When I worked there during our lunch rush, we would have a person dedicated to every task, fries, coffee, orders, bagging. When it came to the dinner rush, we would have half the staff or less then our lunch rush. So in a sense it is the work of 2 to 3 people. Also during overnight we would have only one person in the front, and one in the back. Once Uber eats came on the scene our workload increased 3x or more, but no extra staff was added! :-)

Edit: that’s not even mentioning when we would be short staffed, due to people not showing up / calling in, which happened every other day it felt like, and the shift wouldn’t be replaced.

Yes. Lunch rush is the baby of all McDonalds management. You'll rarely see an understaffed store then. Coincidentally this is the shift that most store managers work.

Night shift is where you'll see the cluster-fucks occur most and it's when the ice cream machine will be "down" the most in my experience

I suspect this is a franchisee trying to improve profitability versus a company wide issue. I suspect it is highly variable. Also, sometimes sales are unexpectedly higher than normal.

We have comments from people who’ve worked there, which fit the general impression that the places tend to give.

I haven’t worked in fast food, but I’ve worked in retail, and it was my experience that the “nice” manager would schedule us, like… one extra person beyond the bare minimum.

Why do you suspect this, do you have any particular insight into these kinds of businesses beyond the rest of us?

Well, yes I do. I have owned four franchised businesses - all quick serve restaurant style - from two different national chains. Individual franchisees have significant leeway in how they schedule. Some, particularly marginal locations, will cut staffing to the bone. Others that are more confident in sales and doing well are able to schedule more than the bare minimum so that customers don’t wait as long and employees are happier.

Sales unexpectedly higher than normal happens, but that typically only lasts an hour and then you go clean the now very messy store, while if sales were normal you would have enough staff on hand to keep it clean as you go. Stores keep enough clean trays and the like around to handle the worst case extra busy, and the trash cans can go an hour without being emptied. Customers will pick the least dirty table.

The customer load on a service business like McDonald's is going to vary chaotically from minute to minute. It's a difficult problem to have it match the staffing level, while staying in business.

Lunch is like one $1200 hour, dinner is $4-600/hour, but occurs over many more hours. Lunch is definitely busier and better staffed, and the dinner crew usually needs to to start thinking about closing, so a few go off at 7 to start dish or clean the back room or whatever.

> When it came to the dinner rush, we would have half the staff or less then our lunch rush. So in a sense it is the work of 2 to 3 people.

Is dinner as busy per hour as lunch?

What they mean is "the workers have 2-3x more work queued up than can be handled for satisfactory operations"

Quality of service will suffer.

I'll counter you. How do you find competent, reliable people that show up to work consistently and work hard for $9.00 an hour?

You're doing the work of your buddies who called in. Your buddies called in because they're 17 and they're dad made them get this job. They hate it! This happens every damn day.

I think many of these jobs are starting at closer to $15/hr now, but perhaps your point still stands

Yeah I think you're right. I'm out of touch now.

I started working there ~10 years ago and my starting pay was $7.30/hr. I made $10/hr as a manager

I started at $4.25/hour, but got pushed up to $5 within a year. I feel old now.

Back in the early 2000s, I worked on a product that was the only profit center in a public company. While there were people who worked on overall technical architecture, it was only myself and one front end dev dedicated to the product. Other products that ran in the red had dozens of employees because they were the things that got touted to Wall Street, but we were the very boring thing that kept the company alive.

Back in high school I worked in fast food as a closer. One front end person, one backend person, one manager for dinner rush, late rush, clean up from the day both in the kitchen and the store, some basic prep for the next day (morning shift did main prep), and they kept pushing us to get our times down so that we could walk out the door as soon as the store closed rather than taking any time after closing for our cleanup, etc. Our labor cost per hour was likely around $17. The energy to run the ovens, refrigerators, etc was fairly consistent, while our labor cost for any extra time after closing was a variable cost that ate into their profit margin.

Doesn't matter what industry -- ask a doctor about their workload -- if management can squeeze labor costs, they will.

> if management can squeeze labor costs, they will.

Everybody squeezes costs, including you and I. Don't you shop for the lowest prices? I do. Customers of fast food are pretty price sensitive.

Of course, there's a great deal of price sensitivity especially on commodity products. But - perhaps implicit rather than explicit within my remarks - there's also mismanagement or questionable management. And, price is not always aligned with profit. That Arby's generated something like $1MM in yearly profit, in 1996 dollars. The extra $5.05 they would have paid me for the hour after closing to ensure the store was actually clean, prep was properly done, pans were cleaned etc, made exactly jack squat difference to their margin.

In the case of the tech company...let's just say they are all but forgotten, while other players came along with competent management and have formed new multi-billion dollar businesses.

I've pretty much never encountered a worker who did not think they could run the business better than their employer.

And, sure, there are a lot of incompetent employers. They usually go out of business. Businesses have a high failure rate, and it's pretty darn hard to make enough at it to put up with all the aggravation and work required to make it successful. Businessmen do not go into business to make a 3% return on capital, as anyone could buy a bond that pays 3%.

Bill Gates famously never went on vacation for something like the first two decades of Microsoft.

It would be nice to have fewer assumptions about others made on HN.

Stated assumptions are fine.