I’m not sure how this scales. What high paying jobs are there for the masses of unskilled workers to perform?
Believe it or not, there are people who want minimum wage jobs. I had a long-time employee who never got a raise. One day she approached me and asked why everyone else got raises and she didn’t. I explained that I based pay on performance and she was always doing the bare minimum asked of her. I told her that if she worked harder, she’d get paid more.
She was satisfied by my explanation and never questioned me again about her pay. She continued to perform at the same level, never got a raise, and seemed happy enough.
Ha! Good point. I think my username from now on should only represent the good part of McDonald’s, the drive thru portion. So McdrivethruMechanic.
I’m 49, and yes, it used to be better. When I was in high school in the '80s I worked at a McDonald’s, and speed was the priority. We occasionally ran promotions during which we were required to fill each customer’s order within 60 seconds, or they got a coupon for a free drink. That’s 60 seconds from pressing “total” on the register to having all items on the tray or in the bag and being ready to receive payment. For a single person ordering a sandwich/fries/drink, it was typically much quicker than that, but it got tight if you had someone ordering for a family of five. We could achieve these speeds because food was always ready: there were fully assembled sandwiches waiting in the warming bin. These days they do on-demand sandwich assembly, I guess because the juicy ingredients don’t soak into the bun so much? Whatever, it now means that sandwiches get assembled one at a time instead of six or twelve at a time, beginning after the cashier presses “total” on the register. This is a terrible bottleneck. In addition, for some reason the order-taking process has also become slower. Back in my day (yeah, I said it), someone ordered an item, and you pressed a button; these days, it seems like they’re drilling down through a menu tree each time you ask for something.
FWIW, this isn’t just McDonald’s. I have the same experience every time I eat at Wendy’s (except the food is better).
we are moving farther and farther into a world where there may not be enough necessary work to go around. I don’t think make-work that doesn’t pay enough to live on is a good answer to that problem.
I dislike the kiosks, I find that they’re slower than ordering with a live cashier - they can easily find the right buttons to press immediately since it’s their job, whereas the menu on the kiosk doesn’t feel intuitive and I often have to hunt around for items (the kiosk also just seems a bit slow to react, RAM-wise). And I’ll need to go over and ask for a drink cup anyways from the cashier so it defeats half the purpose. Like MrAtoz it seems the people at the local McDonalds I frequent all seem to largely ignore the kiosks as well. There were a couple times where an employee will be standing by the kiosks and trying really hard to force people to use them, but thankfully that’s been rare.
I’ve found it really depends on the individual store… the Wendy’s near me will frequently have my order ready before I can even go fill up the soda cup.
If you can replace three shifts daily every day forever with a glorified tablet, whether those people made $8/hr or $14/hr isn’t really going to matter because you’re saving money either way. Some light Googling suggest the neighborhood of $10k for a self-service kiosk which means a single 40hr/week employee would need to be making $5.20 an hour to be competitive for the same hours in the first year – oh, except the kiosk works more than 40 hours a week and only costs $10k once (plus some maintenance costs which aren’t going to come near to evening this out).
Long term, the only thing that’ll make a difference is if everyone refuses to use it or if it causes substantial product loss (like the supermarket self-checkouts) so you still need just as many employees, plus you have a dumb kiosk sitting around. Someone’s minimum wage rate isn’t going to move the needle unless people start making $2/hr.
It’s always been this way. 95% of the time, you can order and get your food in under five minutes. A few times a day, however, they get a huge rush and you’re lucky to get your food in fifteen or twenty minutes. I worked at McD’s in the 90s and it was the same way then. If you’re in a hurry, it’s always better to go outside of rush hours. So mid-morning, mid-afternoon, late evenings.
I’ve used the kiosks before and while it’s a little more work, hunting around for the choices you want, it’s not that difficult, and it is nice to have an option if the counter is busy or I don’t feel like talking to anyone.
For those saying McDonald’s used to be faster, you might be right about your McDonald’s. But I distinctly remember the McDonalds around my area being terrible in the 80s-early 90s, but getting much better (faster, and better prepared food) in the late 90s (coincidentally, when I worked there). I think some managers are better at getting quality work out of teenagers and down on their luck older folks than other managers, and managers change over time, so the quality of any particular McDonald’s changes over time. But I think that’s random variation, not strictly “it was better before”.
I haven’t used the kiosks yet, but my general impression of present-day McDs matches the OP’s—chaotic, no organized lines, people just standing or milling about in the ordering area, only one person taking orders, and most the staff focused on serving drive-thru customers.
I’ve occasionally had food delivered to my table, but this isn’t offered consistently. Some locations have it, some don’t.
I, too, am nostalgic for the days when all the food was pre-made and you received your order in a matter of seconds. However, I was far less picky in my younger days. If that system came back, I’d probably be disappointed.
I agree w/ the 1st sentence. What do you propose?
Talk about a complete failure to use technology, though. We have Google, Siri, and Alexa who are all mostly capable of interpreting speech (and it doesn’t even have to be US English!) and coming close to approximating what you want. Instead of having humans push fucking touch-screen buttons, just have them speak their order FFS, and then present it on the screen. If something is incorrect, they can select that and either re-speak that part or have the option of making manual (ie touchscreen) adjustments. Seriously, why not do it this way? It would make life easier for shitloads of people and likely vastly improve ordering time.
I’e used the touchscreen before, it is about 100 times slower than telling the person at the cash register what you want, waiting 5 seconds, and getting your damn food. I’ll just use the drive through, where that’s still the default.
Whereas I have always been a picky eater. As a child, I refused to eat at McDonald’s because none of the pre-made food was anything i was willing to eat. (Except the French fries. When they were cooked in beef tallow they were awesome.) Now that the food is made to order, there are items I’m willing to eat.
Holy shit, do you enjoy talking to phone menus? If they moved to the system you propose (which would have to function in a noisy environment) I would definitely never go there. That would be worse than the bad old days when everything was pre-made. I would have to fight to order and then get food I won’t eat.
I found the screen reasonably user-friendly.
What amazes me every time I’m somewhere that has one, is how In N Out makes it work. Seriously. The burgers are delicious and reasonably priced (a double is like $3.50, so not on the same scale as similar quality burger joints like Five Guys or Fatburger where it’s closer to $5 or $6). They pay their employees well (I believe in Cali, they start at $13/hr). They seem to employ a shitload of people (last time I was in Phoenix, the In N Out I visited, I counted something like 14 or 15 employees working the lunch rush–these are just the ones I was able to see.) Everybody who works there seems happy as a clam and takes pride in their job. It’s like they’re lacing the water with happy pills or something. As I understand it, they get decent benefits, too. It’s always amazed me as how in the hell they make it work. It’s always seemed to me like they should be charging customers double at the same volume to be able to support all that.
I might have mentioned this elsewhere, but I was recently at a Starbucks, where one menu board (out of seven) behind the counter had a short list of items, and only prices for one size. The remaining six menu boards had photos of food and coffee, but nothing else. At the bottom of the one menu board that had the short list was the message “For our full menu, please download our app”. Like hell I will. If you can’t be bothered to put your full menu up in the actual business, you are missing the idea of a menu. WTF?
Here in NYC, there’s considerable variation between McDonald’s restaurants. In midtown, near my office, there are two, within walking distance of each other. One is clean and efficient, and the other is filthy and disorganized. The clean one has the kiosks, but use is not mandatory. The only people I ever see trying to use them are foreign tourists, for some reason. I guess it kind of eliminates the language barrier.
There are no drive-through issues here, obviously.
What all, as far as I can tell, NYC McDonald’s have is a very, very casual attitude towards panhandling, sometimes aggressive panhandling, outside and inside the restaurants. *Every *McDonald’s in the city (I’m not kidding) has a self-appointed doorman, who has taken over the door and expects a tip for opening the door. Many restaurants, in every kind of neighborhood, have panhandlers working the tables and sometimes even the lines, right at the register, in full view of the employees. Some are quite aggressive.
It’s pretty unpleasant. I won’t bring my kids to McDonald’s. I mean, I wouldn’t bring them a lot anyway – I don’t want them to get to used to that stuff – but I won’t bring them at all because of the panhandling situation.
I use the kiosks all the time in the McDonald’s close to me, for several reasons:
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I’ve used them enough so I know where all the menu items are located, and I can go to them quickly. I can select options that might confuse a live person.
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If I need to think about an item I can take my time. There’s never anyone behind me waiting to use my kiosk.
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Orders made at the kiosk are taken directly to your table, using a table tent number.
This McDonald’s is busy, but I wouldn’t call it chaotic.
Oddly enough, I’ve never seen a kiosk with language options other than English, and in my neighborhood in Chicago, it really should also be available in Spanish.
I went to a gas station with a food court in it. It was late at night and I wanted a real cup of coffee and not that pot of colored water they had in the store. I went up to the specially trained food clerk who was doing absolutely nothing and asked for a cup of their fancy-over-priced-flown-direct-from-Brazil-ground-on-demand-coffee. I was told I would have to use the kiosk. Yeah, not going to happen. I haven’t been back since and that was maybe 5 years ago. Sometimes I pull into the same station to pour myself some coffee from a thermos or whatever drink I brought with me.
I haven’t either, but every menu listing has a picture of that item, so language probably isn’t a problem.
Or to get the cups! (At least in places where they have problems with people ripping off the self-serve soda machines.)
Anyway, I remember when you could walk into a McDonalds, see what they had in stock behind the counter, pay and get handed the item directly. I think there’d still be a market for that kind of outlet…