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I worked at McDonald’s 25 years ago, for a year during college. It’s still one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. The work is unrelenting; customers treat you l

I worked at McDonald’s 25 years ago, for a year during college. It’s still one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. The work is unrelenting; customers treat you like a machine; the pay sucks; the hours are constantly changing; there are no meaningful benefits. All of this is done to reduce the cost and increase the homogeneity of the final product. The product itself has been engineered for decades to be as palate-pleasing and inexpensive as possible. The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such. All of this so we can eat cheap, predictable burgers. It’s the worst kind of poison — that which kills slowly, and sucks the joy from your life as it does so.

ajay-b 5y ago
I worked for BoJangles in the 90s at a starting wage of $4.75. They called it a training wage, for 90 days. It sucked, but not the job, or really the customers, it was the management. Managers never had, nor cared for, the respect of their reports.
dls2016 5y ago
I still can’t get over the pay people are willing to put up with. I worked at a busy Central PA Red Robin location during high school in the late nineties and usually bused tables. Often the dishwasher would be MIA and I would offer to cover, but only after the restaurant slowed down for the evening (so I could collect on the tip-out from servers) and the rate was $10/hr. I could make a few dollars more bussing and the servers could clear $20/hr or more on busy nights. Over 20 years ago! I saw a NY Times article about garbage men who make only $15/hr in southern states. Who in the hell wants to do any of these jobs?
- 1_player 5y ago
  Those that have no other option? I don't get the question at all, not everyone has the chance or luck in life to become a surgeon or a software engineer.
  - dls2016 5y ago
    > Those that have no other option? Of course I understand this is the answer. It's more of a rhetorical question to the idiot quotes from the Facebook group about how fast food is a "teenage job". Even as a teenager 20 years ago I wouldn't work for less than $10/hour. What I don't understand is how people don't see the wage pressure exerted by corporate America in the last few decades. NAFTA to remove a bunch of "real jobs", then move remaining manufacturing to "two-tier" systems where new employees can't attain wage rates that their parents would have made at those jobs, then all the shenanigans at low wage places (just-in-time scheduling, wage theft, toxic customers, no benefits, etc. etc. etc.). Don't even get me started on how the American "safety net" forces people to work in these shitty jobs. Dare to make over some ridiculous poverty threshold and you get no assistance.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      > Even as a teenager 20 years ago I wouldn't work for less than $10/hour. Lucky you. Sometimes even teenagers have to provide for their family, for even more ridiculous rates because they're teenagers and thus somewhat exploited by society. Not everyone can afford saying no to bad paying jobs. I'd work for $1 an hour if the alternative was starving or selling my body or dignity. Though in fairness it's much easier and more lucrative to just enter the crime world. No age checks there, but promises of riches and they're always hiring.
      - dls2016 5y ago
        > Lucky you. Or we could remove luck from the equation and decide as a society to support everyone: living wages, food, housing, health care. I recognize my luck, which is why I find society so absurd at times. And I for sure have no problem paying higher taxes to extend the guarantees above to all citizens.
AussieWog93 5y ago
It's always interesting to hear this from employees of McDonald's in the US. Here in Australia, it's widely regarded as a great first employer that pays well and provides fantastic experience to young people.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I'm in the USA. Worked for McDonalds starting as a junior in high school and through college. It was a great job for a young kid, I learned a lot about business and restaurant operations. Pay wasn't super, but it was spending money. Never intended to be the sort of job to support a family.
  - black_13 5y ago
    “Never intended to support a family” why not ? Why is this job more or less important than another? There are a lot of these franchises so they must be important.
  - alphabettsy 5y ago
    Where does this idea of “Never intended to be the sort of job to support a family.” come from? Half or more of the people I see working at any given fast food chain are adults, which makes sense considering they need some mature people around and people to work during the day when kids are at school. What about those people?
    - strawdynamics 5y ago
      They are poor.
      - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        "Even poor families" need support.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Managers can make good money, I think OP was referring to the entry level positions. And I would agree, they aren’t intended to provide a wage to support a family. That doesn’t stop people who are doing just that to work those jobs. And there are also plenty of adults who don’t need to work who do those jobs. I know a few older guys who work part time at Home Depot making peanuts but they don’t need to the money, they need some routine and interactions.
bitexploder 5y ago
I worked there first job as well. 1995/1996. Tough job, but not too bad. I worked up front running registers and helped in the kitchen as well. I was 6’1/6’2” back then and climbed in the play place tunnels to clean up kid shit and vomit, often smeared everywhere in there. Worked on an Interstate. One night 30 minutes before closing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers rolled in and ordered an insane amount of food. No one was even annoyed. It was impressive how much food they ordered. Honestly, I don’t remember too many issues or “Karen” types back then. The occasional upset customer over an order mistake or something. I always went home smelling like McGrease. It was not an easy job, but I suppose I was treated alright. I’ll take my desk job any day.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  "not too bad" What would you consider a bad job? In relation to my current not actually a job job where I do computer shit, I would consider my menial, back breaking, minimum wage first job to be bad.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Whether a job is bad pretty much is exclusively dependent on whether or not you, your manager(s) and/or your coworkers have an adversarial relationship.
  - bitexploder 5y ago
    I dunno. Other than standing a lot it was not a very hard job. I was treated like a human and my boss would let me schedule stuff around whatever I had going on. I was a teenager in high school though so I only worked like 15 hours a week. I also didn’t need a lot of money living at home. Mostly dangerous jobs, ones that break your body like construction, and ones where you work with people who don’t treat you well are “bad” in my book. Wages and making a living would be a problem is this was your main job though, obviously. I didn’t like cleaning the play tubes, but it never bothered me much.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >In relation to my current not actually a job job where I do computer shit, I would consider my menial, back breaking, minimum wage first job to be bad. Sorry, but nearly any skilled job could end up in the "bad job" sector, if your benchmark is "cushy IT job". Even Doctors. They may get paid handsomely, but considering the many years they have to spend grinding away studying and taking exams, and the overtime they have to do (in the public sector) plus the on calls and dealing with many sick people, that aint no cushy job. The easiest cushy job I could think of is tram driver in my city. Don't need to think about steering, just watch the lights, and either hit the gas or the brake pedal, then push the buttons for opening and closing the doors.
logshipper 5y ago
> The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such. I worked nights at a McDonalds about 4 years back (first year of university) in Canada. You are spot-on about them treating humans as the weakest link. For instance, I noticed that every carton in the freezer contains an illustration of the item inside (in addition to names in English and French). My understanding is that they simply do not trust their workforce to be able to read the contents of the carton and will gladly slap an image on top to remove any unpredictability from the process.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I used to do package design for frozen and refrigerated foods, stuff they sell at Costco. We were always doing little illustrations showing how to, like, open a bag of croutons and pour it onto a salad. As if we were drawing the manual for how to put on an oxygen mask in case of depressurization. I always get a kick out of looking for those things on food packaging these days.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Labeling something in every way imaginable is basically a free way to reduce the long tail of errors. I think there's a wide gulf between that and "treat literally everyone like they have the intellect of a toddler" kind of policy making which you see advocated for a lot on Reddit (less so here, but sometimes). McDonalds definitely does that, but my impression is that it's more of an acknowledgement of things getting missed in that kind of work environment than people being stupid. When two school buses pull up and you've got every machine beeping and buzzing things need to be stupid proof.
- a-priori 5y ago
  They’re just not assuming that all their workers are fluent in English nor French, which 1.8% of Canadian residents are not (according to the 2016 census).
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    And there's a not always inaccurate stereotype about the back-of-house at 'real' restaurants being entirely immigrants who only speak enough English to communicate with the servers.
johnisgood 5y ago
I do not know about cheap. I could easily live on healthy (or healthier) food[1] in Eastern Europe, but would not be able to live on food from McDonalds, financially. I come from a poor family, and going to McDonalds was always a reward because we did it on rare occasions due to the high prices. Most of the time we just bought the ingredients, and cooked, which was always the cheaper option, and surprisingly the healthiest. [1] Food you make yourself from scratch, say: stew of lentils with meatballs
- colechristensen 5y ago
  The economics around the world will make how cheap it is vary by quite a lot. Compared to buying a high quality hamburger in America from people who are paid and treated well, McDonalds is very cheap (i.e. it is easy to find ten times more expensive burgers)
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    How cheap is McDonald's considered to be in the US? I don't think it's fair to compare a McDonald's to an "expensive burger", just as you wouldn't compare an entry-level cheap car to a Rolls-Royce. Yeah, they're both "burgers", but that's about it. I also think GP's point was a bit different, as in eating out altogether may have been seen a treat, not McDonald's specifically. Eating in was more the norm, for price reasons. Over here in France, I do consider it expensive for what it is. I can easily whip together food that is healthier, tastier and cheaper. And when I say "easy" I also consider the time factor. It takes me less time to chop up some vegetables, throw them in a pot over some minced meat and do the dishes while it cooks. I can also cook some rice / pasta / whatever to go with it. It usually takes around 30 minutes from start to finish. Unless the McDonald's is right next door, it won't even be faster. It's been years since I haven't been in a McDonald's, but a menu used to cost some 7-8 €. Most other fast-food places (think kebab joint) used to cost roughly in the same ballpark. The kind of recipe I'm talking about above will usually come in a bit cheaper, and there are multiple servings. Of course, there are cases when you're out and about and can't cook, so YMMV, but for many places where people work "inside" (as opposed to, say, construction), there usually are microwave ovens available, so you can reheat your own food.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
I only eat at McDonald's about 3 times a year. It's not even cheap. But then nothing is cheap in a country with 21% VAT lol. And there are much better fastfood options out there.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
McDonalds is not cheap in my county. I live in Marin County.

ajay-b 5y ago

I worked for BoJangles in the 90s at a starting wage of $4.75. They called it a training wage, for 90 days. It sucked, but not the job, or really the customers, it was the management. Managers never had, nor cared for, the respect of their reports.

dls2016 5y ago

I still can’t get over the pay people are willing to put up with. I worked at a busy Central PA Red Robin location during high school in the late nineties and usually bused tables. Often the dishwasher would be MIA and I would offer to cover, but only after the restaurant slowed down for the evening (so I could collect on the tip-out from servers) and the rate was $10/hr. I could make a few dollars more bussing and the servers could clear $20/hr or more on busy nights. Over 20 years ago! I saw a NY Times article about garbage men who make only $15/hr in southern states. Who in the hell wants to do any of these jobs?

1_player 5y ago
Those that have no other option? I don't get the question at all, not everyone has the chance or luck in life to become a surgeon or a software engineer.
- dls2016 5y ago
  > Those that have no other option? Of course I understand this is the answer. It's more of a rhetorical question to the idiot quotes from the Facebook group about how fast food is a "teenage job". Even as a teenager 20 years ago I wouldn't work for less than $10/hour. What I don't understand is how people don't see the wage pressure exerted by corporate America in the last few decades. NAFTA to remove a bunch of "real jobs", then move remaining manufacturing to "two-tier" systems where new employees can't attain wage rates that their parents would have made at those jobs, then all the shenanigans at low wage places (just-in-time scheduling, wage theft, toxic customers, no benefits, etc. etc. etc.). Don't even get me started on how the American "safety net" forces people to work in these shitty jobs. Dare to make over some ridiculous poverty threshold and you get no assistance.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    > Even as a teenager 20 years ago I wouldn't work for less than $10/hour. Lucky you. Sometimes even teenagers have to provide for their family, for even more ridiculous rates because they're teenagers and thus somewhat exploited by society. Not everyone can afford saying no to bad paying jobs. I'd work for $1 an hour if the alternative was starving or selling my body or dignity. Though in fairness it's much easier and more lucrative to just enter the crime world. No age checks there, but promises of riches and they're always hiring.
    - dls2016 5y ago
      > Lucky you. Or we could remove luck from the equation and decide as a society to support everyone: living wages, food, housing, health care. I recognize my luck, which is why I find society so absurd at times. And I for sure have no problem paying higher taxes to extend the guarantees above to all citizens.

AussieWog93 5y ago

It's always interesting to hear this from employees of McDonald's in the US. Here in Australia, it's widely regarded as a great first employer that pays well and provides fantastic experience to young people.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I'm in the USA. Worked for McDonalds starting as a junior in high school and through college. It was a great job for a young kid, I learned a lot about business and restaurant operations. Pay wasn't super, but it was spending money. Never intended to be the sort of job to support a family.
- black_13 5y ago
  “Never intended to support a family” why not ? Why is this job more or less important than another? There are a lot of these franchises so they must be important.
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  Where does this idea of “Never intended to be the sort of job to support a family.” come from? Half or more of the people I see working at any given fast food chain are adults, which makes sense considering they need some mature people around and people to work during the day when kids are at school. What about those people?
  - strawdynamics 5y ago
    They are poor.
    - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
      "Even poor families" need support.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Managers can make good money, I think OP was referring to the entry level positions. And I would agree, they aren’t intended to provide a wage to support a family. That doesn’t stop people who are doing just that to work those jobs. And there are also plenty of adults who don’t need to work who do those jobs. I know a few older guys who work part time at Home Depot making peanuts but they don’t need to the money, they need some routine and interactions.

bitexploder 5y ago

I worked there first job as well. 1995/1996. Tough job, but not too bad. I worked up front running registers and helped in the kitchen as well. I was 6’1/6’2” back then and climbed in the play place tunnels to clean up kid shit and vomit, often smeared everywhere in there. Worked on an Interstate. One night 30 minutes before closing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers rolled in and ordered an insane amount of food. No one was even annoyed. It was impressive how much food they ordered. Honestly, I don’t remember too many issues or “Karen” types back then. The occasional upset customer over an order mistake or something. I always went home smelling like McGrease. It was not an easy job, but I suppose I was treated alright. I’ll take my desk job any day.

bostonsre 5y ago
"not too bad" What would you consider a bad job? In relation to my current not actually a job job where I do computer shit, I would consider my menial, back breaking, minimum wage first job to be bad.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Whether a job is bad pretty much is exclusively dependent on whether or not you, your manager(s) and/or your coworkers have an adversarial relationship.
- bitexploder 5y ago
  I dunno. Other than standing a lot it was not a very hard job. I was treated like a human and my boss would let me schedule stuff around whatever I had going on. I was a teenager in high school though so I only worked like 15 hours a week. I also didn’t need a lot of money living at home. Mostly dangerous jobs, ones that break your body like construction, and ones where you work with people who don’t treat you well are “bad” in my book. Wages and making a living would be a problem is this was your main job though, obviously. I didn’t like cleaning the play tubes, but it never bothered me much.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >In relation to my current not actually a job job where I do computer shit, I would consider my menial, back breaking, minimum wage first job to be bad. Sorry, but nearly any skilled job could end up in the "bad job" sector, if your benchmark is "cushy IT job". Even Doctors. They may get paid handsomely, but considering the many years they have to spend grinding away studying and taking exams, and the overtime they have to do (in the public sector) plus the on calls and dealing with many sick people, that aint no cushy job. The easiest cushy job I could think of is tram driver in my city. Don't need to think about steering, just watch the lights, and either hit the gas or the brake pedal, then push the buttons for opening and closing the doors.

logshipper 5y ago

> The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such. I worked nights at a McDonalds about 4 years back (first year of university) in Canada. You are spot-on about them treating humans as the weakest link. For instance, I noticed that every carton in the freezer contains an illustration of the item inside (in addition to names in English and French). My understanding is that they simply do not trust their workforce to be able to read the contents of the carton and will gladly slap an image on top to remove any unpredictability from the process.

noduerme 5y ago
I used to do package design for frozen and refrigerated foods, stuff they sell at Costco. We were always doing little illustrations showing how to, like, open a bag of croutons and pour it onto a salad. As if we were drawing the manual for how to put on an oxygen mask in case of depressurization. I always get a kick out of looking for those things on food packaging these days.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Labeling something in every way imaginable is basically a free way to reduce the long tail of errors. I think there's a wide gulf between that and "treat literally everyone like they have the intellect of a toddler" kind of policy making which you see advocated for a lot on Reddit (less so here, but sometimes). McDonalds definitely does that, but my impression is that it's more of an acknowledgement of things getting missed in that kind of work environment than people being stupid. When two school buses pull up and you've got every machine beeping and buzzing things need to be stupid proof.
a-priori 5y ago
They’re just not assuming that all their workers are fluent in English nor French, which 1.8% of Canadian residents are not (according to the 2016 census).
- crooked-v 5y ago
  And there's a not always inaccurate stereotype about the back-of-house at 'real' restaurants being entirely immigrants who only speak enough English to communicate with the servers.

johnisgood 5y ago

I do not know about cheap. I could easily live on healthy (or healthier) food[1] in Eastern Europe, but would not be able to live on food from McDonalds, financially. I come from a poor family, and going to McDonalds was always a reward because we did it on rare occasions due to the high prices. Most of the time we just bought the ingredients, and cooked, which was always the cheaper option, and surprisingly the healthiest. [1] Food you make yourself from scratch, say: stew of lentils with meatballs

colechristensen 5y ago
The economics around the world will make how cheap it is vary by quite a lot. Compared to buying a high quality hamburger in America from people who are paid and treated well, McDonalds is very cheap (i.e. it is easy to find ten times more expensive burgers)
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  How cheap is McDonald's considered to be in the US? I don't think it's fair to compare a McDonald's to an "expensive burger", just as you wouldn't compare an entry-level cheap car to a Rolls-Royce. Yeah, they're both "burgers", but that's about it. I also think GP's point was a bit different, as in eating out altogether may have been seen a treat, not McDonald's specifically. Eating in was more the norm, for price reasons. Over here in France, I do consider it expensive for what it is. I can easily whip together food that is healthier, tastier and cheaper. And when I say "easy" I also consider the time factor. It takes me less time to chop up some vegetables, throw them in a pot over some minced meat and do the dishes while it cooks. I can also cook some rice / pasta / whatever to go with it. It usually takes around 30 minutes from start to finish. Unless the McDonald's is right next door, it won't even be faster. It's been years since I haven't been in a McDonald's, but a menu used to cost some 7-8 €. Most other fast-food places (think kebab joint) used to cost roughly in the same ballpark. The kind of recipe I'm talking about above will usually come in a bit cheaper, and there are multiple servings. Of course, there are cases when you're out and about and can't cook, so YMMV, but for many places where people work "inside" (as opposed to, say, construction), there usually are microwave ovens available, so you can reheat your own food.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

I only eat at McDonald's about 3 times a year. It's not even cheap. But then nothing is cheap in a country with 21% VAT lol. And there are much better fastfood options out there.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

McDonalds is not cheap in my county. I live in Marin County.