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'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.
Edit: Found it. You did get a coke for free. Damn, 2004. https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
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.
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.
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.
It can? I used it once a few years ago and they wouldn't start making the food until I was in the parking lot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
Either way, the conversation would be better without your involvement.
But, like you said, I realized what they were doing, and how they quite possible NEED to do it just to keep dumb management happy.
So of course I didn't say anything.
> The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system
While waiting their <$20 fast, cheap food.
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.
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.
I’ve used the app once - it was slower than ordering at the kiosk, I was bombarded by ads and promos, and they didn’t pre cook my food.
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.
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.
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.
It's worse, we simply abstract away everything else, including innumerable things that are quantifiable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
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.
For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.
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!
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_and_Maurice_McDonald
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!
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.
When this happens to me, I usually solve it by not posting, HTH
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.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18652908-the-rise-of-...
By corporations?!? Because that is what we talking about.
Frankly, if we go back far enough we get all the way to slavery and genocide so rose-tinting your glasses about past values doesn't sway me.
Also, the materialism was top ideology in America. It gave us prosperity gospel long time ago.
There is imagined history and real history. They are not the same.
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.
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?
500 dollars a year to every worker would make a material difference in most of their lives.
I want to make sure I’m kicking my field goal at the right goal post before you move them.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
We are allowed to pierce the corporate veil here.
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.
The correct question is: how much more or less would they make if they were applying some other philosophy?
At least in the context of this conversation.
And, an increase in profit of $340 million across 13,882 stores (in the US) is less impressive.
And presumably that $8.563 billion is McDonalds corporate and the franchisees didn’t see all of that gain.
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.
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?
I suppose you meant quantitative and it's just a typo
Sure, I said.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with..."
"Umm, can I just tell you why I cancelled my service, as if you and I were both human beings?"
"I'm sorry, I have to follow this script exactly."
So I apologized to the guy and hung up.
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.
> it takes a lot of work for a number to mean anything and we largely aren’t doing it
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 fill replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
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.
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 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)
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...
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.
If you sell 80-150 hamburgers at the lunch rush, front loading 70 so there’s a bunch at the start is fine.
But current system is close to perfection for me.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
So many parties either directly exploiting others or being able to do it by taking significant cuts of revenue for questionable value...
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 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.
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.
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.
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
$20 burgers will also slow that
I miss pizza
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.
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.
Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.
That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.
Name checks out.
Minnesotan, perhaps?
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.
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".
I could be wrong: Was register-work a welcome reprieve from the Potato Salt Mines of something even worse or more-stressful?
You’d get better service if a glowing neon sign appeared above your head that said:
“A customer is standing in front of you. Tap here to begin.”
Public sentiment (at least that I hear) towards McDonald’s, Subway and Chipotle have dropped a lot.
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.
Fast food, in my lifetime, seems to have moved more to the lower end of the demographic spectrum in terms of customer base.
Some combination of wealth driven taste changes and health concerns within the top half on the customer side.
honestly, this is the biggest problem with american capitalism these days.
consumers that just act like zombies and never modify their behavior, no matter how much they get abused.
The one I went to last week had a banner advertising a $20/hr starting wage. Clearly they'd like to hire more.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Data says it won't stop you from coming back. It may even make you a more profitable to-go orderer that doesn't need onsite resources.
I worry that this kind of thing will make "delighting your customers" too expensive compared to just minimum viable product.
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".
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.
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.
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.