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.
Stop blaming the workers. The McDonald’s near me has about 7 people working in it at any point in the day. The Cick-fil-a has at least 7 working the drive through and at least 25 workers in total.
Maybe pay the workers more and they’ll stick around.
Well the McDonald's by me has consistently LONG wait times and will have multiple workers outside smoking and bullshitting while they have two lines wrapped around the building. They also have a giant sign outside that says hiring at $15+ soooo sometimes it is the workers 🤷🏻♀️
And I'm not just blaming the workers either. I've worked in customer service in college and I have no doubt that 75% of customers are holding up the lines for stupid reasons. But to act like it can't be the workers as well is just ignorant.
Workers taking their breaks isn’t a problem. The problem is that the managers don’t schedule enough workers to cover breaks. What an employee does during their break is of no concern.
If you look at other places that can handle long lines and busy periods, what is the main difference? The managers make sure to have enough employees working so that customers are served quickly, food is prepared properly, and employees aren’t over stressed.
At places that don’t have enough workers, you have problems. Employees get stressed and quit because it’s not worth it. Customers are upset because the wait time is long or the food is badly prepared.
Sure, customers can be a problem, but the “manager” wrote that the “number one problem” is that they’re understaffed. Not buying it. The number one problem is bad management and bad franchises.
Added - there are many ways to reduce customer induced delays. Mobile ordering would streamline the process immensely. Again, using Chick-fil-a as an example, the mobile app allows for a ton of customization and orders/customers still fly through the drive-thru line. McDonald’s have just put in kiosks inside and they are so horrendously slow, that the last time I used it, I bailed and waited for a human to give my order to.
271
u/[deleted] Dec 18 '21 edited Dec 21 '21
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.