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.
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.