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I worked at McDonalds for 4 years. 2 as a kitchen worker. 2 as a shift manager. I've personally cleaned these machines too many times to count. I've never he
by Dem_Boys 3y ago
I worked at McDonalds for 4 years. 2 as a kitchen worker. 2 as a shift manager. I've personally cleaned these machines too many times to count.
I've never heard one person tell "the truth" about this (at least in my personal experience).
Our ice cream machine was often down too but not because it was broken. Because we were short staffed and making ice cream is a HUGE time sink for employees. The manager would just tell the employees "no more ice cream" and they all knew what's up. They'd be very happy that they could focus on food and McCafe and thus not disappoint customers too much due to slow service.
Folks don't quite understand that McDonald's is consistently short staffed and the workers are often doing the work of 2-3 people just to try to get you fast and hot food.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> the workers are often doing the work of 2-3 people How is that possible?
- alphameese 3y agoWhen I worked there during our lunch rush, we would have a person dedicated to every task, fries, coffee, orders, bagging. When it came to the dinner rush, we would have half the staff or less then our lunch rush. So in a sense it is the work of 2 to 3 people. Also during overnight we would have only one person in the front, and one in the back. Once Uber eats came on the scene our workload increased 3x or more, but no extra staff was added! :-) Edit: that’s not even mentioning when we would be short staffed, due to people not showing up / calling in, which happened every other day it felt like, and the shift wouldn’t be replaced.
- voisin 3y agoI suspect this is a franchisee trying to improve profitability versus a company wide issue. I suspect it is highly variable. Also, sometimes sales are unexpectedly higher than normal.
- bee_rider 3y agoWe have comments from people who’ve worked there, which fit the general impression that the places tend to give. I haven’t worked in fast food, but I’ve worked in retail, and it was my experience that the “nice” manager would schedule us, like… one extra person beyond the bare minimum. Why do you suspect this, do you have any particular insight into these kinds of businesses beyond the rest of us?
- voisin 3y agoWell, yes I do. I have owned four franchised businesses - all quick serve restaurant style - from two different national chains. Individual franchisees have significant leeway in how they schedule. Some, particularly marginal locations, will cut staffing to the bone. Others that are more confident in sales and doing well are able to schedule more than the bare minimum so that customers don’t wait as long and employees are happier.
- bluGill 3y agoSales unexpectedly higher than normal happens, but that typically only lasts an hour and then you go clean the now very messy store, while if sales were normal you would have enough staff on hand to keep it clean as you go. Stores keep enough clean trays and the like around to handle the worst case extra busy, and the trash cans can go an hour without being emptied. Customers will pick the least dirty table.
- Dem_Boys 3y agoYes. Lunch rush is the baby of all McDonalds management. You'll rarely see an understaffed store then. Coincidentally this is the shift that most store managers work. Night shift is where you'll see the cluster-fucks occur most and it's when the ice cream machine will be "down" the most in my experience
- WalterBright 3y agoThe customer load on a service business like McDonald's is going to vary chaotically from minute to minute. It's a difficult problem to have it match the staffing level, while staying in business.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoLunch is like one $1200 hour, dinner is $4-600/hour, but occurs over many more hours. Lunch is definitely busier and better staffed, and the dinner crew usually needs to to start thinking about closing, so a few go off at 7 to start dish or clean the back room or whatever.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> When it came to the dinner rush, we would have half the staff or less then our lunch rush. So in a sense it is the work of 2 to 3 people. Is dinner as busy per hour as lunch?
- kube-system 3y agoWhat they mean is "the workers have 2-3x more work queued up than can be handled for satisfactory operations" Quality of service will suffer.
- Dem_Boys 3y agoI'll counter you. How do you find competent, reliable people that show up to work consistently and work hard for $9.00 an hour? You're doing the work of your buddies who called in. Your buddies called in because they're 17 and they're dad made them get this job. They hate it! This happens every damn day.
- atlasunshrugged 3y agoI think many of these jobs are starting at closer to $15/hr now, but perhaps your point still stands
- Dem_Boys 3y agoYeah I think you're right. I'm out of touch now. I started working there ~10 years ago and my starting pay was $7.30/hr. I made $10/hr as a manager
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI started at $4.25/hour, but got pushed up to $5 within a year. I feel old now.
- poulsbohemian 3y agoBack in the early 2000s, I worked on a product that was the only profit center in a public company. While there were people who worked on overall technical architecture, it was only myself and one front end dev dedicated to the product. Other products that ran in the red had dozens of employees because they were the things that got touted to Wall Street, but we were the very boring thing that kept the company alive. Back in high school I worked in fast food as a closer. One front end person, one backend person, one manager for dinner rush, late rush, clean up from the day both in the kitchen and the store, some basic prep for the next day (morning shift did main prep), and they kept pushing us to get our times down so that we could walk out the door as soon as the store closed rather than taking any time after closing for our cleanup, etc. Our labor cost per hour was likely around $17. The energy to run the ovens, refrigerators, etc was fairly consistent, while our labor cost for any extra time after closing was a variable cost that ate into their profit margin. Doesn't matter what industry -- ask a doctor about their workload -- if management can squeeze labor costs, they will.
- WalterBright 3y ago> if management can squeeze labor costs, they will. Everybody squeezes costs, including you and I. Don't you shop for the lowest prices? I do. Customers of fast food are pretty price sensitive.
- norir 3y agoIt would be nice to have fewer assumptions about others made on HN.
- robertlagrant 3y agoStated assumptions are fine.
- poulsbohemian 3y agoOf course, there's a great deal of price sensitivity especially on commodity products. But - perhaps implicit rather than explicit within my remarks - there's also mismanagement or questionable management. And, price is not always aligned with profit. That Arby's generated something like $1MM in yearly profit, in 1996 dollars. The extra $5.05 they would have paid me for the hour after closing to ensure the store was actually clean, prep was properly done, pans were cleaned etc, made exactly jack squat difference to their margin. In the case of the tech company...let's just say they are all but forgotten, while other players came along with competent management and have formed new multi-billion dollar businesses.
- zaptrem 3y agoWhat made it a time sink? How could it be made faster?
- voisin 3y agoYeah I wondered this too. Watching them work, it certainly doesn’t look like they take more time than most McCafe drinks or making burgers.
- Someone1234 3y agoIt likely doesn't, but McCafe Drinks/Burgers are a staple. Coffee and Burgers are likely included in most of their orders, Ice Cream they get a few each hour.
- dawnerd 3y agoIf it’s only a few that’s no more of a backup than someone getting to order and going “uhhhhhhhhhh” or the people arguing with the cashier that something was wrong.
- cbm-vic-20 3y agoI've never worked at a McDonald's, but I have had to operate and maintain a soft-serve ice cream machine. I don't eat soft serve ice cream because I know how long it takes to clean these machines properly. I've seen what happens when they aren't. I don't trust that places like fast food joints that are understaffed, where the employees aren't motivated enough to do a thorough job, would take the time necessary to make sure those machines are clean.
- Dem_Boys 3y agoIt's a relative time sink and the toughest logistical challenge in the whole store for workers due to soft serve melting so fast. You must make the ice cream last. The car has to be at the window (or customer at the counter) when you start. This is the only item in the store that must be prepared like this so you must always have a free person to do this. McDonalds does't provide the labor budget to have "free people" standing around to get your ice cream when you need it. Making ice cream almost always hurt another area of the store in a small way. Also making a soft serve ice cream cone is much harder than you think. Took me ~2 months to get it down. Dont even get me started on dipped cones. Fun fact: This is why your mcflurry doesnt have candy at the bottom. Workers hate ice cream! They dont blend it with the machine, they'll just hand blend it to be quick. The fix would be to take the burden off the the employees. Automate it just like they did drinks. Or increase the labor allowance to have the staff to handle ice cream. They'll probably never do that though.
- a2tech 3y agoAlso staff not keeping the ice cream machine full or ignoring the warnings on the screen or...all the other things. As long as people followed all the rules the machines they were bullet proof.
- Dem_Boys 3y agoExactly! Our ice cream machines were well made and always worked as they should. They'd be down for a couple hours a month to clean but that's it. The machine would flash and beep when the ice cream mix was low so we were always eager to shut it up.
- jandrese 3y agoThe intersection of minimum wage part time jobs with no benefits and motivated contentious workers is unfortunately fairly small.
- yterdy 3y agoEvery retail/food service job is understaffed. You ask what people displaced by AI will do for a living? That. They'll do that. Because, actually, we do need people at PoS, if we're selling to other people. Hint hint as to why you should be supporting "unskilled" labor unions, high wages for those workers, and the destigmatizing of those types of jobs.
- bumby 3y agoDisplaced workers going into unskilled labor doesn't seem like an idealized "post-AI" situation. If anything, it might be something we should guard against. There's nothing wrong with honest work, but some would probably paint that scenario as dystopian, if you consider that many people think creative and autonomous work are important to human flourishing. If anything, I'd want AI to take over those rote jobs so people can focus on that type of creative work they tend to find more fulfilling.
- candiddevmike 3y agoAI will enter meat space long after it replaces knowledge workers
- chmod775 3y agoAutomation entered meat space centuries before it replaced knowledge work.
- bumby 3y agoI tend to agree, but there are various degrees of "meat space." Rote manual work has been getting automated away for decades. Now AI is taking away rote (or adjacent) knowledge work. The question is whether a reasonable solution for those displace by AI in the knowledge sector is to go work in the rote manual labor space. That presupposes their labor rate is suppressed below that of automation.
- thih9 3y agoI’m not sure if I’m capable of performing fulfilling work that would also have anything resembling of a demand. Take creative work. The pre-AI market was already extremely competitive. Few artists can chase autonomy, the rest needs to sell out to some level - usually significant; not the human flourishing we wanted. AI may disrupt this; still, my guess is that the pool of profitable creative workplaces remains unchanged, at best.
- pengaru 3y agoOne problem with your claims is this is pretty well documented as a uniquely McDonalds franchise problem at this point. Competing fast-food franchises serve similar frozen dairy products, in a similar staffing environment, without their machines constantly being out of service. This video covered the situation fairly well IIRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
- Dem_Boys 3y agoYou may be right! Just my experience working there for 4 years at 6 different stores. This happened all the time at every store I worked at. BTW Our machine would legit break too. Maybe once a year it would be down for a day.
- pengaru 3y agoThe linked video makes a pretty strong case for it being a "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" situation...
- Zenst 3y agoHad a stint myself and cleaned those Taylor shake machines, takes time as have to disassembler the entire chamber - lots of sharp blades and not many trusted to do it right. Let alone checking all the O-rings, which you often need spares and short of the one you need. Then inspections....so often find they would at least try to close the machine early to shorten the close, and often be down. Sometimes due to lack of milk for the machine and no they can't just pop down the local supermarket to get some - least not known that ever happen, nor risked as be job ending kinda things as cutting into that franchise supply grip.
- jldugger 3y agoIt's kinda wild how a franchise built around a milkshake machine now cannot bother with milkshakes.
- jjulius 3y agoThe company whose OG sign said "McDonald's Famous Hamburgers" the year they introduced "fast food" principles into their operations was actually built around shakes?
- bumby 3y agoRay Kroc (who is really responsible for the growth of the McDonald's franchise) was a milkshake machine salesman. I believe he was introduced to the McDonalds brothers when selling them a milkshake machine that could mix multiple individual milkshakes at once. Edit: here's the "multimixer": http://www.sterlingmulti.com/multimixer_history.html http://www.sterlingmulti.com/multimixer_history.html
- pinkmuffinere 3y agoTo be fair, Wikipedia says McDonald’s is now 80 (!!!) years old, I expect many foundational aspects of the business have changed since then. But it is wild to see particular aspects of the evolution. I wonder how much was anticipated/planned, and how much “just happened”
- jareklupinski 3y agoi only go there for chicken sandwiches these days...
- citizenpaul 3y agoThey did pretty much give up on the shakes not long after becoming a popular place. They were one of if not the first to switch from actual cow milk to chemical gelatin formulations. So they really have always been struggling with the difficulties of quickly serving an ice cream product for their entire existence. That's a long time to have a thorn in your side and put up with it. 80 years according to the other comment.
- Racing0461 3y agoI don't think people would care if mcd says they are short staffed. I think people care due to mcd lying.
- Dem_Boys 3y agoAs a manager you can't tell the customers this. You'd lose your job if your store manager or any higher ups find out. You lie to the customers and the workers cover for you (the shift manager) because they hate making ice cream.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt also needs to be cleaned (daily when I was crew), and that often means taking it apart early to get ahead of closing, or putting it together late because you didn’t have enough time to get to it before breakfast ended, or maybe just don’t put it back together at all because the person that usually did it was gone that day.
- derefr 3y agoThis makes sense for daytime-rush "broken" ice cream machines; but almost all the reports I've seen about "broken" machines are about people coming into a dead store during the night-shift, when the employees would in theory have nothing better to do than make them an ice cream.
- jvanderbot 3y agoYou underestimate the creativity and laziness of night shift food workers. Once a daytime manager says "no ice cream", how far away is a night shift worker from just repeating that mantra? Source: Was one, did that for other things all the time. > " Sorry, we don't deliver to your area on Mondays "
- Dem_Boys 3y agoYour right about this occuring mostly at night. The store looks dead but do you know if the night crew is caught up on their closing responsibilities? Doing dishes, stocking nuggest sauces, cleaning the grill, disassembling the fry hopper, organizing the stock room, etc... If the store closes with none of these done the manager will blow their labor budget due to taking 3 hours to close and the employees will be pissed. Your rebuttal is a good one and your somewhat right. Grabbing you an ice cream cone when there's no customers likely isn't a big deal. The manager usually cuts the ice cream while being overwhelmed (Ahh! 7 ice cream cones and we have 10 cars behind them. No more ice cream!) and never tells employees to start offering it again. Offering ice cream again would piss off the employees and also slow down the manager who's trying to hit labor and drive through times
- derefr 3y ago> The store looks dead but do you know if the night crew is caught up on their closing responsibilities? I mean, I've never worked in fast food myself, but that split of responsibilities assumes that the night shift are closing, no? There are a lot of 24-hour McDonald's locations, where no explicit "closing" ever happens. I would assume that in a 24hr location, a lot of what would otherwise be "closing" responsibilities are either spread out as "clean as you go", turned into something done at shift-start/shift-end for each shift (and so made a lot quicker by only having 1/3rd the accumulated workload for each shift), or pushed to the dead-est period (which according to one Quora post is "in the middle of the graveyard shift, 3-6AM".)
- mahgnous 3y ago[dead]
- november84 3y agoHow long ago was this and have the machines changed over the years? Because this ice cream machine always broken seems like anew phenomenon compared to my tenure back around 97. I was there for about a year IIRC, other than cleaning the machine "making ice cream" was dumping the premixed liquid into the top two compartments.