Talk about your experiences in the fast food industry.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This thread is not intended as a flame on fast food or the companies that sell it. I’m posting this because I got to thinking about it by this thread here. I heard a statistic somewhere that something like 70% of Americans had their first job at a fast food joint, such as McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Jack-In-the-Box, Rallys, Sonic, etc.

If true, this is a monolithic shared experience in the national psyche, and worth talking about. My own time in fast food nation (okay, that’s the ONLY pun I’ll use here) was the two years I worked for McDonald’s in my hometown my last two years of high school.
I looked all over town for a job, and McDonald’s was the only place that would hire me. (It was a very small town; most businesses employed the owner’s kid or his friends.) Because jobs were so hard to get in my hometown then (the early '90s) I didn’t feel any stigma, and nobody acted like I should.

To this day, I have never had a job that was physically and mentally taxing simultaneously to the level that working at McDonalds was. I did more strenuous labor on a construction crew a few years later, but not at high speed, surrounded by molten grease, with 30 people watching and waiting and a manager barking in my ear. I was in pretty good shape then, but I remember the sweat pouring off me in such rivers that my paper hats disintegrated and the managers became concerned that I would drip on the food.
At Mickey D’s I burned every finger on both hands on the grill at least once each. I was always the one who had to empty the huge grease traps next to the grill, since I was one of only a few people strong enough to lift them when they got full. I got involved in a few minor dramas with other employees there who I went to high school with. We all stole food like crazy, and even got caught a few times, but it was no big deal.

So, what did I learn? That A) some jobs suck, B) I didn’t have to do those jobs forever if I didn’t want to, and C) It felt good to earn money. All in all, I would say it was a positive experience.

2

My first job was in my uncle’s restaurant, which was kind of a hot dog fast food sorta thing. Let’s face it, I got the job because he was a relative. I basically said hey I need a job and he said ok you start next week. But, after that, he didn’t want anyone in the restaurant thinking he played favorites, so he was actually harder on me than he was on anyone else there. I didn’t complain. It taught me a good work ethic. I don’t remember ever burning fingers or anything else. The only time I ever remember even gettin hurt was when I was goofing around with another guy who worked there. I made the mistake of snapping a wet clean up rag at him. This apparently was a skill he had been working on for the entire couple of years he was in the restaurant, because he turned around and snapped his cleanup rag right on my nuts. Indiana Jones and his whip had nothing on this guy. Just my luck, a customer happened to come in just then. “Hi, may I help you?” I had to say between gritted teeth and pretend there was nothing wrong.

The only thing I really hated about the job was cleanup at the end of the night. We served a wider variety of food than Mickey D’s, so I had scrub out things like the mashed potato pot and gravy pot. Mostly, though, I can’t complain. It was minimum wage, but it was a pretty good job.

In college, I needed a bit of extra money, so I took a night job at Mickey D’s. I had worked all through high school at my uncle’s restaurant, so by then I was an old pro at fast food work. Mickey D’s was a lot more automated than what I was used to. Instead of just putting ketchup on burgers, you had a little squeeze thing that put exactly the right amount of measured kechup and mustard on the burgers. We cooked chicken nuggets in my uncle’s restaurant. We put them in the deep fryer and took them out when they started to float (that’s how we knew they were done). In Mickey D’s, you put the nuggets in the fryer and pressed a button and the timer told you when they were done. Everything was on a timer. Beep - flip the burgers. Beep - take them off the grill. Beep - fries are done. There was no skill at all involved. The other striking differnce for me was that the managers treated the employees like numbers, and never really even spoke to them except to give them orders. The fast pace of Mickey D’s didn’t bother me because I was used to it. The only time I ever remember it being an issue was when a basketball game let out. You don’t want to work at the Mickey D’s that is closest to the colloseum in a big college town when a game lets out. I made 80 hamburgers every 3 minutes for several hours straight.

Overall, I’d say it was a positive experience too. If it wasn’t for these jobs I wouldn’t have been able to pay for college.

3

One of my first jobs was at the snack bar at a KMart in North Carolina. Man, I hated that job. It was so unbelievably boring, it was hard work (I usually worked alone, so had to cook, and man the register). I especially hated cleaning at the end of each night. One night I was cleaning the grill, and one of the steps involved was dumping a pitcher full of ice on the grill. I apparently dumped a little too vigorously, and a few ice cubes hopped directly off the grill, into the cooling hot oil vats directly adjacent. That I didn’t get splattered was a miracle, but it did give me an amazing scare. Anyway, I hated that job a lot and was eventually fired, sadly enough, for not being up to KMart’s standards. Really - that’s what they wrote on my slip.

So, I went to work for McDonald’s. Slightly better pay, but just as miserable. Part of my problem was that I was a New England teenager working in a southern McDonald’s, and my coworkers really just did not like me. “Damn yankee” was muttered behind my back a lot, and the work still completely sucked. On top of that, I was frequently tagged to wash the dishes at the end of the night, and often didn’t get home until 11, 12 at night, and struggling to stay awake at school. After four months of working, having never called in once, I called in. They said if I didn’t come in to work, I could just turn in my uniform. So I did.

And, after that, I went to work at the hot dog stand on the Air Force base where my father was stationed. I did not last long at that job at all. I started shortly before going on a vacation, and they said that wasn’t a problem. I had almost no training, and my third day there, I had to open the stand, on a Saturday morning, and work alone until 3:00 pm. It was far too much for me. I had a line of 10 customers waiting while I ducked around a corner and just cried. It wasn’t long after that that I went to HR and told them I just wasn’t cut out for the job and quit. I couldn’t bear to tell my dad I had quit (who, in hindsight, probably would have understood) so I think I told him that they, too, had fired me, for taking the vacation. Funny, that I thought being fired was more acceptable than actually quitting.

That job, though, was the final nail in the coffin, and I vowed that I’d never work in food service again. And I haven’t since. The very thought of it makes me want to shoot someone. I enjoyed the telemarketing jobs that I had more than I enjoyed those three jobs - and I really, really did not like telemarketing.

4

My first job, while still in High School, was at a McDonalds. I closed the first night, and cried when I saw the stack of dishes I was expected to do. I stuck at it though, for a few months, because I liked the paychecks. I even transferred to another McDonalds closer to my house and school. It was a positive experience, in as much as it showed me what real work was like, how employers are allowed to treat their charges, and exposed me to people from other cultures. I never did like it all that much, and soon took a job at a family owned Fish and Chips chain where the work environment was radically different, they cared for their employees as people and didn’t work you into the ground. I worked there through the end of High School, and well into my Community College experience. I left them to become a Busboy at a high end restaurant where I thought I could make more Money. It lasted a few months, then folded. Fast Food experiences can be good or bad, it’s going to depend a lot on the management, and the co-workers.

5

I work at Hungry Jack’s. Despite what you may think from my chair-throwing thread I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I like my managers and I like my coworkers and the customers are, well, they’re interesting. A lot of people I know say they hate their customers, but if you ask me that just means you’re not really a service type to begin with. It helps that everyone has a pretty good attitude and the managers and friendly and know your name and all that. They come out and work the tills or make burgers in the back when needed. From what I hear others say, that may be a bit unusual.

Our store is right next to a McDonald’s. It is a lot bigger and, frankly, better than our store. They have a McCafe out front and a constant supply of customers. Oh, and their tills have touch screens. Our tills are the old kind with a keyboard that is basically a 16x8 grid where you have to memorise the positions of everything on it and some that aren’t. For example. to ring up a cheeseburger meal you have to press the “peach cup” button, a nuggets meal is “vanilla yoghurt” and coffee is “small” followed by a random button (a regular cappucino, for example, is “small” followed by “whopper with cheese”). In May our store is getting renovated while us workers are shuffled off to various other stores for a month and we will presumably get touch screen tills, rendering useless all the crap I spent my first several weeks learning. Such is life.

As I said, I like working here. If I had shit managers and shit coworkers I’d probably have quit before even paying off my uniform deposit. The pay is a bit crap but hey, it’s fast food. They were also willing to take me with no experience, unlike every other place I applied to. As a bit of useless trivia, all the Hungry Jack’s stores in WA are owned by one guy, but McDonald’s stores tend to be owned by individuals. Apparently this allows them to treat their workers worse and fire them more freely according to some labour loophole involving small businesses. Or something. I’m not sure but having sat for a very long time in the store next door while waiting for an interview, I think I would rather work at Hungry Jack’s. It’s smaller and less hurried. I heard they have an annual turnover something like 11 million AUD. That was a bit of a shock; I was expecting it to be much more. Not that $11 million is anything to be sneezed at, but you know.

6

I worked at Pizza Hut (Australia) for just under two years while I was finishing high school.

I honestly can’t remember much about it. Either I have a bad memory, or I’m repressing badly. But I can’t remember much from those two years, so it wasn’t the job that did it to me… :slight_smile: But I will talk about what I do remember.

We were a tiny, delivery-only store attached to a shopping centre down here in Adelaide. When I was first hired, I started by manning the phones, washing the dishes in the industrial style dishwasher and restocking the make table if it got low during the night. It wasn’t terribly strenuous, even on a busy night. The worst part, though, was cleaning the pizza pans.

These puppies were cast iron, a good centimetre thick. After coming out of the oven and having the pizza discharged, they would be stacked under the cut table in piles of about twenty or thirty. And they would retain the heat like a bastard, staying hot for hours afterward. I’d have to retrieve these stacks from under the cut table whenever there was a moment that someone wasn’t there cutting pizzas, and ferry them to the back of the store where the dishwasher was. After a few months, I ended up with a ladder of burn scars up and down the insides of both forearms. They weren’t serious, but they lasted a couple of years afterward. That was pretty cool.

After I’d got that all down, they started letting me take counter orders, stock the fridge out the front and keep the waiting area clean. But my favourite part was always cutting. When the drivers were all out delivering (they usually cut and boxed), I usually got tapped to take the pizzas out of the oven, cut and box them. That was fun.

I guess we were lucky where we were. We never got any irate customers, and the occasional irritated person was usually mollified with a free pizza/drink/garlic bread and that was that. We never got robbed while I was there, and my managers were always great about letting me roster certain days off if I needed them. For a highschool student, I made pretty good money. By the time I left, I was making $11 or $12 an hour. Of course, I was only working a few hours a week but that’s neither here nor there.

One thing that sticks out in my mind is a perfect example of corporate bullshit, however. Just before I left PH, they started a new advertising campaign in Adelaide, presumably a backlash against the incursion of dominos into their market - “We have more toppings than ever. Double cheese! Come try us now!” etc. etc.

Three days after that marketing was released, we got a note from corporate - “We are adjusting our recipes and measure sizes, here’s the new measures…”

Sure it was double cheese. Two whole cups. But the cups were smaller than the original ones were. That just made me laugh then. Nowadays, I would have gone to the ACCC.

7

Save this post as a Word or notepad file. When you view it 10 or 15 years later, you will have a totally different perspective. You might be surprised.

8

I’ve never had to work any food related job in my life, for which I am extremely grateful. You, my potential customers, should be equally grateful.

9

I’d just like to say that, while my “experience in the FFI” amounts to asking for no ice in my coke, I’m finding this thread mighty interesting. I want to ask engineer_comp_geek though, can you really make a hamburger every 2.25 seconds? :eek:

Oh, and for some reason this almost made me lose my tea:

10

I worked at a McDonald’s for a couple years also. The kitchen really is like an assembly line. One person slaps a bunch of burgers on the clamshell grill, which has a top element that lowers into place to cook the meat faster. Another person prepares an array of buns, often a few dozen at a time. There is a steam cabinet that keeps cooked meat in a usable state for a short period (15 minutes? I don’t remember); once the buns are ready the meat goes on. A third person wraps the burgers; if there is cheese involved they get put in an industrial microwave for a few seconds to melt the cheese. There is also a kitchen manager to direct the flow of food, who may be a fourth person or may also do one of the other jobs.

I was usually on drive-thru duty, doing several things at once at high speed. Oddly, most of my injuries at work weren’t from working at the grill but from the drive-thru or front counter. We had an ice machine in the back, and had to haul ice to holding bins up front where the soda fountains were. The ice cubes would tend to melt slightly and refreeze together, so that we usually had to hack at it with the scoop to get any ice. Ice can get fairly sharp, so I now have a bunch of little scars on my knuckles. I also worked closing shift a lot, and was often the guy to clean the shake machine. Inside the machine is a freezing chamber with sharp blades to chop up any ice crystals that form. You know where this is going.

11

They go in batches. You’re not doing one every couple of seconds, you’re doing 80 at a time. This was back when Mickey D’s had grills (I’m an old fart, so this is before they switched to microwaves). You’d cover the grill with burgers, then press the button to start the timer. When the timer beeps, you flip them all over. When the timer beeps again, you take them all off of the grill. I think there was another beep in the middle somewhere for salt and pepper. You don’t just stand there while the burgers are cooking either. You’ve got 80 buns to get ready. We had a special tool that dispensed exactly the right amount of ketchup and mustard, and another one that did the onions. You’d just hold the tool over the bun and squeeze the trigger, and snap, out would come the condiments. So, it was like snap snap snap snap snap snap all the way across the buns. You don’t dare make a mistake because you don’t have time to fix it before the burgers come off the grill. The “special sauce” and mayo came in big tubes and was dispensed in a thing that looked like an oversized caulking gun, but it was the same thing, snap snap snap. The pickles took the longest time because there wasn’t an automatic tool for those. You had to count out pickles and shove them on the buns as quickly as you could. Start to finish was 3 minutes. It didn’t matter if you were doing 5 burgers at a time or 80. It was always 3 minutes.

There was another guy back there making all the deep fried stuff (fish filets, chicken nuggets, and pies). We didn’t make anywhere near as many fish filets as burgers so he’d help get the buns ready too. Otherwise one person just couldn’t keep up with that many burgers at a time.

12

My first “real job” was Burger King and my second was McDonalds. I worked there in 1971, back when orders were taken on a pad with a pencil. I think I started at $1.35/hour.

I thought it was a great experience. We were expected to maintain decent grades or they wouldn’t let us work there. I always had money in my pocket and started buying my own clothes (including an awesome leather jacket that was the envy of all my friends).

We had a level of customer service that simply doesn’t exist in the fast food industry. For instance, on cold winter nights, we were expected to double-bag the food so it would be warm when the customer got home. We never let the pre-made burgers sit for more than two hours (they’d be tossed…or taken home by ME!). We learned how to be courteous to customers and to make sure their visit was enjoyable. I bussed tables, mopped floors, stocked paper items, gave correct change, etc., etc.

I learned how to work under pressure, how to be part of a team, and how to be on time. I walked to work nearly every day…even when it was really, really cold or rainy. I worked my ass off at those jobs. I think every kid should do a year or two at McDonalds.

13

I agree with Kalhoun. I realised about 10 minutes into my second day that Hold on! They’re PAYING ME TO WORK! This isn’t school; I can’t go and sit in the staff room if I don’t feel like dishing out burgers today! Totally different environment.

engineer_comp_geek, sturmhauke, that sounds really, REALLY automated. When were you working? Even now in our store we have a broiler (wood-like meatwaffles go in one end, delicious beef patties come out the other), a bun toaster (only does one bun at a time) and all the burger ingredients sit in a pan along a counter. The patties go in pans too, heated ones. The maximum holding time is an hour for a pan of 4" patties and 45 minutes for 5". The workers make one burger at a time and put on condiments using spatulas and squeezy bottles. Though all this may change after the renovation…

Here’s an interesting factoid for y’all: as I hinted earlier, the hamburger patties, before their trip through the broiler, do not really resemble meat at all. Imagine a thin, pale pink (from being uncooked and covered with frost) disc with waffle marks in it from whatever machine compressed it into that shape (actually, reverse waffle marks, but it looks close enough). It is cold and very hard, and if you knock two together it sounds like wood. That’s how your Whopper meat arrives at our store.

14

I survived the McExperience as well. I really haven’t made up my mind whether I would like my kids to work there or not. I worked in different stores in different town at different stages of my life, so I had good experiences and bad. I quite enjoyed it when I was in high school, working front register a few hours a week for pocket money. Later on, when I was working 40 hours a week and had a kid, not so much. I recall one day when I was seven months pregnant, I worked the back drive thru window for eight hours straight with no break of any kind. I only had to pee for the first six hours, after that, my body just became an order-taking, button-pushing, pain-feeling mechanism. I’d have to say that was the low point.

15

Yoiks! 80 down with an 80 back?

Years and years ago, I was with Wendy’s for a while. Let’s just say it was not my most-favorite job.

16

My first job (I was 16) was at a Taco John’s. I made something like $3.25 an hour. I must admit that I really learned a lot working there, the most important of which was how to count back change. A lot of people I know don’t know how to do that. I didn’t cook. I was better at the register and drive-thru. I did work with some real losers there. A couple of them were girls my age who would come to work with flasks in their back pockets. They didn’t like me because the managers did and once destroyed some of my property that I had stored in my locker. The manager did nothing, so I quit. One of those girls grew up to be a meth addict. I have no idea what happened to the other.

I worked at a Hardee’s while I was in college. This was a much different experience. The restaurant was much cleaner, and there was always a manager on during each shift. These people ran a tight ship. I really enjoyed working there, actually, and the people were great.

17

Oh God, memories. I worked in McDonalds whilst studying for my A Levels, and it was the worst job I’ve ever had. Saturday nights were the worst – I’d start at 4pm, and work through till 4am. I lived a pretty rough town, and the hour before we closed at midnight was sheer hell. The build-up was pretty bad but once the pubs kicked out, it was horrendous. Hordes of drunk, aggressive people would descend on us, screaming abuse if we didn’t shove burgers in their faces within five seconds of them entering, starting fights (one Christmas a full-scale riot broke out, several staff, myself included, were injured, and a customer had part of his ear bitten off), throwing food around, throwing up everywhere, doing God knows what in the toilets. I was always put on the tills because I was fast, so was always on the front line, so to speak. It was the resulting mess that would keep us there till 4am – on a couple of occasions, we’d still be there when the breakfast crew arrived to open up. We even had a protection racket going with the local police force – they’d get the leftover food at the end of the night, in exchange for keeping an eye on us, much good that did us.

When I went to uni, I transferred to the local McDonalds, and that was much better – the customers didn’t wage all out war in the middle of the restaurant, for a start!

All in all, I don’t know that I could say it was a positive experience, except that every job after that, no matter how bad (and I’ve had a lot of awful jobs!), was still better in comparison!

18

I worked in food & beverages for Six Flags, which means I worked at a bunch of different kinds of joints–from ice cream carts to concession stands to cafeteria-style restaurants. But I spent most of my time at a hamburger place called the Black Friar.

I did it for a year and half, starting when I was 16. The previous year I had been in the grounds department, cleaning up the streets and all the shit left behind by all the guests, so I considered the move F&B to be a promotion. In some ways, it was. I didn’t have to be out in the open sun, or deal with the humilation of fishing used Maxi pads out of the flower beds (it happened only once, but once is enough!). And it was fun goofing off with my coworkers, even if we were sometimes called to do grueling work. As a grounds-keeper, I was often all by myself so I felt left out of all the fun that the other teenage employees seemed to have.

But it was a sucky job, mostly. First off, I worked in the Confederate section of the park. That’s right. The Confederate section. Right across from the haunted house called the Monster Plantation, there was the Plantation House, which sold fried chicken and biscuits. The themes from Gone with the Wind and Driving Miss Daisy were piped in over the loud speakers. Like I said before, the name of my “base” restaurant was called The Black Friar. Guess who comprised most of the lower-level positions? Black people! WTF? As a sixteen-year-old, I didn’t think it was all that big a deal. But now, I can’t even believe the park was able to get away with it.

Sometimes I would work at the Plantation House. The manager there was an uptight prick who wouldn’t let any of us take any of the chicken home at the end of the day, even the stuff that filled the dumpsters (and trust me, there were always plenty of leftovers with that dry-ass chicken!). He was white–everyone else was black. And we worked in the Plantation House, in the damn Confederacy! We should have pulled a Nat Turner on his ass.

Working at the concession stands was worse, though. At concession stands, most times you were paired with someone else, but a lot of times you were left all by yourself. Which meant that if you had a mile-long line for popcorn, and you were all out of popcorn, you were forced to make everyone mad by taking the time to pop some more. Or if the diet coke was all out, you’d have to tell everyone who asks for one, “I’m sorry, we’re all out. But they should be able to help you at the Black Friar.” Saying it once or twice was no biggie, but it got embarrassing after a while. We’d run out of everything: mustard for the pretzels, cheese for the pretzels, pretzels, cotton candy, ice, straws, coke syrup and carbonation, change for the register…and if you were working all by yourself, you were screwed. Once, a guy totally freaked out when I informed him I’d run out of diet coke (to be fair, he had been standing in line for awhile) and started cussing me out. It was a million degrees, mosquitos were chomping on my legs, and I was physically exhausted. His blow-up was the last thing I needed, and I started bawling right there at the register. THEN my freakin’ nose started to bleed. The other patrons were very sympathetic, and fortunately my boss happened to be passing by and rescued me. It was definitely my lowest moment at Six Flags over Georgia, even worse than the time I got in trouble for giving another employee a free bag of cotton candy.

Overall, I’d say that even though I got a lot out of that experience, I wouldn’t want to go back to that job or one like it. If I were suddenly unemployed and needed a job, I would take just about anything but fast food worker.

19

I worked at a Wendy’s for about 2 years, had a blast there. Only drawback was the owner, he was a pain in the ass but wasn’t there very often so I dealt with it. The managers were cool for the most part and I made friends with most everyone I worked with. Since I was homeschooled and already had my GED I was working days, so it was a group of about 5 of us that worked together all the time.

The woman that ended up as GM for most of my time there was great to work with and we spent hours after the store closed talking. She was a lesbian and was great to be able to go to with issues I had over being gay. It was a very small town area and she was the first other gay person I knew.

Overall I’d say it was a positive experience for me.

20

The same thing happened to me. I had a nasty gum infection coupled with a cold. I thought it would be against my ethics to go to work sneezing bacteria into food that people consume. I obtained a note from my dentist and gave the McD’s a ring. Show up or fired was the reply.

Fine.

I’d already put in my two weeks’ notice, and I had another job lined up to begin the following week.

I went home after school and retired to bed with a belly-full (er, two tablets) of Tylenol 3. It felt good to walk away from that hell hole. I will never work in the food industry again.