“I looked at the schedule you posted in the kitchen and you don’t work today.”
“That was last week’s schedule. I work from one to seven today and two to eight tomorrow. The next day I work from two to five at Burger King then five-thirty to eleven-thirty at Subway.”
“I thought your last day at Burger King was last Wednesday.”
“It was, but they scheduled me anyway.”
“They’re going to start pulling strangers off the street to fit in those odd shifts.”
Does it not make sense to these people that their workers will be less likely to quit if they have regular schedules and can, y’know, plan their lives some? And don’t they have computers? Some of the earliest shareware I saw was for fast food scheduling.
If I had to guess, based on my old job experiences, I’d say it’s a mix of petty politics, employees like students with weird schedules, other employees changing their schedules last minute, actual hard data on rush times, and general incompetence.
Employees who say they’re flexible in their hours get used hard. I still remember when I was scheduled for second shift one day and first shift the next at a gas station. I had from 10 pm to 6 am to get some food and a bit of sleep. As it happened, the guy on third shift bailed on me, so I wound up working second and third and got another employee to cover first while I passed out.
I did the scheduling at my work (not a fast food place, but lots of part timers) for a long time. It’s an ungodly hard job. Like doing a big jigsaw puzzle every week.
You really can’t give most employees the same schedule every week. You can try, once in a while it works, but then someone tells you they want to go to a concert next week and need Wednesday off and it throws a wrench in the plans and you have to redo everything.
So you want to work Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week from 8-2, but next week Mark asks for off on Tuesday…someone has to fill that in. It can’t be someone that already works that shift which means someone is going to have to take his shift, which means someone is going to have to take that shift and so on. It’s easier just to start from scratch every week.
Every week I’d sit there with my pile of requests for days off. I’d put a big line through those days and then fill in the rest making sure to get my full time workers up to 40 hours (minus any days the requested off) and do my best to get all my part timers at lest 3 days each.
FTR my full time people typically had steady schedules but that’s because what they do and what the part time people do don’t really overlap and the full time people tend not to ask for nearly as many days off, but when they do, another full timer is going to have a funky work week.
The person doing the scheduling at my place now sucks at it, but I won’t take it back since I really don’t have an hour a week to devote to it.
The thing I’ve always told people is if you want a steady schedule, tell them you can only work specific days/times and hope they’ll work around that. The problem is, as mentioned above, if that’s not flexible enough, they’ll get rid of you and hire someone that doesn’t have such a restrictive schedule. Though sometimes you can get away with telling them you can’t work one specific day (ie Tuesdays) so at least you’re guaranteed the same day off each week. But it’s usually best to tell them you have something going on on Tuesdays as opposed to “I just don’t want to work on Tuesdays” as that’s how the ‘petty politics’ thing gets started.
Yeah, and I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who schedules hours is an asshole or an idiot, just that those are all the different factors that come into play.
(Course, I’m still bitter about the bitch who tried to get me to quit my movie theater job by scheduling me for half a shift in two weeks. Thankfully I was just a teenager still living with my parents at the time, so the $25 paycheck was merely hilarious and annoying instead of damning.)
I do the workflow scheduling for my department these days, but it’s an order of magnitude easier than retail scheduling. I know I’ve got X employees for 8 hours each the next day along with X number of jobs, and I just have to partition out the work so all the jobs are covered while no employee gets more than 8 hours of work dropped in their lap. I don’t envy the managers who have to deal with crazy employee schedules.
I long ago figured out that retail management of people making minimum wage would probably result in me killing half my staff the first week, mostly over scheduling, so it was probably not an appropriate career path. My daughter’s problem is that she’s trying to help us out by maximizing her hours (BK got too creepy) and has an unemployed father who can deliver and pick up, regardless her schedule.
I did pretty much the same thing every week for over a year, and it matches my experience pretty much exactly. When you’re working with mostly teenage workers, their job usually falls about dead last in their list of priorities, and they request off for pretty much everything. Not that I blame them, because when I was their age, I was the same way. I tried my hardest to keep the schedules mostly the same from week to week, sliding people around to cover shifts as needed, but some weeks you’d just have to start over from scratch. Yes, I did give preferential treatment to some employees, but only the ones who were actually hard and reliable workers (and I tried my hardest to be objective about that). There’s also the case of some employees who just do not work well with other employees. Either because they don’t get along and are in a bad mood the entire shift, or because they get along too well and talk the entire shift. So you can either micromanage and tell them to get back to work every 10 minutes, or you can try your best to make sure they don’t end up working at the same time.
So yeah, when you see an individual person’s schedule from week to week, it can look a little crazy and random. When you look at the whole process, it makes a little more sense. Just a little.
Y’know, bucking the pay by a buck an hour buys you a better class of employee, as in people who make better employees. Just sayin’. With a shift staff of four that’s just two Whoppers per hour.
As another ex-fast food manager, it’s really not that simple. More often than not the manager in a chain restaurant doesn’t have all that much control over pay - we were required by corporate to hire on all new employees at state minimum wage, and the biggest raise you could get, barring promotion, was 15 cents/hour every six months. Franchised stores might have a little more discretion, but considering that that restaurant has all the same expenses as a corporate store PLUS the franchise fee, money is even tighter. Labor is pretty much the biggest expense a restaurant has, accounting for about one-third of every dollar brought in. On top of that, fast food is a very low profit-margin enterprise, since there’s only so much you can charge for a burger and fries before people take their business elsewhere - in the store I worked at, a month where we made a 4% profit margin after all expenses was FANTASTIC, and 1-2% was closer to the norm.
To use the example above, my old restaurant had a labor guide of about 600 man-hours a week, dependent on sales. To pay every employee an extra dollar per hour would be an extra $600 expense - and assuming that a McJackStar Thickwhopper costs an even two dollars (which it doesn’t, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll say it does), and assuming that all other expenses scale with business volume (which they don’t, but most of them do) it would take an extra 7,500 burgers sold per week to recoup the profit loss.
Anyway, to the OP’s question, i’m going to have to agree with the previous posters that making a schedule is pretty much like doing a big complicated puzzle. You have to account for differing sales projections from week to week, labor caps as imposed by corporate or by the franchisee, employees’ scheduling needs due to time-off requests or transportation or babysitting or school, the ebb and flow of sales throughout the day, particular events within the store like a big promo, new employee training, or a visiting VIP, any upcoming events in the vicinity that may impact business like road construction or bad weather or parades, various employees’ skill sets, state and federal law regarding minors, employees who don’t like each other because of some piddling drama, and a myriad of other concerns.
One place where I worked fed everyone’s requests for days off and such into a computer. The computer then spit out everyone’s schedule. If the computer scheduled you on your requested day off you were SOL and had to swap shifts with somebody else.
If you requested too many days off and/or requested too many schedule changes, you were lucky to be scheduled once or twice a week. One of my former coworkers used to do this a lot (and, to be fair, she was a single mom and was at the mercy of whoever could watch her kids). Her schedule eventually dwindled to a 4-hour shift on Saturdays and that was it. Needless to say, she quit soon after.
That was the whole point. As somebody upthread said, if you aren’t flexible when it comes to when you can work, chances are they don’t want you.
More often then not (IME) when a part time high school kid quits they usually say something like “I can still work on the weekends” or “I can still work one or two days if you really need me” or “My last day will by Tuesday but I can come in Wednesday if John doesn’t show up again.” That’s how that happens…Or Someone called the person that is supposed to have Tuesday as their last day and said “Hey, I know Tuesday of next week is supposed to be your last day but John, Frank and Anne all asked for off, could you work the morning shift?” Sure, you can say no, it’s not your problem, but again, that’s another way you wind up working the day after your last day.
I sort of got scheduled once before I was actually an employee. I had applied to work at a grocery store, and a few days later, got a call saying I was hired. I said “Great, when do I start?” The manager told me he’d let me know. Three days later, I got a call from a fairly irate manager asking if I was going to bother showing up to my shift I was three hours late for. I told him that it was the first I heard of it. I was still waiting for him to let me know when I’d start. He said with great disdain for my obviously inferior intellect that I started three hours ago. “Pretty sure I didn’t”, I said, and hung up on him.
Thus began and ended my lack of employment at Safeway.
I can quite understand that doing a schedule is not easy with many different special requests, Joe can only work Mondays and Wed., but John can only work Wed. and Fri., both need 20 hrs/week, but John can’t work the same shift as Jose because they hate each other and Jack is new and needs to be paired with Juan who’s experienced and a good worker…
But aren’t there good software tools to give the basics without the extra requests, and you only need to accommodate those?
In addition, many managers are completely incapable - not you, obviously; I’m just watching a guy moving people to new shifts that collide with their regular shift, apparently moving the shifts without looking at the old schedule! Or the same manager who doesn’t post the schedule for the whole company, because he doesn’t want employees swapping with each other, though that’s often the easiest way, when Sally asks Anne to switch their Mon- Tue. 7-9 pm shift and both agree, instead of going to the manager, who sends out an email to all 20 employees and has to deal with the answers. So some micromanaging or incompetence makes things much worse.
It pays from a fast food manager perspective to have employees with incredibly flexible work schedules. If you’ve dedicated an AM crew and a PM crew you’re screwed when a few people on one get sick and the other all have commitments they were able to make because their schedules never change.
Ideally everyone will be able to be called in to work at any time.