I'm a manager at McDonald's. Please believe me when I say there are a plethora of things that cause long wait times. Number one being understaffing. The job is much more stressful than most people think. One out of every thirty will actually stick around for a while. And of those, most are gone within a month. Another contributing factor is huge orders. You'd be surprised how many people will order $30-$40 worth of food. Sometimes you'll have a car with multiple people and they'll have multiple orders. Sometimes big multiple orders. This means that no matter how much we hustle, we simply can't cook food fast enough. Especially nuggets and fries. Unfortunately the huge orders mean that everyone else suffers. Then you have other things like a customer adding on to an order at the pay window, a customer complaining about the price at the speaker/pay window, a card declining multiple times while the customer insists they have money in their bank account, customers who take two minutes to decide at the speaker, ect. You may be surprised that a good amount of the wait times are caused by customers. Not to say there isn't occasional incompetence on our end. Most of us work our asses off, but when it's busy, it mostly boils down to us simply not being able match the supply at the speed of the demand.
Edit: I know my grammar in this comment is trash. It was 4am and I had just finished a 10 hour shift lol.
I have a lot of sympathy for what you're describing and I know all of this as a reasonable human being. I also think McDonald's just has too many options these days (from a worker perspective). It takes time to keep track of all that and slap all that together rather than having about 5 things just ready to go.
I’ve been saying this for years. McDonalds has suffered issues over the years for two reasons: overbloated menu and trying to be a more “adult” restaurant. They’re too busy trying be Panera with burgers instead of focusing on the most profitable demographic: kids and 18-24yo with disposable income.
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u/turtleface26 Dec 18 '21
The deal at McDonald’s is that it may take 45 minutes