3 ms·

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 con

• 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.
    • justsomehnguy 2mo ago
      With each year it's more and more evident what 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires' is not just an observation but more like a medical diagnosis. > The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system While waiting their <$20 fast, cheap food.
      • deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
    • ChrisClark 2mo ago
      Oh, I've felt that when they marked my order done and hadn't started yet. But, like you said, I realized what they were doing, and how they quite possible NEED to do it just to keep dumb management happy. So of course I didn't say anything.
    • alwa 2mo ago
      I feel like I could think of a way to word a letter that pointed out the problem without pointing out specific locations or people. I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it. I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.” But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.
      • neilv 2mo ago
        Would something like the following work (other than sounding a little self-important), or is there another concern? "Dear McMoo corporate or regional management, I've noticed an operations issue at a McMoo location, which I think probably affects many of your locations. I think the issue might be denying your management accurate data signals, while adversely affecting customer experience and brand, and unnecessarily increasing stress to your workers. [...]" Sometimes it's worth writing such a letter. If I were in corporate, I'd want that serendipitous letter, about something important I didn't know. (Well, unless my promotion was riding on the worker metrics program I proposed being seen as a success, and my bosses believe more in perfect winning success with the very first shot, than they do in iterative refinement and learning.) It's more uplifting to write letters of praise for an employee/location. I wrote one recently, to a big national chain. The only tricky part I've found is that I try to imagine corporate rules that might've been violated. For example, I might not want to say, "I told your employee my special-needs child loves your multinational chain ketchup, and the employee immediately fashioned a toy dog out of a dozen ketchup packets, and handed it to my delighted child, all while singing a song from a Disney movie." (In my imagination, that could get the employee written up 6 different ways.)
    • cxr 2mo ago
      This reads like someone who either never had one of these jobs and is left to try to use their imagination, or someone who is knowingly misrepresenting what consequences are awaiting low-level employees purely by choice. Either way, the conversation would be better without your involvement.
      • idiotsecant 2mo ago
        What on earth are you talking about. A customer writing a letter to corporate management calling out an employee for corrupting tracking metrics would be quickly acted upon in any retail or fast food context, even if tons of other employees do it. If anyone is disconnected from reality here, it's not me.
        • cxr 2mo ago
          Nope.
    • ApolloFortyNine 2mo ago
      Employee games the system, people wait too long for food, people wait too long for food so they stop eating at the restaurant (this was my solution, it's fast food cutting it out is pretty much only a plus), people stop eating at restaurant so restaurant raises it's prices, more people stop going, restaurant closes. The naive take is to think any one of these actions happen in a vacuum. Plus if this is happening at any scale at a restaurant then the manager probably told them to do it.
• junofan 2mo ago
  Wow, that explains why my order number mysteriously disappeared from their “now serving” screen even though I went at a time when the restaurant was empty.
• lovich 2mo ago
  That’s also why they have you pull out of the drive thru to one of the waiting zones even if there’s no one in line behind you. It lowers their “time in drive thru” metric and I guess they aren’t currently measuring time waiting in a parking spot after or it’s a less important metric for the franchise
• impendia 2mo ago
  Have front-line employees come under pressure these days? When I worked in fast food, in the nineties, the managers were under pressure to optimize a variety of metrics. But they didn't have a lot of carrots or sticks, and most of the rank-and-file employees put in an honest day's work but beyond that didn't give that much of a shit.
  • asddubs 2mo ago
    the shift managers are the ones under pressure, who are front line employees, they do the same work as the regular employees plus a bit extra and earn maybe $17 an hour instead of 15.
    • impendia 2mo ago
      Indeed, that's who I was thinking of. At the time I thought of them very much as "managers" and not having the same job as me. But I happened to see one of the shift managers' paystubs once, and she was not exactly making good money.
• bigfatkitten 2mo ago
  > 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. That was probably true at some point, but it isn’t now. My teenager works part time at McDonalds. She tells me the drive thru at her store is equipped with cameras that automatically track the progress of each vehicle from order taking to payment to presentation, as well as into the waiting bay if you end up there.
  • f33d5173 2mo ago
    They said except for the drive thru.
• rurban 2mo ago
  Just take away their printers, install order screens in the kitchen. No way to cheat then