first chains was White Castle: White implies purity and a standard of cleanliness, as opposed to the local greasy spoon cafe where the only assurance of quality is that it hasn't been shut down yet.
So McDonald's pays for processes and materials that it can blast out into a million little restaurants, all the same, secure in the knowledge that minimum-wage workers can be sufficiently skilled and motivated to carry out those processes and use those materials the right way. Doing anything better might lead to a much improved experience in some restaurants but it will reliably lead to total disaster in others, which is utterly contrary to the business model.
By that standard, McDonald's is fairly high quality.
Standardization is why chain restaurants exist at all. They give people a way to get a meal they know is going to be of a certain quality at a certain price with a sufficiently low probability of being surprised. Surprises are, on the whole, generally negative: Good restaurants are few and far between, especially at the fast food price point, and a sufficiently bad surprise can have health implications. There's a reason one of the first chains was White Castle: White implies purity and a standard of cleanliness, as opposed to the local greasy spoon cafe where the only assurance of quality is that it hasn't been shut down yet.
So McDonald's pays for processes and materials that it can blast out into a million little restaurants, all the same, secure in the knowledge that minimum-wage workers can be sufficiently skilled and motivated to carry out those processes and use those materials the right way. Doing anything better might lead to a much improved experience in some restaurants but it will reliably lead to total disaster in others, which is utterly contrary to the business model.
By that standard, McDonald's is fairly high quality.