Did McDonald's Ever Have A Breakfast Buffet?

Once upon a time, you could eat all the McDonald's hotcakes, sausage patties, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, and various pastries that you could manage to stuff down your gullet (see attached Breese Journal story) every weekend. No, this isn't an urban legend. Back in the 1990s, many McDonald's locations had an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. Strangely, if you do an internet search on this, you won't find much more than social media posts of people's fond remembrances of this mythical fast food extravaganza (or others wondering if they'd merely dreamed it). I remember it, but it's as if any references to the McDonald's breakfast buffet have been scrubbed from the public consciousness. 

In order to prove its existence, I had to peruse old newspapers to find any solid evidence. And indeed, it did exist. At one point in the middle of the decade, hundreds of McDonald's locations across the U.S. featured them, from Florida to Connecticut, Pennsylvania to Illinois. They even had a name for it: "Mac's Choice." It blossomed during the heyday of the fast food buffet when everyone from KFC to Wendy's featured some sort of all-you-could eat setup. But then, without explanation, they disappeared. Poof!

The McDonald's breakfast buffet began life in the early 1990s in Daytona Beach, Florida, and it was so popular the concept quickly spread to other locations. By 1994, McDonald's rolled it out across 400 restaurants in an experimental capacity. It cost $3.99 for adults (around $9.00 today) and for kids 12 and under it was $1.99. the equivalent of $4 in 2025 dollars. Every weekend from 7:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. (11:30 a.m. on Sundays), you could top your scrambled eggs with cheese, peppers, and salsa, and load up on other McDonald's favorites. They even had fresh fruit.

Unlike the KFC buffet that still exists in some far-flung locations, the Mac's Choice breakfast buffet is dead and gone. I couldn't find any newspaper advertisements for it after 1998, although it may have lasted for at least another year or so in some locations. Why it was scrapped is a mystery, but it was probably one of the worst mistakes in McDonald's history, right up there with getting rid of the all-day breakfast a couple decades later and changing the apple pie formula.