Well, the drive thru didn’t cook the burger, that much is certain. Do you need to be a genius? No. But it isn’t easy. It only takes one person “just adding a drink” at the second window or counting his change to slow drive thru down. Even given perfect customers, large orders simply take more time to fill, and plenty of people don’t hesitate to order three extra value meals, two happy meals, and whatever.
I’m not trying to defend these people. Just sayin’. Good drive thru service is hard to provide. It usually takes four people and a bunch of regular customers; and a franchise, concerned about actually making money, rarely has four people on drive thru. You usually could only see these conditions at lunch and dinner rushes. I’ve long felt it is mathematically impossible to achieve the standards that corporate wants and retain profitability, but maybe I just had a bunch of shitty kids working for me (not unrealistic, given the pay).
At my store, you could expect superb service from 7:30AM until about 1. We had a reliable number of customers and a swarm of long-time employees (several years). It’s a service industry. Just 'cause anyone can do it doesn’t mean everyone can do it well. Before 7:30, too few employees, and after 1:00, too few employees plus the high school kid factor. Add that to the fact that most managers are just super-workers rather than anyone who actually has a clue about management, and you get your typical fast food restaraunt.
In my time, we were expected to average thirty dollars per clocked employee (which was everyone but the head and assistant managers at my place) per hour. For a four-person drive through, that’s $120 an hour (given 90-sec drive thru times, you’re looking at about $3 an order average). A decently steady but not straining amount of customers would provide that, depending on the time of day (at breakfast, where many just order coffee, for instance, it is a lot more people than it would be around lunch time). But you’d want probably two grill workers in that situation (especially now that they no longer have sandwiches prepared ahead of time), making $180. Of course, the walk-in counter service must still be available, and that’s not a lot of business, but the service has to be there, so now you’re up to $210. For $210 of business, you’d want another person available for grill and relieving breaks, meaning you’re up to $240. But with that much business, you’ll also need someone to take care of dining room and keep the trash kept up outside, and they’re not producing anything but you still need to get an extra $30 for them, so now you’re looking at $270. That’s an awful lot of business. I assure you that most stores simply cannot maintain that level of business over the course of the day.
That leaves two general choices, from the perspective of the head manager (the proxy for the owner): keep people on the clock and take a hit on the $30/person/hour hoping your bigger hours like lunch and dinner will take up the slack (they can, sometimes), or understaff and take the hit on service to maintain regular profitability. At the store I was at, the latter was the order of the day post-lunch, and the former was the order of the day pre-lunch, for reasons which were more related to getting employees in rather than any possible business or management model. Even if you only need someone for two hours, you’ll never find employees that will only come in for two hours.
Fast food is about thin margins and squeezing out the most you can of high-turnover, low-skill, (generally) low-eductation, low-pay employees (which isn’t much, as common sense should dictate). Give 'em a break. If you want better service, go pay for it. I man that politely, though, I know how it sounds. If given the choice between Chili’s and McDonalds, I personally choose McDonalds every time. The extra service and small improvement in quality is simply not worth the considerable difference in price to me when all I want is a burger. For $4 I get an eatable, if not decent, burger at McDonalds. Including tip, and hell, wait time, at a regular franchise restaraunt it is easily double that for only a marginal improvement, IMO. If McDonalds in the US sold beer, they’d beat everyone out for me except when I’m in a steak mood.
Everything costs money, especially good employees and service. There are no personal shoppers at dollar stores!
All that said, there is no excuse for undercooked food. Ever. There are plenty of plausible causes, of course, but no excuses.
I’ve seen so many people on the boards echo such experiences. I boggle at it every time. I travel for work all over the continental US and some of Canada and I have to say that I’ve yet to run into such spectacularly poor service. Maybe I’m biased. 
I’m not saying you’re lying to me, in fact I believe you (my order gets screwed up sometimes, too, but since I like the entire menu I don’t bother doing anything about it), I just feel like the luckiest fast food shopper alive sometimes. 
(Though now that I think about it, I do tend to get unacceptable service from Burger King.)
Not that I was aware of, but frankly it wasn’t something I would have taken any pains to notice, either. I only recall the sausage patties and cinnamon rolls being pre-cooked, and later, the pancakes. Of course, I haven’t worked there since probably 1996.
:mad: