Data has ruined fast food (among many other businesses).
When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. You order on a tablet, and 10+ minutes later an overworked employee sets it on the counter and scurries away, probably after realizing it's not a drive-thru order. The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. There's at least one alarm going off constantly.
Back then they were run based on someones intuition of what makes a good customer experience. Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.
The problem with fast feedback loops is that they filter out long term signals. The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. So the kind of dashboards that modern managers demand, offer nothing but the most obvious, short term "insights", that you might as well eliminate the man in the middle and feed the data directly into a set of simple decision rules.
> The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted.
Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
May 'annual profit' continue to be the only measure that has mattered, does matter, or will ever matter to those that bask in the radiance of perpetual earning growth!
You may have no memory of it, but there was a time when many American corporations had different, broader values. The structure of the present is not necessary or inevitable.
Did they really have broader values or did they just not have the technical sophistication to optimize their operation to this level? Where "values" just a substitute for more limited information?
I think computers have made the structure of the present inevitable.
The founders [1] of mcdonalds probably did care about say cheaply providing people with enjoyable food. But I would bet soon after they sold [2] the company the actual values changed and definitely a bunch of CEOs down the road the guy put in charge is there for shareholder return.
I personally don't think it's computers. It's unfettered corperatization. Stop giving companies corporate charters to "do all business activities allowed by X state" and instead give them more narrow charters.
Richard and Maurice McDonald had a small business that almost certainly wouldn't even be around today if they didn't sell to Ray Kroc. The McDonald's we know is a corporation. Corporatization is the process of turning government agencies, public services, or non-business organization into corporations. A more broad interpretation would be applying corporate philosophy to non-corporate things.
McDonald's is already a corporation -- corporatization doesn't apply.
If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!
>If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!
You don't need to tell me anything. Nor vic2 versa. You don't fight a corporation with reasoned debate, you need more broad tools. Customer demand. Regulations. Competition.
The big mistake here is trying to desensitize the people into thinking they have no power.
Incorporation was a special privilege the government granted, not a right, so anyone who wanted to form a corporation had to convince the government to pass a law just for them allowing them to do it. Saying "I want to make as much money as possible, to hell with everyone and everything that stands in my way" wasn't going to cut it. Basically every corporation was doing some kind of public service. Maybe they didn't have any values beyond stuffing their pockets with cash, but they had to at least convincingly portray themselves as having broader goals and keep up that act well enough that the government didn't take their charter from them.
Many early corporations were ordinary profit-seeking businesses. Manufacturing, in particular, were increasingly incorporated simply to conduct private enterprise, and states began passing general incorporation statutes for manufacturers quite early in the 19th century.
The special-charter system wasn't some golden age of corporations being held accountable to society. One of the reasons states abandoned special chartering was because it became associated with favouritism, lobbying, monopoly privileges and corruption. Legislators had something valuable to hand out, so connected businesses could seek preferential charters. General incorporation laws were partly an anti-corruption reform.
Thank goodness it's no longer at the whim of the ruler of the moment. Trump can only threaten FCC licenses of broadcast companies, not corporate charters of every industry.
Arguably, there were different values in effect in the past.
There was more emphasis on values like: God-as-god. Country. Family. Courage. Integrity.
The newer values are more like: Money-as-god. Survival. Cats. Dopamine maxxing.
I may get downvoted for mentioning religion in the context of a question about values. But to bring data into it, it's reportedly a fact that "None" [0] as a dominant religious self-identity is indeed a newer/increased phenomenon. It would be hard to argue thats that's not a clear measure of shift in values.
Its called social shaming and its still a thing in other countries. Even for a CEO. This very much is a cultural issue and not an unhalting inevitability of capitalism.
Yes. The people that make up that corporation should care about their fellow man (family, friends) and should take pride in making good things (personal fulfillment).
Their workers, customers, and probably some local governments. They might even say it themselves at times.
> How does this compare to what you do for a living?
I make video games. There's always some sausage but I like to think I'm helping to bring joy and spark creativity, not simply make a billionaire richer.
Given my lack of full time work, I'm at least sure these last few years I'm not doing the latter directly.
Really think about it for a second; $8.5 billion in profit. That's an insane amount of money. How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way? Not that the government would spend the extra tax revenue wisely. Instead, what if they took $1 billion of that to increase the pay of the lowest earning employees significantly while not increase the highest earners at all, or paying 100% of health care (medical, dental, vision, and mental), or any of the other things to help improve employee relationships. Then, start focusing on the external things that could be directly improved by taking less profit to improve things for those so much is taken. That's still $7.5 billion in profit.
> How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way?
I don't think it's fair to imply that McDonald's is doing anything shady. They have over 2 million workers (although not directly, it's a franchise model). They make a lot of profit but, proportional to the total workforce, it's about average. Hardly something to be outraged about.
If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.
The underlying implication here is whether companies should make any profit at all. If the amount of profit allowed is non-zero, what is the correct number? And if there is a correct number, what do you propose to do about it?
I’m sorry, was your problem with the implementation of a theoretical lowering of profits for McDonald’s that would result in $500 per employee or your original argument I responded to implying that $500 per employee was immaterial?
I want to make sure I’m kicking my field goal at the right goal post before you move them.
I never stated I had a problem. The original poster seemed almost offended that McDonald's made a "large" profit. So my question is, what is the correct amount of profit that company should make? And, conversely, what happens if a company has losses?
As for whether employees should make more money, I'm definitely not against that. Seems to me, raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation would be a good start.
I replied to this paragraph that was a subset from your original post
> If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.
I responded by saying this, which was the entirety of my post
> The average American, which McDonald’s workers are on the low end side, can’t handle a 500 dollar emergency.
500 dollars a year to every worker would make a material difference in most of their lives.
You responded with this entire post
> Ok. Lets do it. Tell me how?
Was I misunderstanding something? I am fully guilty of responding to a misconceived strawman, or mistaking one poster for another on this site so I have no problem if that’s what occurred.
If what I laid out as the state of responses is however the state of reality than I want to know what specifically you are asking so we can stick to one argument and not weave past each other.
I'm not offended. I'm just thinking of how large $8.5 billion is and what could be done with some of that profit while still keeping a shit ton of profit. It's not like I suggested spending $8.25 billion, I just suggested a measly $1 billion, maybe $2b
Call your representative and push for such legislatio. join a labor coalition in your area, Be it a union, a special interests group, etc. If they can get a local bill to petition, help get signature gathered and donations raised.
Do this for some 3-10 years and there will start to be national movements and pressure for federal bills addressing this. Assuming we don't just kowtow to fascism as we are now in my country.
I probably do not live in your region, so you'll need to look up your relevant organizations. Which would include existing bills and proposal that can already save a lot of legwork.
My main thesis here is that this isn't something you have to (nor can) do alone. And there are others who probably already have the ball rolling. Joining a larger cause can create a better effect than creating a narrative in your head that corporations are all powerful and paid off your representatives.
This is meaningless because it's entirely hypothetical. If McDonald's is only looking at quantitative data the "bad outcome" hasn't come for them. It seems quite successful in fact (especially in these tough economic times). Maybe if leads to a massive failure we can come back and revisit this but for now, based on facts, it's working just fine for them.
People like to believe that enshitifying everything will eventually lead to failure because sucks for us. It does suck for us. But I'm not convinced that karma is coming for them.
So if I make $0.10 of profit, all my decisions are validated?
What if we knew that Maccas could have made $20 billion, but ignoring qualitative data reduced their profits to $8.563 billion. Do those decisions still look smart?
Still doesn't look like it is hurting them, but to put it in perspective that's a 4% increase in profit, while 2025 inflation was around 2.5%. Closer to a 1.5% gain in real terms.
I'm quite certain every McDonald's franchise knows how to hire high schoolers and serve up a bunch of smashburgers to instantly become the busiest franchise in the state.
The problem isn't an ability to understand long term signals. The problem is that if a franchisee tried to generate that signal corporate would filter them right out of their franchise.
aren't they independently owned? so if they wanted to offer a superior service, couldn't they do so? I thought franchise rules were a _threshold_ not a _ceiling_.
Right, but those short term insights can deliver short term value, often lots of it. That value can then be redirected into an index fund and generate real long term returns. There is no financial incentive for QSR execs to look past the next fiscal year, or even quarter when liquidating customer loyalty is so lucrative.
> When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered. Unfortunately, after merciless teasing by other chains, they relented and only assemble to order and cook to order in some cases. Huge increase in lunch latency; ordering via the app can help a little...
It keeps getting worse, too, because everyone in the store is heavily evaluated on the KPI of 'time to serve an order.' But except for drive-thru, the staff control the timer. If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
So of course they delete the orders as soon as humanly possible, relying on the printouts stuck randomly around the kitchen to try to keep track, and now anyone in the management chain who does care about actual service time is completely blinded to how well or poorly they're doing. Even a manager who is out there helping, and can plainly see how slow they are, still knows the metrics are meaningless so it's hard to track progress towards improvement.
>If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
I've noticed this at other restaurants too and have debated emailing corporate when it happens (since I'm guessing the manager of the restaurant also is on board).
It's not that I don't get _why_ they do it, but it just compounds the problem. Corporate will see the stats and go 'oh X employees is enough at Y hour' despite 10 people waiting for their order since it said complete.
I feel like I could think of a way to word a letter that pointed out the problem without pointing out specific locations or people.
I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it.
I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.”
But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.
Would something like the following work (other than sounding a little self-important), or is there another concern?
"Dear McMoo corporate or regional management, I've noticed an operations issue at a McMoo location, which I think probably affects many of your locations. I think the issue might be denying your management accurate data signals, while adversely affecting customer experience and brand, and unnecessarily increasing stress to your workers. [...]"
Sometimes it's worth writing such a letter. If I were in corporate, I'd want that serendipitous letter, about something important I didn't know. (Well, unless my promotion was riding on the worker metrics program I proposed being seen as a success, and my bosses believe more in perfect winning success with the very first shot, than they do in iterative refinement and learning.)
It's more uplifting to write letters of praise for an employee/location. I wrote one recently, to a big national chain. The only tricky part I've found is that I try to imagine corporate rules that might've been violated. For example, I might not want to say, "I told your employee my special-needs child loves your multinational chain ketchup, and the employee immediately fashioned a toy dog out of a dozen ketchup packets, and handed it to my delighted child, all while singing a song from a Disney movie." (In my imagination, that could get the employee written up 6 different ways.)
Employee games the system, people wait too long for food, people wait too long for food so they stop eating at the restaurant (this was my solution, it's fast food cutting it out is pretty much only a plus), people stop eating at restaurant so restaurant raises it's prices, more people stop going, restaurant closes.
The naive take is to think any one of these actions happen in a vacuum. Plus if this is happening at any scale at a restaurant then the manager probably told them to do it.
The impulse is to out the bad system, not the poor souls stuck in it. Thus the ultimate decision to say nothing, as there is no way to affect one and not the other.
You can just complain about seeing it at "every location you've been to" (because this is true, I've yet to find a McDonalds in my city that doesn't game the order system). It shows the problem is widespread without blaming anyone too specific.
This reads like someone who either never had one of these jobs and is left to try to use their imagination, or someone who is knowingly misrepresenting what consequences are awaiting low-level employees purely by choice.
Either way, the conversation would be better without your involvement.
What on earth are you talking about. A customer writing a letter to corporate management calling out an employee for corrupting tracking metrics would be quickly acted upon in any retail or fast food context, even if tons of other employees do it. If anyone is disconnected from reality here, it's not me.
That’s also why they have you pull out of the drive thru to one of the waiting zones even if there’s no one in line behind you. It lowers their “time in drive thru” metric and I guess they aren’t currently measuring time waiting in a parking spot after or it’s a less important metric for the franchise
Wow, that explains why my order number mysteriously disappeared from their “now serving” screen even though I went at a time when the restaurant was empty.
Have front-line employees come under pressure these days?
When I worked in fast food, in the nineties, the managers were under pressure to optimize a variety of metrics. But they didn't have a lot of carrots or sticks, and most of the rank-and-file employees put in an honest day's work but beyond that didn't give that much of a shit.
the shift managers are the ones under pressure, who are front line employees, they do the same work as the regular employees plus a bit extra and earn maybe $17 an hour instead of 15.
Indeed, that's who I was thinking of. At the time I thought of them very much as "managers" and not having the same job as me. But I happened to see one of the shift managers' paystubs once, and she was not exactly making good money.
> But except for drive-thru, the staff control the timer. If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
That was probably true at some point, but it isn’t now.
My teenager works part time at McDonalds. She tells me the drive thru at her store is equipped with cameras that automatically track the progress of each vehicle from order taking to payment to presentation, as well as into the waiting bay if you end up there.
Yes, I remember that too. They even had this one promotion back in the day where you could start some timer after you ordered and if you didn't get your meal in 60 seconds you did get something for free (was it the full order? I dont remember).
It's been so obvious for a long long time now, but people still keep believing that smart things make you faster or give you a better life or whatever, but that just doesn't add up. It's just frustrating, often takes longer and the only reason it is there is to grab your data. There is no other reason.
I'm too young to remember this particular promotion (though I certainly ate a lot of fast food in 2004). Data grabbing can't be the only reason, though. It's so much more expensive now to pay a large staff at a restaurant that isn't busy most of the time. Raw materials are more expensive, labor and benefits are more expensive, and the result is a combination of higher prices and lower quality outcomes. If the outcomes were the same the prices would be quite a bit higher.
The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.
In N Out has a much smaller footprint, so there is scarcity going for them. In a suburb of los angeles, there might be an in and out in your town or a neighboring one. There were sometimes a dozen or two McDonalds, BK, Carl's, Taco bell, Del Taco, Jack in the box, etc - multiples of each. 1 In N Out for 3-4 cities, but potentially 6-12 of each of the others.
I think that explains it. The singular Carl's Jr in a nearby city was always busy, for a similar reason. it closed during covid, for whatever reason, and the next nearest one is at least 2 hours away. Compared to the 6 McDonald's in my metro: 4 Taco Bell, 3 Whataburgers, 5 Wendy's, and 4 Open BKs out of 7 that were open prior to 2020.
The Raising Cane's is always packed to bursting, too, because there's only 1 in the area.
Burger King has a promotion going where if they screw up your Whopper, you get an extra one for free.
My wife laughs at me because every time I see that commercial, I point out that if our local BK (now out of business! surprise!) had to do that, they'd have been out of business even faster. Every single time I went there, they screwed up at least one thing. I just finally stopped going.
The App irritates the living f** out of me. I live about 10 miles outside town and it assures me that when I'm two minutes away, they will start making my order. That has never happened. I either have to click the "I'm here now" as I pull into the parking lot, or go into the dining room.
Doesn't matter; the price of McDonald's has gotten to the point where it costs about the same as the local diner whose food is exponentially tastier and they'll give me a free soda as I wait for my food to be made.
At the McD's nearest me, they will start when I'm at the nearest stop light; if I get stuck on a long red, timing is pretty good. At other locations, starting in the parking lot is still a little faster than if I had ordered in the store; drive through may be faster from the parking lot, but if the queue is full to the order point, if I order at the regular point, my order is usually ready by the time the orders in front have been taken care of; the order point is usually placed so the pipeline works smoothly at peak volume.
Sure. It's definitely in the "a little." But given how slow the kiosks and apps are to operate, due to all the animations and cross-platform frameworks, getting that order done before you get in the car to go means the order starts when you pull into the parking lot, rather than after you go inside and poke buttons on the kiosk 37 times.
Or in the slim chance that there is a line it's good. But I've rarely seen a number of kiosks insufficient to prevent lines.
> When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered.
I worked at McDonald's at that time. We would make a tray of 12 cheeseburgers and microwave them then leave them in the warmer until they're sold or got disgusting enough for customers to complain.
The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.
Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order.
I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.
> The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.
Yes, peepul, this was a thing.
You'd go in, and ask them what's hot, and you'd pick one and pay and you're off to the munchies races.
The experience now is definitely worse but even back in the early 2000s, owners tracked drive thru service order times and the managers constantly reminded us of this.
I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store.
They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
In some ways, it feels like cosmic balance that DT gets priority. Hear me out:
In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.
At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT.
(Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)
> Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.
Tell this to the idiots at supermarket checkout who wait for the total price to ring up before they reach into their purse (or whatever) to retrieve their checkbook and only then begin filling in alllllll the check's fields...
They still seem to be gaming the system these days. I constantly see them clearing the order out and printing the ticket to stick it somewhere temporary so their time metrics look low, but now I get a notification in the app my order is ready when it actually is not.
I'm using McDonalds completely differently. I come in, I sit, I order on my phone, have fun on my phone while I wait, they deliver food to my table, I'm eating and having fun on my phone, when I have enough of food and fun I get up, carry the tray to where it supposed to go and get out. I don't care about the wait times as long as the order eventually arrives. I don't care about interactions with the employees. "Bon appetit" is even a bit too much. Perfection would be if the whole interaction was limited to my "Thank you!" when the food arrives.
When I visited the Netherlands, they have a fast food chain you would love called FEBO that basically takes this to the extreme: they have a giant vending machine-like wall with small glass food warmers cabinets displaying burgers, fries, etc all freshly cooked, one per door, so you literally just put in your payment info and grab the food already right there in front of you!
These go back 70+ years. Walk in and there is an array of glass doors with delicious meals behind them, ready to eat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
I remember 1980s McDonalds, where they had steel rows of styrofoam encased Big Macs and Quarter Pounders behind seven tills of staff, with little metal separators telling the time they were made so anything older than 10 minutes was sent to the garbage. This was before drive throughs, but even with a line five deep you'd be out in 5 minutes at noon. My boss would take us for lunch every day, it was amazing.
They're not always all that fresh. But they can't leave them in there too long.
We call it an automatiek. It's not just FEBO, there's a few other chains that do it too. Like Smuller's at the train stations. I always love the satay croquettes.
I've seen a few places like this in a few countries. It's taking the automated, no human involved thing to the extreme. You never even see anybody working.
> Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.
I get what you're saying, but a downside to what you're describing is guaranteed waste of food. If food is prepared based on expectations, there's no way that all the food will be ordered before it goes cold/end of hours, and has to be dumped.
Not necessarily. Restaurants are nuts to get food waste down (I used to work in house at a large corporate chain and 80% of what the dev team did revolved around inventory tracking, and figuring out how to minimize unsold food).
If you sell 80-150 hamburgers at the lunch rush, front loading 70 so there’s a bunch at the start is fine.
You also have the employees gaming the system (at least where I am). The order goes in through the touch screen, then the screen shows your order number as being prepared, and then as ready when it's time to pick up. But since they're judged on how long the customer is waiting, they cheat and mark it as completed long before it actually is, making it disappear from the screen. So now the data shows "wow with just 2 staff we're still serving our meals in 3 minutes" when in reality you have a line of people waiting.
I totally agree, and I think this is why using a traditional, Deming-style Quality Assurance framework is so valuable.
Data is useful, but only to a point. A process-first approach (guided by clearly defined quality characteristics) is going to produce more meaningful and sustainable results: products and services that customers value more, lower costs and less waste for the company, and happier and more empowered employees.
This is a silly analogy but it's like integer truncation has been applied everywhere blindly. Staffing model says you need 2.5 employees on average to handle the load? You get 2. Everywhere with everything.
And modern technology / weak labor market has made this worse. I worked retail in high school in 90s and we basically had a weekly somewhat regular schedule. It was very rare to get sent home early.
Now you hear about people being "on call" for basically minimum wage jobs, called in for half shifts, sent home early, etc. Stringing together 40 hours at a job like this is basically a job in itself.
Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.
Because there’s been a decline in experience across so many fast food and fast casual restaurants over the last ten years, regardless of when they were founded, it seems like something industry wide (maybe data is part of that) rather than a business cycle.
On the other hand, fast food places around me have large digital touch-screen kiosks for ordering. You can always go up to the counter to order, but it seems like everyone prefers the kiosk if one is available. For good reasons too -- you get to see what the food looks like, you don't feel rushed, etc.
I'm not so sure the experience (of talking to fast food employees?), if you can call it that, matters all that much to people who want to grab a quick bite with their family.
To me the biggest change in restaurants is the norms/expectations of service personnel. e.g. I'll walk into a restaurant and the young hostess might stare at me until I go "Uh, for two please". Or the waiter at a restaurant might make it feel like he's only standing in for his friend and never was a waiter before in his life before I release him back to the waiter social circle going on in the corner. But I can't blame that on "data".
As a customer who hasn't worked at a fast-food chain, I think the reason I accepted the order-screens so readily is because it seemed like they freed from the human staff from something dehumanizing, being forced to act like a machine with a tedious rote-script doing data-entry.
I could be wrong: Was register-work a welcome reprieve from the Potato Salt Mines of something even worse or more-stressful?
By “experience”, I meant everything a customer goes through at a restaurant. Food quality, value, service, cleanliness, etc. I’m neutral on kiosks so I don’t hold that against them.
Public sentiment (at least that I hear) towards McDonald’s, Subway and Chipotle have dropped a lot.
> Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.
If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
I've seen the same changes. The most noticeable is, now that they are no longer required to be visible at the front counter in case someone comes in to order, because of kiosks, the workers usually specifically hide anywhere else, to minimize the chances of being disturbed by customers with their endless requests ("I've been waiting for 15 minutes for a large fry...")
Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). I won't speculate if it's been "worth it" since it'll devolve into an off-topic political debate, but basic economics does predict that since labor costs twice what it did 10 years ago, they'll do everything to minimize how much labor they buy. Couple that with what you said, basically, using "Moneyball" techniques to finesse everything with all these optimizations, we get the operations we see now in all retail establishments.
And even if there are states that haven't done the minimum wage changes, the markets that have are so big. The national businesses that have adapted to it have proven out their barebones-labor model there - why wouldn't they roll out most of the changes nationwide?
I think if someone launched a fast-food place or a drugstore in 1995 that operates with the type of skeleton crew they use today, it would fail overnight due to people having a choice. But today, since essentially 100% of retail operates this same way, they don't experience any pressure to do better.
> Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California).
In-N-Out allows us to discard this notion. They've maintained full staffing while simultaneously paying staff above-market rates (even in California). They only charge 30 cents more for a basic cheeseburger, and the burger is much higher quality, so even that is hard to attribute to wages.
In-n-out not only has high wages, they’re staffed to the nines. I’m talking 20-25 employees during rush time. You don’t see some, because they’re in the back peeling potatoes for dinner rush 6 hours later.
In-N-Out is, IIRC, completely privately owned by the founder's family. Every location is directly controlled. Their customers are the people buying burgers.
McDonalds, of course, is 5% corp-owned flagships and 95% franchise "opportunities". They don't have customers, they have tenant farmers who work the land leased to them.
Maybe we should start to question how good idea this whole thing of other companies operating under brands of others really is for all of us. Franchises might make money. Or they won't... It is still pretty large rentier cut... Still nothing compared to things like taxis of Uber or Lyft or food delivery... And then the whole Amazon package delivery...
So many parties either directly exploiting others or being able to do it by taking significant cuts of revenue for questionable value...
In-N-Out may have a lot of staff but my experience is that they are extraordinarily slow for "fast food", and this was before the pandemic. They would never meet the metrics of other chains. Arguably, they have always been understaffed.
I sometimes have the urge to go to an In-N-Out, but the drive through line loops through their own parking lot and into the one next door. There are people standing outside the restaurant because the indoor dining line extends past the doors. I don't really want to sit in my car or stand in line for 30 minutes.
I used to go to In-N-Out weekly when I worked a late shift; the line after midnight is much shorter.
In-N-Out is a low-margin, high-volume business, kind of like how Walmart is.
They literally can't cut staff because they only make money due to the incredibly high number of meals they serve per hour. So they have to serve as efficiently as possible, which requires that fully-staffed kitchen and counter, or there wouldn't be enough time in the mealtime hours to do that volume otherwise. It's just as impossible for them to cut any staff as an airline could remove pilots from the cockpit, in that the whole operation would cease to function.
McDonald's and the rest are never going to be In-N-Out though because it would take years of operating at steep losses in the hopes people would notice how fast and tasty they'd become. I can't think of a mature company that's ever pulled off going from "boring mainstream place" to "cult favorite" like that.
McDonalds was that and more first. They established the template that In-N-Out continues to follow, as anyone older than ~30 remembers.
McDonalds chose to aggressively enshittify, In-N-Out did not. You're probably right that McDonalds will never be that again, I don't think they even want to. If you cut minimum wage in half today, they'd keep the same staffing levels and the franchise owners would pocket the difference.
We agree mostly. I'm sure they would never "give back" the labor spend they've already 'learned to live without.' Though if you cut minimum wage, it'd suddenly become possible for a new entrant to open a restaurant that would embarrass them, by having twice the staff while holding other things similar. Today that's impossible to do without losing a ton of money, so the current businesses are protected from competition (other than from those "cult" type of place like In-N-N-Out. But how much more business can McDonald's really lose to In-N-Out, since they're basically running at capacity).
Stats tell me the bigmac price in Denmark is in average about 7$ and in the US about 6$, while their average employee hourly pay about 23$ in DK versus 13$ in the US. I don't think the minimum wage and labor costs and whatnot explains it, change my mind.
I have no special insider knowledge here, but I'm reasonably sure McDonald's relative drop in the hierarchy of global made-to-order food providers is a combination of increased competition, more health conscious and eco conscious customers, and younger generations choosing to spend higher amounts on sit-down experiences when bothering to eat out. They're largely franchisees who make the staffing decisions anyway. McDonald's corporate ensures portion sizes, ingredients, and preparation are the same everywhere, but I don't think they're dictating to franchise owners how many staff members they need to keep on hand.
Again, caveating I'm not a franchise owner and don't know the details in depth, but the bulk of what McDonald's collects is the rent on the stores themselves, which is fixed, and royalties are a percentage of gross sales, not profits, so they shouldn't have much reason to care if franchises are profitable as long as they stay in business.
The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live.
Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.
The fast food places near me closed all their dining rooms when indoor dining was banned during the pandemic. They converted their front doors into Doordash-only pickup. I was expecting that change to be permanent for fast food joints, but no, they've all reopened their indoor dining areas.
They have reopened them in most (but not all) places. But you also see more new builds designed with no seating, or extremely minimal, uncomfortable seating (e.g. a single high ‘bar’ with a few metal stools against a wall or window. Or even that minus the stools - stand and eat at that bar). The seating is now designed to be more for waiting for a to-go order than for enjoying a meal.
Compare to a 1990s model that might be much larger and have 10-12 booths around the outside of a big square room, with 10-15 more tables in the center. The game plan is clear from where I sit. The act of dining in at fast food is already not popular among anyone outside of high schoolers and homeless, and that’s the exact same set of diners that makes the most work for them. So, they’d like to just cut it out entirely.
Prices have gone up, service and quality have gone down.
Definitely results in me going far less. But I'm also the type to complain and demand a refund if my food takes more than 10 minutes at a fast food place.
Like the entire reason I'm even buying your crap food is because I'm in a hurry and it's cheap. Now it's not cheap but I'm still in a hurry. I'll just climb over the counter go back and make it myself at this point.
Until customers say nope and stop going it will just get worse. Too many people are on autopilot and won't just say no. I remember last time I'm at subway they're like "oh it's an extra 2 dollars for pickles" and I laughed said, "alright bye" and just walked out. "Hey what are we supposed to do with your sandwich" "it's your sandwich, not my problem".
My first job was working at Wendy's (c. 2006/2007). I recall the kitchen being busy enough that you had to constantly navigate around your coworkers. I worked with a bunch of Brazilians (all super nice people) and a handful of kids around my age.
IIRC lunch rush had (my memory is fuzzy..):
2 drive through positions, 2-3 people on cash registers, dining room cleaner, fry guy (sometimes 2?), 2-3 burger assemblers, one person on drinks, griller, dish washer, and the assistant manager and manager helping out everywhere. Prep team might still be working too.
I remember really enjoying the food a kid (in moderation). And everyone having a mini tantrum when someone ordered fries with no salt :D
Was also shocked to see one of my Brazilian coworkers working at the crack of dawn on my way to school, cause he typically had closing shifts.
Its important to know that McDonalds in other countries still schedules 10+ workers at a time. The wages are just too expensive in the US to justify that kind of schedule but in countries like the Philippines, where the average livable wage is $20 USD a day, it makes sense to hire 10+ workers for a single shift.
Just for comparison, the average meal price at McDonalds in the Philippines (Big Mac meal with small fries and a drink) is around $4 USD.
Same thing has happened to grocery stores. The place near me doesn't even staff a single checkout lane after 8pm-- the only option is to use self-checkout. I had a full cart at 9pm a while back and asked an employee if they could help me checkout. She literally laughed before telling me that I had to use self-checkout, or I was out of luck and would need to come back tomorrow.
Well, they almost always need to be hiring due to turnover. But they’re not trying to increase their number of people scheduled at once.
Also, in California, that’s now the minimum wage allowed by law for fast food. Fast food is a special, higher-minimum exception for some silly reason. (And I say this as someone who spent over 2 years of my youth doing that work.)
Yeah, that's capitalism baby. They'll lower the quality, working conditions and raise prices a much as they can get away with. Doesn't matter if it hurts the brand in the long term, only suckers reason further than next week.
It's fast food. The focus is on price over all else. If they maintained the staffing levels from back then, then instead of poor service you'd be complaining that a Big Mac costs $15.
Well, a quarter pounder with cheese meal here in California costs $13.79. Combo meals at most fast food range from $13-17. But most of that happened right after the $20 special fast food minimum wage law. So they’re spending more on labor than before, and yet employing like 40% fewer people for that money.
People rightly complain about the prices when it comes to chains like McDonald’s. They built their brand on fast, cheap food. But right now, the average cost of a Big Mac in the US $5.79, which is quite high given the raw ingredient cost of the sandwich components, around a 107% markup [1]. And that’s for a burger reconstituted from freeze-dried ingredients shipped in cardboard boxes. And the dining room experience is truly atrocious. It just doesn’t add up.
A burger made of fresh, never frozen ingredients from In N Out or Five Guys only carries a 50-80% markup [1], and those stores are properly staffed and consequently offer a much more pleasant dining room experience.
I suppose my point is that it is possible to deliver a good customer experience and still maintain a healthy operating margin. What McDonald’s is doing to make the whole experience worse is not a necessity to keep the business alive, it is a choice to maximize profits at the expense of the brand’s long-term reputation.
If Five Guys' ingredients cost more in absolute terms, they can afford a smaller markup percentage-wise so that's not necessarily a good comparison. I think despite their larger mark up McDonald's is still significantly cheaper.
Regardless, it would be even more expensive without reductions in staffing. It's not like they could be hiring twice as many employees at half the cost each and are just choosing not to. Fast food is a highly competitive market.
Yeah, because all those employees are now doing much better paying jobs elsewhere instead of a low paying job like cleaning a dining room. The dining room at a McDonald's functions just as well at the 80% dirtiness as it did at 10% dirtiness. It's like how you can go to India and there'll be like 400 different employees at a hotel. One will usher you into the door. The other will hold the door. The third will say "Welcome, sir!" and lead you to the front desk while a fourth tells a fifth to grab a suitcase.
That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.
It’s a US problem and I say it as an USAnian. Go to Paris, Berlin, London, McD feels like a fine establishment. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but that’s what I saw.
Observing my local McDonalds, and comparing to my childhood experiences; now McDonalds is doing a lot more volume. The drive-through line goes faster and is longer, and there are pickup orders. So in total, they are making more money than ever.
My memory is that McD drive through was worse before, and less people used it. Go to a Burger King drive-through if you wanna go back in time.
Inside, similar number of customers, and inexplicably fewer employees serving them. I blame the management decisions more than the data it's based on. Probably the numbers are telling them to punish the indoors customers, and they aren't using their brains about how that's going to be a long-term problem.
Speaking of data, you can ask the app to "anonymize" you as Valued Customer. Your name doesn't really matter to McDonalds.
Different stores in different chains have a very different attitude. There is a Taco Bell in Ithaca which has a staff that has some esprit de corps and then another where the dining room is disgusting.
Restaurants, especially the largest chains and franchises like McDonalds, have been data-driven for many, many years. They don't guess. They know year-over-year sales and recent regional trends. They haven't been using intuition in a very, very long time. They might get it slightly wrong less often than in the past, but they haven't been "very wrong" in a long time. We knew how many burgers we would sell in a day decades ago when I worked fast food, within about 5% most days.
The data-driven decisions at this point are corporate offices working out how to make an extra $0.25 off every transaction. The enshittification is coming from the franchisees who are working out how to maximize their profits after whatever corporate royalties are paid.
These days, they have a stranglehold on the best real estate and they know it. If you want OK food at an OK price in an OK restaurant, they know you'll go to their place. If you personally won't go, five other people nearby will and they don't need you. They don't need an exceptional experience. Customers will be there.
In Australia McDonalds, Hungry Jacks (Burger King), and KFC aren’t fast. And McDonalds barely passes as food.
I can have a succulent Chinese meal at my table in less time than either of those big-three, and my local roast chicken joint about 30 seconds after I sit down.
what you are describing is basically company ownership or high level managers of the store are just keeping kicking out legs of the table and waiting to see if it will still stand up
because you and others keep going back to the store no matter how bad it gets, they keep testing what other cuts they can do
eventually it will be just one employee sitting in the corner watching several humanoid bots doing all the work and just required to press the reset button when they glitch
maybe even a single human remote employee doing that for 100+ stores
vandalism will get insane and then corporations will just get congress to pass felony laws to slow that
I recently had a similar experience with Subway in a touristy region of South Dakota. Small place run by two very young girls. One managing the drive-thru, and asking customers what type of bread, what type of cheese, toasted or not and at the same time managing beeping machines and being watched on camera at ALL times. She was doing her best. The other however was terrible as half the things were run out (olives, sauces) and she had no idea how or where to refill. I could see the first shooting daggers at her.
now as a human there, i could clearly see what was happening. I could come up with a bunch of simple things that could fix it. But as I drove back with my sandwiches, I kept wondering how this shows up on a spreadsheet or some internal system that Subway might have for decision making.
That really really made me question things that I had always suspected but swept under the rug. I concluded to never go back to subway (which I've always liked FWIW) or any other fast food joint. What stops them from adding absolute garbage into the food (which will never show up in any report) or the factories that I'm not privy to if it adds to the bottom line. Fast food is no better than packaged frozen food. Fast food companies are no better than the current crop of mega corps draining every nickel and dime to the bottom line for the next quarter.
I have more respect now for few employees at some joints (even airlines) that refused to give me some food items when I was with my kid on the basis that they haven't ever seen that stuff go bad for months and their conscience wont let me feed that to my kids and handed me something else instead. This human character trait I have new found appreciation for.
And subway isn't the exception I see, its the rule. I now see the same at McDonalds, Chipotle, Dominos and other fast food joints. Goddam Moneyball.
I've been collecting ideas on how and what to carry or buy when we travel instead of relying and feeding my family on this. Its hard but I think worth it.
When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. You order on a tablet, and 10+ minutes later an overworked employee sets it on the counter and scurries away, probably after realizing it's not a drive-thru order. The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. There's at least one alarm going off constantly.
Back then they were run based on someones intuition of what makes a good customer experience. Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.