> When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered. Unfortunately, after merciless teasing by other chains, they relented and only assemble to order and cook to order in some cases. Huge increase in lunch latency; ordering via the app can help a little...
It keeps getting worse, too, because everyone in the store is heavily evaluated on the KPI of 'time to serve an order.' But except for drive-thru, the staff control the timer. If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
So of course they delete the orders as soon as humanly possible, relying on the printouts stuck randomly around the kitchen to try to keep track, and now anyone in the management chain who does care about actual service time is completely blinded to how well or poorly they're doing. Even a manager who is out there helping, and can plainly see how slow they are, still knows the metrics are meaningless so it's hard to track progress towards improvement.
>If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
I've noticed this at other restaurants too and have debated emailing corporate when it happens (since I'm guessing the manager of the restaurant also is on board).
It's not that I don't get _why_ they do it, but it just compounds the problem. Corporate will see the stats and go 'oh X employees is enough at Y hour' despite 10 people waiting for their order since it said complete.
The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system just enough to keep their jobs is a wild one.
Employee games the system, people wait too long for food, people wait too long for food so they stop eating at the restaurant (this was my solution, it's fast food cutting it out is pretty much only a plus), people stop eating at restaurant so restaurant raises it's prices, more people stop going, restaurant closes.
The naive take is to think any one of these actions happen in a vacuum. Plus if this is happening at any scale at a restaurant then the manager probably told them to do it.
The impulse is to out the bad system, not the poor souls stuck in it. Thus the ultimate decision to say nothing, as there is no way to affect one and not the other.
You can just complain about seeing it at "every location you've been to" (because this is true, I've yet to find a McDonalds in my city that doesn't game the order system). It shows the problem is widespread without blaming anyone too specific.
I feel like I could think of a way to word a letter that pointed out the problem without pointing out specific locations or people.
I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it.
I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.”
But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.
This reads like someone who either never had one of these jobs and is left to try to use their imagination, or someone who is knowingly misrepresenting what consequences are awaiting low-level employees purely by choice.
Either way, the conversation would be better without your involvement.
Oh, I've felt that when they marked my order done and hadn't started yet.
But, like you said, I realized what they were doing, and how they quite possible NEED to do it just to keep dumb management happy.
So of course I didn't say anything.
With each year it's more and more evident what 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires' is not just an observation but more like a medical diagnosis.
> The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system
While waiting their <$20 fast, cheap food.
Yes, I remember that too. They even had this one promotion back in the day where you could start some timer after you ordered and if you didn't get your meal in 60 seconds you did get something for free (was it the full order? I dont remember).
It's been so obvious for a long long time now, but people still keep believing that smart things make you faster or give you a better life or whatever, but that just doesn't add up. It's just frustrating, often takes longer and the only reason it is there is to grab your data. There is no other reason.
Edit: Found it. You did get a coke for free. Damn, 2004. https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
Burger King has a promotion going where if they screw up your Whopper, you get an extra one for free.
My wife laughs at me because every time I see that commercial, I point out that if our local BK (now out of business! surprise!) had to do that, they'd have been out of business even faster. Every single time I went there, they screwed up at least one thing. I just finally stopped going.
I'm too young to remember this particular promotion (though I certainly ate a lot of fast food in 2004). Data grabbing can't be the only reason, though. It's so much more expensive now to pay a large staff at a restaurant that isn't busy most of the time. Raw materials are more expensive, labor and benefits are more expensive, and the result is a combination of higher prices and lower quality outcomes. If the outcomes were the same the prices would be quite a bit higher.
The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.
TIL there's burgerschachteln.de, because of course there is a person collecting burger packaging on the Internet.
Of course they're German too.
That brought back some memories. I would always order a Filet-o-Fish which they made fresh due to the low demand.
The App irritates the living f** out of me. I live about 10 miles outside town and it assures me that when I'm two minutes away, they will start making my order. That has never happened. I either have to click the "I'm here now" as I pull into the parking lot, or go into the dining room.
Doesn't matter; the price of McDonald's has gotten to the point where it costs about the same as the local diner whose food is exponentially tastier and they'll give me a free soda as I wait for my food to be made.
The machines were right; truly civilization peaked in 1999.
> When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered.
I worked at McDonald's at that time. We would make a tray of 12 cheeseburgers and microwave them then leave them in the warmer until they're sold or got disgusting enough for customers to complain.
> ordering via the app can help a little...
I’ve used the app once - it was slower than ordering at the kiosk, I was bombarded by ads and promos, and they didn’t pre cook my food.
> ordering via the app can help a little...
It can? I used it once a few years ago and they wouldn't start making the food until I was in the parking lot.
At the McD's nearest me, they will start when I'm at the nearest stop light; if I get stuck on a long red, timing is pretty good. At other locations, starting in the parking lot is still a little faster than if I had ordered in the store; drive through may be faster from the parking lot, but if the queue is full to the order point, if I order at the regular point, my order is usually ready by the time the orders in front have been taken care of; the order point is usually placed so the pipeline works smoothly at peak volume.
Sure. It's definitely in the "a little." But given how slow the kiosks and apps are to operate, due to all the animations and cross-platform frameworks, getting that order done before you get in the car to go means the order starts when you pull into the parking lot, rather than after you go inside and poke buttons on the kiosk 37 times.
Or in the slim chance that there is a line it's good. But I've rarely seen a number of kiosks insufficient to prevent lines.
They only changed this recently.