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Data has ruined fast food (among many other businesses). When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for e

Data has ruined fast food (among many other businesses). 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. Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. You order on a tablet, and 10+ minutes later an overworked employee sets it on the counter and scurries away, probably after realizing it's not a drive-thru order. The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. There's at least one alarm going off constantly. Back then they were run based on someones intuition of what makes a good customer experience. Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.

bothers 2mo ago
Data has replaced knowledge, and the true tragedy of this will only be felt by our children and their children. But it will be felt keenly.
toast0 2mo ago
> 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...
- 07c84979b3b5d7 2mo ago
  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 https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
  - Cockbrand 2mo ago
    TIL there's burgerschachteln.de, because of course there is a person collecting burger packaging on the Internet.
    - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
      Of course they're German too.
  - ricardobayes 2mo ago
    That brought back some memories. I would always order a Filet-o-Fish which they made fresh due to the low demand.
  - alex0015 2mo ago
    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.
    - genewitch 2mo ago
      In N Out has a much smaller footprint, so there is scarcity going for them. In a suburb of los angeles, there might be an in and out in your town or a neighboring one. There were sometimes a dozen or two McDonalds, BK, Carl's, Taco bell, Del Taco, Jack in the box, etc - multiples of each. 1 In N Out for 3-4 cities, but potentially 6-12 of each of the others. I think that explains it. The singular Carl's Jr in a nearby city was always busy, for a similar reason. it closed during covid, for whatever reason, and the next nearest one is at least 2 hours away. Compared to the 6 McDonald's in my metro: 4 Taco Bell, 3 Whataburgers, 5 Wendy's, and 4 Open BKs out of 7 that were open prior to 2020. The Raising Cane's is always packed to bursting, too, because there's only 1 in the area.
- andai 2mo ago
  The machines were right; truly civilization peaked in 1999.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  > 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.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    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.
  - toast0 2mo ago
    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.
  - wvenable 2mo ago
    They only changed this recently.
- xp84 2mo ago
  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.
  - ApolloFortyNine 2mo ago
    >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.
    - idiotsecant 2mo ago
      The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system just enough to keep their jobs is a wild one.
      - voakbasda 2mo ago
        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.
        tavavex 2mo ago
        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.
- maccard 2mo ago
  > 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.
- rascul 2mo ago
  > 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.
  - kalleboo 2mo ago
    I remember people sharing "tricks" like "order without X" in order to force the order to be made from scratch instead of pulled from the heating tray.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2mo ago
  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.
scottlamb 2mo ago
> Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience. If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
hliyan 2mo ago
The problem with fast feedback loops is that they filter out long term signals. The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. So the kind of dashboards that modern managers demand, offer nothing but the most obvious, short term "insights", that you might as well eliminate the man in the middle and feed the data directly into a set of simple decision rules.
- geye1234 2mo ago
  > The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
  - sseagull 2mo ago
    Everyone quotes Goodhart's law, but I think the McNamara fallacy is even more important nowadays. It should be read aloud to every CEO every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
    - waldarbeiter 2mo ago
      > Making a decision based on only qualitative data I suppose you meant quantitative and it's just a typo
    - wvenable 2mo ago
      These bad outcomes aren't coming. Maybe we as customers don't like it but it doesn't mean the companies are suffering for it. For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.
xp84 2mo ago
I've seen the same changes. The most noticeable is, now that they are no longer required to be visible at the front counter in case someone comes in to order, because of kiosks, the workers usually specifically hide anywhere else, to minimize the chances of being disturbed by customers with their endless requests ("I've been waiting for 15 minutes for a large fry...") Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). I won't speculate if it's been "worth it" since it'll devolve into an off-topic political debate, but basic economics does predict that since labor costs twice what it did 10 years ago, they'll do everything to minimize how much labor they buy. Couple that with what you said, basically, using "Moneyball" techniques to finesse everything with all these optimizations, we get the operations we see now in all retail establishments. And even if there are states that haven't done the minimum wage changes, the markets that have are so big. The national businesses that have adapted to it have proven out their barebones-labor model there - why wouldn't they roll out most of the changes nationwide? I think if someone launched a fast-food place or a drugstore in 1995 that operates with the type of skeleton crew they use today, it would fail overnight due to people having a choice. But today, since essentially 100% of retail operates this same way, they don't experience any pressure to do better.
- hamdingers 2mo ago
  > Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). In-N-Out allows us to discard this notion. They've maintained full staffing while simultaneously paying staff above-market rates (even in California). They only charge 30 cents more for a basic cheeseburger, and the burger is much higher quality, so even that is hard to attribute to wages.
  - dsr_ 2mo ago
    In-N-Out is, IIRC, completely privately owned by the founder's family. Every location is directly controlled. Their customers are the people buying burgers. McDonalds, of course, is 5% corp-owned flagships and 95% franchise "opportunities". They don't have customers, they have tenant farmers who work the land leased to them.
lbriner 2mo ago
The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers. Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order. I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.
- Larrikin 2mo ago
  The experience now is definitely worse but even back in the early 2000s, owners tracked drive thru service order times and the managers constantly reminded us of this. I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store. They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    In some ways, it feels like cosmic balance that DT gets priority. Hear me out: In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life. At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT. (Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)
PaulHoule 2mo ago
Different stores in different chains have a very different attitude. There is a Taco Bell in Ithaca which has a staff that has some esprit de corps and then another where the dining room is disgusting.
iambenm 2mo ago
My read on this, beyond data and MBA's, is that all of the slack has been pulled out of the economy.
- morkalork 2mo ago
  This is a silly analogy but it's like integer truncation has been applied everywhere blindly. Staffing model says you need 2.5 employees on average to handle the load? You get 2. Everywhere with everything.
  - steveBK123 2mo ago
    And modern technology / weak labor market has made this worse. I worked retail in high school in 90s and we basically had a weekly somewhat regular schedule. It was very rare to get sent home early. Now you hear about people being "on call" for basically minimum wage jobs, called in for half shifts, sent home early, etc. Stringing together 40 hours at a job like this is basically a job in itself.
ck2 2mo ago
what you are describing is basically company ownership or high level managers of the store are just keeping kicking out legs of the table and waiting to see if it will still stand up because you and others keep going back to the store no matter how bad it gets, they keep testing what other cuts they can do eventually it will be just one employee sitting in the corner watching several humanoid bots doing all the work and just required to press the reset button when they glitch maybe even a single human remote employee doing that for 100+ stores vandalism will get insane and then corporations will just get congress to pass felony laws to slow that $20 burgers will also slow that I miss pizza
Ajedi32 2mo ago
It's fast food. The focus is on price over all else. If they maintained the staffing levels from back then, then instead of poor service you'd be complaining that a Big Mac costs $15.
- wvenable 2mo ago
  Except that, adjusted for inflation, a Big Mac was cheaper at that time.
  - Ajedi32 2mo ago
    Regardless, it would be even more expensive without reductions in staffing. It's not like they could be hiring twice as many employees at half the cost each and are just choosing not to. Fast food is a highly competitive market.
- slumberlust 2mo ago
  Their prices are not cheap, unless of course you use the app; I wonder why they structure the incentive that way...
- proggy 2mo ago
  People rightly complain about the prices when it comes to chains like McDonald’s. They built their brand on fast, cheap food. But right now, the average cost of a Big Mac in the US $5.79, which is quite high given the raw ingredient cost of the sandwich components, around a 107% markup [1]. And that’s for a burger reconstituted from freeze-dried ingredients shipped in cardboard boxes. And the dining room experience is truly atrocious. It just doesn’t add up. A burger made of fresh, never frozen ingredients from In N Out or Five Guys only carries a 50-80% markup [1], and those stores are properly staffed and consequently offer a much more pleasant dining room experience. I suppose my point is that it is possible to deliver a good customer experience and still maintain a healthy operating margin. What McDonald’s is doing to make the whole experience worse is not a necessity to keep the business alive, it is a choice to maximize profits at the expense of the brand’s long-term reputation. [1] https://youtu.be/5zOmh9F4xcs https://youtu.be/5zOmh9F4xcs
speak_plainly 2mo ago
I totally agree, and I think this is why using a traditional, Deming-style Quality Assurance framework is so valuable. Data is useful, but only to a point. A process-first approach (guided by clearly defined quality characteristics) is going to produce more meaningful and sustainable results: products and services that customers value more, lower costs and less waste for the company, and happier and more empowered employees.
Waterluvian 2mo ago
Throughout the corporation teams are optimizing for what gets them promoted and I bet they're doing very well. Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.
arjie 2mo ago
Yeah, because all those employees are now doing much better paying jobs elsewhere instead of a low paying job like cleaning a dining room. The dining room at a McDonald's functions just as well at the 80% dirtiness as it did at 10% dirtiness. It's like how you can go to India and there'll be like 400 different employees at a hotel. One will usher you into the door. The other will hold the door. The third will say "Welcome, sir!" and lead you to the front desk while a fourth tells a fifth to grab a suitcase. That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.
reaperducer 2mo ago
hamdingers Name checks out. Minnesotan, perhaps?
- hamdingers 2mo ago
  No, I've just watched a lot of Mike Nelson era MST3K. Never actually had one myself.
red-iron-pine 2mo ago
that doesn't sound like data, that sounds like capitalism
enquirewithin 2mo ago
In Australia McDonalds, Hungry Jacks (Burger King), and KFC aren’t fast. And McDonalds barely passes as food. I can have a succulent Chinese meal at my table in less time than either of those big-three, and my local roast chicken joint about 30 seconds after I sit down.
- steveBK123 2mo ago
  shout out to succulent Chinese meals
  - theposey 2mo ago
    gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!
slibhb 2mo ago
Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.
- travisjungroth 2mo ago
  Because there’s been a decline in experience across so many fast food and fast casual restaurants over the last ten years, regardless of when they were founded, it seems like something industry wide (maybe data is part of that) rather than a business cycle.
  - hombre_fatal 2mo ago
    On the other hand, fast food places around me have large digital touch-screen kiosks for ordering. You can always go up to the counter to order, but it seems like everyone prefers the kiosk if one is available. For good reasons too -- you get to see what the food looks like, you don't feel rushed, etc. I'm not so sure the experience (of talking to fast food employees?), if you can call it that, matters all that much to people who want to grab a quick bite with their family. To me the biggest change in restaurants is the norms/expectations of service personnel. e.g. I'll walk into a restaurant and the young hostess might stare at me until I go "Uh, for two please". Or the waiter at a restaurant might make it feel like he's only standing in for his friend and never was a waiter before in his life before I release him back to the waiter social circle going on in the corner. But I can't blame that on "data".
    - enquirewithin 2mo ago
      They’re waiting for a notification to appear at the top of their visual field. You’d get better service if a glowing neon sign appeared above your head that said: “A customer is standing in front of you. Tap here to begin.”
    - Terr_ 2mo ago
nonameiguess 2mo ago
I have no special insider knowledge here, but I'm reasonably sure McDonald's relative drop in the hierarchy of global made-to-order food providers is a combination of increased competition, more health conscious and eco conscious customers, and younger generations choosing to spend higher amounts on sit-down experiences when bothering to eat out. They're largely franchisees who make the staffing decisions anyway. McDonald's corporate ensures portion sizes, ingredients, and preparation are the same everywhere, but I don't think they're dictating to franchise owners how many staff members they need to keep on hand. Again, caveating I'm not a franchise owner and don't know the details in depth, but the bulk of what McDonald's collects is the rent on the stores themselves, which is fixed, and royalties are a percentage of gross sales, not profits, so they shouldn't have much reason to care if franchises are profitable as long as they stay in business.
steveBK123 2mo ago
It also feels like a K shaped economy thing. Everything not premium has to be optimized/automated/enshittified to hell. Fast food, in my lifetime, seems to have moved more to the lower end of the demographic spectrum in terms of customer base. Some combination of wealth driven taste changes and health concerns within the top half on the customer side.
dualvariable 2mo ago
> the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers honestly, this is the biggest problem with american capitalism these days. consumers that just act like zombies and never modify their behavior, no matter how much they get abused.
jldugger 2mo ago
> When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, ... > Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. The one I went to last week had a banner advertising a $20/hr starting wage. Clearly they'd like to hire more.
- xp84 2mo ago
  Well, they almost always need to be hiring due to turnover. But they’re not trying to increase their number of people scheduled at once. Also, in California, that’s now the minimum wage allowed by law for fast food. Fast food is a special, higher-minimum exception for some silly reason. (And I say this as someone who spent over 2 years of my youth doing that work.)
  - jldugger 2mo ago
    Ah, TIL. I knew prevailing wages were higher locally but was surprised to see it hit $20. Now I guess I know why.
thrance 2mo ago
Yeah, that's capitalism baby. They'll lower the quality, working conditions and raise prices a much as they can get away with. Doesn't matter if it hurts the brand in the long term, only suckers reason further than next week.
axus 2mo ago
Observing my local McDonalds, and comparing to my childhood experiences; now McDonalds is doing a lot more volume. The drive-through line goes faster and is longer, and there are pickup orders. So in total, they are making more money than ever. My memory is that McD drive through was worse before, and less people used it. Go to a Burger King drive-through if you wanna go back in time. Inside, similar number of customers, and inexplicably fewer employees serving them. I blame the management decisions more than the data it's based on. Probably the numbers are telling them to punish the indoors customers, and they aren't using their brains about how that's going to be a long-term problem. Speaking of data, you can ask the app to "anonymize" you as Valued Customer. Your name doesn't really matter to McDonalds.
seattle_spring 2mo ago
Same thing has happened to grocery stores. The place near me doesn't even staff a single checkout lane after 8pm-- the only option is to use self-checkout. I had a full cart at 9pm a while back and asked an employee if they could help me checkout. She literally laughed before telling me that I had to use self-checkout, or I was out of luck and would need to come back tomorrow.
gofreddygo 2mo ago
I recently had a similar experience with Subway in a touristy region of South Dakota. Small place run by two very young girls. One managing the drive-thru, and asking customers what type of bread, what type of cheese, toasted or not and at the same time managing beeping machines and being watched on camera at ALL times. She was doing her best. The other however was terrible as half the things were run out (olives, sauces) and she had no idea how or where to refill. I could see the first shooting daggers at her. now as a human there, i could clearly see what was happening. I could come up with a bunch of simple things that could fix it. But as I drove back with my sandwiches, I kept wondering how this shows up on a spreadsheet or some internal system that Subway might have for decision making. That really really made me question things that I had always suspected but swept under the rug. I concluded to never go back to subway (which I've always liked FWIW) or any other fast food joint. What stops them from adding absolute garbage into the food (which will never show up in any report) or the factories that I'm not privy to if it adds to the bottom line. Fast food is no better than packaged frozen food. Fast food companies are no better than the current crop of mega corps draining every nickel and dime to the bottom line for the next quarter. I have more respect now for few employees at some joints (even airlines) that refused to give me some food items when I was with my kid on the basis that they haven't ever seen that stuff go bad for months and their conscience wont let me feed that to my kids and handed me something else instead. This human character trait I have new found appreciation for. And subway isn't the exception I see, its the rule. I now see the same at McDonalds, Chipotle, Dominos and other fast food joints. Goddam Moneyball. I've been collecting ideas on how and what to carry or buy when we travel instead of relying and feeding my family on this. Its hard but I think worth it.
YesBox 2mo ago
My first job was working at Wendy's (c. 2006/2007). I recall the kitchen being busy enough that you had to constantly navigate around your coworkers. I worked with a bunch of Brazilians (all super nice people) and a handful of kids around my age. IIRC lunch rush had (my memory is fuzzy..): 2 drive through positions, 2-3 people on cash registers, dining room cleaner, fry guy (sometimes 2?), 2-3 burger assemblers, one person on drinks, griller, dish washer, and the assistant manager and manager helping out everywhere. Prep team might still be working too. I remember really enjoying the food a kid (in moderation). And everyone having a mini tantrum when someone ordered fries with no salt :D Was also shocked to see one of my Brazilian coworkers working at the crack of dawn on my way to school, cause he typically had closing shifts.
hdndjsbbs 2mo ago
The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live. Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.
- jerlam 2mo ago
  The fast food places near me closed all their dining rooms when indoor dining was banned during the pandemic. They converted their front doors into Doordash-only pickup. I was expecting that change to be permanent for fast food joints, but no, they've all reopened their indoor dining areas.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    They have reopened them in most (but not all) places. But you also see more new builds designed with no seating, or extremely minimal, uncomfortable seating (e.g. a single high ‘bar’ with a few metal stools against a wall or window. Or even that minus the stools - stand and eat at that bar). The seating is now designed to be more for waiting for a to-go order than for enjoying a meal. Compare to a 1990s model that might be much larger and have 10-12 booths around the outside of a big square room, with 10-15 more tables in the center. The game plan is clear from where I sit. The act of dining in at fast food is already not popular among anyone outside of high schoolers and homeless, and that’s the exact same set of diners that makes the most work for them. So, they’d like to just cut it out entirely.
m463 2mo ago
> The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. Data says it won't stop you from coming back. It may even make you a more profitable to-go orderer that doesn't need onsite resources. I worry that this kind of thing will make "delighting your customers" too expensive compared to just minimum viable product.
stasomatic 2mo ago
It’s a US problem and I say it as an USAnian. Go to Paris, Berlin, London, McD feels like a fine establishment. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but that’s what I saw.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
kaseijin 2mo ago
Prices have gone up, service and quality have gone down. Definitely results in me going far less. But I'm also the type to complain and demand a refund if my food takes more than 10 minutes at a fast food place. Like the entire reason I'm even buying your crap food is because I'm in a hurry and it's cheap. Now it's not cheap but I'm still in a hurry. I'll just climb over the counter go back and make it myself at this point. Until customers say nope and stop going it will just get worse. Too many people are on autopilot and won't just say no. I remember last time I'm at subway they're like "oh it's an extra 2 dollars for pickles" and I laughed said, "alright bye" and just walked out. "Hey what are we supposed to do with your sandwich" "it's your sandwich, not my problem".
kalleboo 2mo ago
You also have the employees gaming the system (at least where I am). The order goes in through the touch screen, then the screen shows your order number as being prepared, and then as ready when it's time to pick up. But since they're judged on how long the customer is waiting, they cheat and mark it as completed long before it actually is, making it disappear from the screen. So now the data shows "wow with just 2 staff we're still serving our meals in 3 minutes" when in reality you have a line of people waiting.
wompawoo 2mo ago
Restaurants, especially the largest chains and franchises like McDonalds, have been data-driven for many, many years. They don't guess. They know year-over-year sales and recent regional trends. They haven't been using intuition in a very, very long time. They might get it slightly wrong less often than in the past, but they haven't been "very wrong" in a long time. We knew how many burgers we would sell in a day decades ago when I worked fast food, within about 5% most days. The data-driven decisions at this point are corporate offices working out how to make an extra $0.25 off every transaction. The enshittification is coming from the franchisees who are working out how to maximize their profits after whatever corporate royalties are paid. These days, they have a stranglehold on the best real estate and they know it. If you want OK food at an OK price in an OK restaurant, they know you'll go to their place. If you personally won't go, five other people nearby will and they don't need you. They don't need an exceptional experience. Customers will be there.
phyzix5761 2mo ago
Its important to know that McDonalds in other countries still schedules 10+ workers at a time. The wages are just too expensive in the US to justify that kind of schedule but in countries like the Philippines, where the average livable wage is $20 USD a day, it makes sense to hire 10+ workers for a single shift. Just for comparison, the average meal price at McDonalds in the Philippines (Big Mac meal with small fries and a drink) is around $4 USD.

bothers 2mo ago

Data has replaced knowledge, and the true tragedy of this will only be felt by our children and their children. But it will be felt keenly.

toast0 2mo ago

> 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...

07c84979b3b5d7 2mo ago
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 https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
- Cockbrand 2mo ago
  TIL there's burgerschachteln.de, because of course there is a person collecting burger packaging on the Internet.
  - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
    Of course they're German too.
- ricardobayes 2mo ago
  That brought back some memories. I would always order a Filet-o-Fish which they made fresh due to the low demand.
- alex0015 2mo ago
  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.
  - genewitch 2mo ago
    In N Out has a much smaller footprint, so there is scarcity going for them. In a suburb of los angeles, there might be an in and out in your town or a neighboring one. There were sometimes a dozen or two McDonalds, BK, Carl's, Taco bell, Del Taco, Jack in the box, etc - multiples of each. 1 In N Out for 3-4 cities, but potentially 6-12 of each of the others. I think that explains it. The singular Carl's Jr in a nearby city was always busy, for a similar reason. it closed during covid, for whatever reason, and the next nearest one is at least 2 hours away. Compared to the 6 McDonald's in my metro: 4 Taco Bell, 3 Whataburgers, 5 Wendy's, and 4 Open BKs out of 7 that were open prior to 2020. The Raising Cane's is always packed to bursting, too, because there's only 1 in the area.
andai 2mo ago
The machines were right; truly civilization peaked in 1999.
Dylan16807 2mo ago
> 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.
- xp84 2mo ago
  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.
- toast0 2mo ago
  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.
- wvenable 2mo ago
  They only changed this recently.
xp84 2mo ago
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.
- ApolloFortyNine 2mo ago
  >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.
  - idiotsecant 2mo ago
    The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system just enough to keep their jobs is a wild one.
    - voakbasda 2mo ago
      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.
      - tavavex 2mo ago
        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.
maccard 2mo ago
> 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.
rascul 2mo ago
> 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.
- kalleboo 2mo ago
  I remember people sharing "tricks" like "order without X" in order to force the order to be made from scratch instead of pulled from the heating tray.
HeyLaughingBoy 2mo ago
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.

scottlamb 2mo ago

> Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience. If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.

hliyan 2mo ago

The problem with fast feedback loops is that they filter out long term signals. The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. So the kind of dashboards that modern managers demand, offer nothing but the most obvious, short term "insights", that you might as well eliminate the man in the middle and feed the data directly into a set of simple decision rules.

geye1234 2mo ago
> The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
- sseagull 2mo ago
  Everyone quotes Goodhart's law, but I think the McNamara fallacy is even more important nowadays. It should be read aloud to every CEO every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
  - waldarbeiter 2mo ago
    > Making a decision based on only qualitative data I suppose you meant quantitative and it's just a typo
  - wvenable 2mo ago
    These bad outcomes aren't coming. Maybe we as customers don't like it but it doesn't mean the companies are suffering for it. For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.

xp84 2mo ago

I've seen the same changes. The most noticeable is, now that they are no longer required to be visible at the front counter in case someone comes in to order, because of kiosks, the workers usually specifically hide anywhere else, to minimize the chances of being disturbed by customers with their endless requests ("I've been waiting for 15 minutes for a large fry...") Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). I won't speculate if it's been "worth it" since it'll devolve into an off-topic political debate, but basic economics does predict that since labor costs twice what it did 10 years ago, they'll do everything to minimize how much labor they buy. Couple that with what you said, basically, using "Moneyball" techniques to finesse everything with all these optimizations, we get the operations we see now in all retail establishments. And even if there are states that haven't done the minimum wage changes, the markets that have are so big. The national businesses that have adapted to it have proven out their barebones-labor model there - why wouldn't they roll out most of the changes nationwide? I think if someone launched a fast-food place or a drugstore in 1995 that operates with the type of skeleton crew they use today, it would fail overnight due to people having a choice. But today, since essentially 100% of retail operates this same way, they don't experience any pressure to do better.

hamdingers 2mo ago
> Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). In-N-Out allows us to discard this notion. They've maintained full staffing while simultaneously paying staff above-market rates (even in California). They only charge 30 cents more for a basic cheeseburger, and the burger is much higher quality, so even that is hard to attribute to wages.
- dsr_ 2mo ago
  In-N-Out is, IIRC, completely privately owned by the founder's family. Every location is directly controlled. Their customers are the people buying burgers. McDonalds, of course, is 5% corp-owned flagships and 95% franchise "opportunities". They don't have customers, they have tenant farmers who work the land leased to them.

lbriner 2mo ago

The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers. Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order. I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.

Larrikin 2mo ago
The experience now is definitely worse but even back in the early 2000s, owners tracked drive thru service order times and the managers constantly reminded us of this. I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store. They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
- xp84 2mo ago
  In some ways, it feels like cosmic balance that DT gets priority. Hear me out: In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life. At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT. (Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)

PaulHoule 2mo ago

Different stores in different chains have a very different attitude. There is a Taco Bell in Ithaca which has a staff that has some esprit de corps and then another where the dining room is disgusting.

iambenm 2mo ago

My read on this, beyond data and MBA's, is that all of the slack has been pulled out of the economy.

morkalork 2mo ago
This is a silly analogy but it's like integer truncation has been applied everywhere blindly. Staffing model says you need 2.5 employees on average to handle the load? You get 2. Everywhere with everything.
- steveBK123 2mo ago
  And modern technology / weak labor market has made this worse. I worked retail in high school in 90s and we basically had a weekly somewhat regular schedule. It was very rare to get sent home early. Now you hear about people being "on call" for basically minimum wage jobs, called in for half shifts, sent home early, etc. Stringing together 40 hours at a job like this is basically a job in itself.

ck2 2mo ago

what you are describing is basically company ownership or high level managers of the store are just keeping kicking out legs of the table and waiting to see if it will still stand up because you and others keep going back to the store no matter how bad it gets, they keep testing what other cuts they can do eventually it will be just one employee sitting in the corner watching several humanoid bots doing all the work and just required to press the reset button when they glitch maybe even a single human remote employee doing that for 100+ stores vandalism will get insane and then corporations will just get congress to pass felony laws to slow that $20 burgers will also slow that I miss pizza

Ajedi32 2mo ago

It's fast food. The focus is on price over all else. If they maintained the staffing levels from back then, then instead of poor service you'd be complaining that a Big Mac costs $15.

wvenable 2mo ago
Except that, adjusted for inflation, a Big Mac was cheaper at that time.
- Ajedi32 2mo ago
  Regardless, it would be even more expensive without reductions in staffing. It's not like they could be hiring twice as many employees at half the cost each and are just choosing not to. Fast food is a highly competitive market.
slumberlust 2mo ago
Their prices are not cheap, unless of course you use the app; I wonder why they structure the incentive that way...
proggy 2mo ago
People rightly complain about the prices when it comes to chains like McDonald’s. They built their brand on fast, cheap food. But right now, the average cost of a Big Mac in the US $5.79, which is quite high given the raw ingredient cost of the sandwich components, around a 107% markup [1]. And that’s for a burger reconstituted from freeze-dried ingredients shipped in cardboard boxes. And the dining room experience is truly atrocious. It just doesn’t add up. A burger made of fresh, never frozen ingredients from In N Out or Five Guys only carries a 50-80% markup [1], and those stores are properly staffed and consequently offer a much more pleasant dining room experience. I suppose my point is that it is possible to deliver a good customer experience and still maintain a healthy operating margin. What McDonald’s is doing to make the whole experience worse is not a necessity to keep the business alive, it is a choice to maximize profits at the expense of the brand’s long-term reputation. [1] https://youtu.be/5zOmh9F4xcs https://youtu.be/5zOmh9F4xcs

speak_plainly 2mo ago

I totally agree, and I think this is why using a traditional, Deming-style Quality Assurance framework is so valuable. Data is useful, but only to a point. A process-first approach (guided by clearly defined quality characteristics) is going to produce more meaningful and sustainable results: products and services that customers value more, lower costs and less waste for the company, and happier and more empowered employees.

Waterluvian 2mo ago

Throughout the corporation teams are optimizing for what gets them promoted and I bet they're doing very well. Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.

arjie 2mo ago

Yeah, because all those employees are now doing much better paying jobs elsewhere instead of a low paying job like cleaning a dining room. The dining room at a McDonald's functions just as well at the 80% dirtiness as it did at 10% dirtiness. It's like how you can go to India and there'll be like 400 different employees at a hotel. One will usher you into the door. The other will hold the door. The third will say "Welcome, sir!" and lead you to the front desk while a fourth tells a fifth to grab a suitcase. That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.

reaperducer 2mo ago

hamdingers Name checks out. Minnesotan, perhaps?

hamdingers 2mo ago
No, I've just watched a lot of Mike Nelson era MST3K. Never actually had one myself.

red-iron-pine 2mo ago

that doesn't sound like data, that sounds like capitalism

enquirewithin 2mo ago

In Australia McDonalds, Hungry Jacks (Burger King), and KFC aren’t fast. And McDonalds barely passes as food. I can have a succulent Chinese meal at my table in less time than either of those big-three, and my local roast chicken joint about 30 seconds after I sit down.

steveBK123 2mo ago
shout out to succulent Chinese meals
- theposey 2mo ago
  gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!

slibhb 2mo ago

Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.

travisjungroth 2mo ago
Because there’s been a decline in experience across so many fast food and fast casual restaurants over the last ten years, regardless of when they were founded, it seems like something industry wide (maybe data is part of that) rather than a business cycle.
- hombre_fatal 2mo ago
  On the other hand, fast food places around me have large digital touch-screen kiosks for ordering. You can always go up to the counter to order, but it seems like everyone prefers the kiosk if one is available. For good reasons too -- you get to see what the food looks like, you don't feel rushed, etc. I'm not so sure the experience (of talking to fast food employees?), if you can call it that, matters all that much to people who want to grab a quick bite with their family. To me the biggest change in restaurants is the norms/expectations of service personnel. e.g. I'll walk into a restaurant and the young hostess might stare at me until I go "Uh, for two please". Or the waiter at a restaurant might make it feel like he's only standing in for his friend and never was a waiter before in his life before I release him back to the waiter social circle going on in the corner. But I can't blame that on "data".
  - enquirewithin 2mo ago
    They’re waiting for a notification to appear at the top of their visual field. You’d get better service if a glowing neon sign appeared above your head that said: “A customer is standing in front of you. Tap here to begin.”
  - Terr_ 2mo ago

nonameiguess 2mo ago

I have no special insider knowledge here, but I'm reasonably sure McDonald's relative drop in the hierarchy of global made-to-order food providers is a combination of increased competition, more health conscious and eco conscious customers, and younger generations choosing to spend higher amounts on sit-down experiences when bothering to eat out. They're largely franchisees who make the staffing decisions anyway. McDonald's corporate ensures portion sizes, ingredients, and preparation are the same everywhere, but I don't think they're dictating to franchise owners how many staff members they need to keep on hand. Again, caveating I'm not a franchise owner and don't know the details in depth, but the bulk of what McDonald's collects is the rent on the stores themselves, which is fixed, and royalties are a percentage of gross sales, not profits, so they shouldn't have much reason to care if franchises are profitable as long as they stay in business.

steveBK123 2mo ago

It also feels like a K shaped economy thing. Everything not premium has to be optimized/automated/enshittified to hell. Fast food, in my lifetime, seems to have moved more to the lower end of the demographic spectrum in terms of customer base. Some combination of wealth driven taste changes and health concerns within the top half on the customer side.

dualvariable 2mo ago

> the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers honestly, this is the biggest problem with american capitalism these days. consumers that just act like zombies and never modify their behavior, no matter how much they get abused.

jldugger 2mo ago

> When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, ... > Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. The one I went to last week had a banner advertising a $20/hr starting wage. Clearly they'd like to hire more.

xp84 2mo ago
Well, they almost always need to be hiring due to turnover. But they’re not trying to increase their number of people scheduled at once. Also, in California, that’s now the minimum wage allowed by law for fast food. Fast food is a special, higher-minimum exception for some silly reason. (And I say this as someone who spent over 2 years of my youth doing that work.)
- jldugger 2mo ago
  Ah, TIL. I knew prevailing wages were higher locally but was surprised to see it hit $20. Now I guess I know why.

thrance 2mo ago

Yeah, that's capitalism baby. They'll lower the quality, working conditions and raise prices a much as they can get away with. Doesn't matter if it hurts the brand in the long term, only suckers reason further than next week.

axus 2mo ago

Observing my local McDonalds, and comparing to my childhood experiences; now McDonalds is doing a lot more volume. The drive-through line goes faster and is longer, and there are pickup orders. So in total, they are making more money than ever. My memory is that McD drive through was worse before, and less people used it. Go to a Burger King drive-through if you wanna go back in time. Inside, similar number of customers, and inexplicably fewer employees serving them. I blame the management decisions more than the data it's based on. Probably the numbers are telling them to punish the indoors customers, and they aren't using their brains about how that's going to be a long-term problem. Speaking of data, you can ask the app to "anonymize" you as Valued Customer. Your name doesn't really matter to McDonalds.

seattle_spring 2mo ago

Same thing has happened to grocery stores. The place near me doesn't even staff a single checkout lane after 8pm-- the only option is to use self-checkout. I had a full cart at 9pm a while back and asked an employee if they could help me checkout. She literally laughed before telling me that I had to use self-checkout, or I was out of luck and would need to come back tomorrow.

gofreddygo 2mo ago

I recently had a similar experience with Subway in a touristy region of South Dakota. Small place run by two very young girls. One managing the drive-thru, and asking customers what type of bread, what type of cheese, toasted or not and at the same time managing beeping machines and being watched on camera at ALL times. She was doing her best. The other however was terrible as half the things were run out (olives, sauces) and she had no idea how or where to refill. I could see the first shooting daggers at her. now as a human there, i could clearly see what was happening. I could come up with a bunch of simple things that could fix it. But as I drove back with my sandwiches, I kept wondering how this shows up on a spreadsheet or some internal system that Subway might have for decision making. That really really made me question things that I had always suspected but swept under the rug. I concluded to never go back to subway (which I've always liked FWIW) or any other fast food joint. What stops them from adding absolute garbage into the food (which will never show up in any report) or the factories that I'm not privy to if it adds to the bottom line. Fast food is no better than packaged frozen food. Fast food companies are no better than the current crop of mega corps draining every nickel and dime to the bottom line for the next quarter. I have more respect now for few employees at some joints (even airlines) that refused to give me some food items when I was with my kid on the basis that they haven't ever seen that stuff go bad for months and their conscience wont let me feed that to my kids and handed me something else instead. This human character trait I have new found appreciation for. And subway isn't the exception I see, its the rule. I now see the same at McDonalds, Chipotle, Dominos and other fast food joints. Goddam Moneyball. I've been collecting ideas on how and what to carry or buy when we travel instead of relying and feeding my family on this. Its hard but I think worth it.

YesBox 2mo ago

My first job was working at Wendy's (c. 2006/2007). I recall the kitchen being busy enough that you had to constantly navigate around your coworkers. I worked with a bunch of Brazilians (all super nice people) and a handful of kids around my age. IIRC lunch rush had (my memory is fuzzy..): 2 drive through positions, 2-3 people on cash registers, dining room cleaner, fry guy (sometimes 2?), 2-3 burger assemblers, one person on drinks, griller, dish washer, and the assistant manager and manager helping out everywhere. Prep team might still be working too. I remember really enjoying the food a kid (in moderation). And everyone having a mini tantrum when someone ordered fries with no salt :D Was also shocked to see one of my Brazilian coworkers working at the crack of dawn on my way to school, cause he typically had closing shifts.

hdndjsbbs 2mo ago

The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live. Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.

jerlam 2mo ago
The fast food places near me closed all their dining rooms when indoor dining was banned during the pandemic. They converted their front doors into Doordash-only pickup. I was expecting that change to be permanent for fast food joints, but no, they've all reopened their indoor dining areas.
- xp84 2mo ago
  They have reopened them in most (but not all) places. But you also see more new builds designed with no seating, or extremely minimal, uncomfortable seating (e.g. a single high ‘bar’ with a few metal stools against a wall or window. Or even that minus the stools - stand and eat at that bar). The seating is now designed to be more for waiting for a to-go order than for enjoying a meal. Compare to a 1990s model that might be much larger and have 10-12 booths around the outside of a big square room, with 10-15 more tables in the center. The game plan is clear from where I sit. The act of dining in at fast food is already not popular among anyone outside of high schoolers and homeless, and that’s the exact same set of diners that makes the most work for them. So, they’d like to just cut it out entirely.

m463 2mo ago

> The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. Data says it won't stop you from coming back. It may even make you a more profitable to-go orderer that doesn't need onsite resources. I worry that this kind of thing will make "delighting your customers" too expensive compared to just minimum viable product.

stasomatic 2mo ago

It’s a US problem and I say it as an USAnian. Go to Paris, Berlin, London, McD feels like a fine establishment. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but that’s what I saw.

deleted 2mo ago
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kaseijin 2mo ago

Prices have gone up, service and quality have gone down. Definitely results in me going far less. But I'm also the type to complain and demand a refund if my food takes more than 10 minutes at a fast food place. Like the entire reason I'm even buying your crap food is because I'm in a hurry and it's cheap. Now it's not cheap but I'm still in a hurry. I'll just climb over the counter go back and make it myself at this point. Until customers say nope and stop going it will just get worse. Too many people are on autopilot and won't just say no. I remember last time I'm at subway they're like "oh it's an extra 2 dollars for pickles" and I laughed said, "alright bye" and just walked out. "Hey what are we supposed to do with your sandwich" "it's your sandwich, not my problem".

kalleboo 2mo ago

You also have the employees gaming the system (at least where I am). The order goes in through the touch screen, then the screen shows your order number as being prepared, and then as ready when it's time to pick up. But since they're judged on how long the customer is waiting, they cheat and mark it as completed long before it actually is, making it disappear from the screen. So now the data shows "wow with just 2 staff we're still serving our meals in 3 minutes" when in reality you have a line of people waiting.

wompawoo 2mo ago

Restaurants, especially the largest chains and franchises like McDonalds, have been data-driven for many, many years. They don't guess. They know year-over-year sales and recent regional trends. They haven't been using intuition in a very, very long time. They might get it slightly wrong less often than in the past, but they haven't been "very wrong" in a long time. We knew how many burgers we would sell in a day decades ago when I worked fast food, within about 5% most days. The data-driven decisions at this point are corporate offices working out how to make an extra $0.25 off every transaction. The enshittification is coming from the franchisees who are working out how to maximize their profits after whatever corporate royalties are paid. These days, they have a stranglehold on the best real estate and they know it. If you want OK food at an OK price in an OK restaurant, they know you'll go to their place. If you personally won't go, five other people nearby will and they don't need you. They don't need an exceptional experience. Customers will be there.

phyzix5761 2mo ago

Its important to know that McDonalds in other countries still schedules 10+ workers at a time. The wages are just too expensive in the US to justify that kind of schedule but in countries like the Philippines, where the average livable wage is $20 USD a day, it makes sense to hire 10+ workers for a single shift. Just for comparison, the average meal price at McDonalds in the Philippines (Big Mac meal with small fries and a drink) is around $4 USD.