Worked at a Hardee’s for three years, so pretty much. It wasn’t a bad job, though I agree with the statement earlier that it’s amazing how much pain you get used to; hundreds of little burns daily, it seemed. At the end of my career there, I had done things that should have caused massive burning (accidentally dunking my entire arm into a fryer, slipping and catching myself on the grill, hands flat down on the surface), but didn’t- compared to the red welts each little spatter of grease caused my first few weeks, I got the impression that one became immune to burns.
We had the weird gender divide in our store. Women up front and at the drive-through, men at the grill and fry stations and store maintenance. Mixed genders did salad prep, biscuit making.
I ended up leaving because Hardee’s corporate was beginning to take cost-cutting measures which not only made the food worse, but made it impossible to provide mandated timely customer service. One tiny example: we were told to not precook 1/4 pound patties (we would keep a reserve of 12 or so for rushes, FIFO, and we sold them quickly enough that we’d put another run on the grill every 5 minutes or so, so they were fresh) but cook to order. They took around 3 minutes to cook, and we were required to have an under-90-second turn around on transactions. Right-o.
Similar problems with roast beef: switched from real beef roasted in-store and on deli slicers to pre-cooked, frozen beef slices in trays soaked in heated “au jus” (salt water in which a packet o’ beef got soaked while breaking down the breakfast prep) for 90 seconds. Nasty stuff. The “au jus” prep technique could only be done one beef packet at a time, and we could not pre-prepare beef, so if someone ordered more than one sandwich, they got to wait another minute and a half for each one. Then, to trumpet the lowered food quality, they advertised a 5-for-$5 roast beef sale! 5 sandwiches at 90 seconds apiece = 7.5 minutes’ wait, minimum. Of course, we were still required to finish transactions in under 90 seconds. At this point, my lunch crew had quit because of the policy changes, and I was running the grill/prep/fry area by myself for lunch rushes. The DM came back to write me up in the middle of the rush over transaction times-- I took off my “crew leader” tie and name badge, put them in my hat with the store keys, handed them to the suddenly panicked DM, and walked out.