by Jason Kelley

McDonald’s is the dominant player in the fast food industry; with thousands of locations all over the world, its business just keeps growing.  While part of this success is because the corporation is dedicated to speed and quality service, the unique family-like nature of each of its stores plays a large role.

To be sure, one must do his or her job quickly and efficiently.  No amount of training will make this happen, it’s an individual effort.  Newer people are given as much slack as possible, but the nature of fast food means people must learn quickly.  It’s sink or swim.  As in everything else, failure to learn has its consequences.  An unspoken rule is that slower people get their hours cut, usually until they quit.  It’s not as bad as it sounds, though; in my experience every effort is made to prevent that from happening.

So what is it really like to work there? Is it as easy or as bad as it seems? To understand those questions a bit of a crash course is needed.

Alphabet Soup

Nearly every metric used to measure performance in a store has an abbreviation attached to it.  The time it takes you to get your food is broken down into two stats: T.T.Ls and C.T.P.  I still cant tell you what the first stands for, all I know is that it is how quickly the drive through is moving on average.  The second is how long a customer spends between the first and second window.  Even though each store has its own goals for these numbers, 110 and 35 seconds, respectively, are the most common.  The grill team’s performance is measured as well, with another inscrutable combination of letters called K.V.S.  Again, the goal is around 35 seconds per order on average.  The only stat that isn’t abbreviated is labor.  Labor in simple terms is the amount of money it takes to pay the people working on the floor each hour.  Represented by a percentage, most stores try to keep it below 20.  Labor is the thing that determines how a store runs.  Keeping it too low, say around 12-15 percent, means that your people are working too hard, thus delivering poor service.  Too high, and you are wasting money–never a good thing in McDonald’s land.  Managing your labor percentage is probably the most difficult part of running a shift.  All of these things can be found on a report called a Daily Activity.  If McDonald’s has an artifact, this is it.

An Ivory Tower

Working for McDonald’s, you learn that there is a rule or ritual for nearly everything.  From the way a floor is swept to taking off a pair of gloves, procedure is king.  Having said that, corporate McDonald’s idea of how people should act and how they actually act is vastly different. For example, when mopping a floor, a distance of five feet from each customer must be kept.  Or, when assembling a double cheeseburger, the pickles are not allowed to touch.  By far my favorite: the amount of lettuce on a McChicken has to weigh an ounce.  These things just do not happen in real life, and all but the most zealous of managers just do not care.

These are just small things, though, what about the larger, more important rules?  Without fault when it comes to things that do with safety, the rules are absolute.  Sweep a floor wrong and no one really cares; risk making a customer sick and hell will reign down on you.  While that’s a dramatic way way of saying it, the Corporate idea of safety and the rules it makes are always clear, and if you want to keep your job you follow and enforce them.

Between the silly and mandatory is where a store’s culture comes from.  It’s my impression that Corporate would rather employ robots with empty smiles and perfect speed.  Sometimes I can see the merit in that.  Friendly, easygoing people love to talk to customers, but they usually don’t focus on actually working much.  The opposite is true of people focused on working: they tend to view customer services as an impediment to getting things done.  Finding, hiring and training the right mix of people is the key to running a good store.

Shadow of the Leader

Store managers do more than run a store, they mentor and guide employees.  To help them, most stores have six to eight swing managers to help run shifts, order product and train new people.  In turn, swings have twelve to sixteen crew-trainers to assist in training and enforcing procedure.  While these people provide training each step of the way, they also provide someone to emulate and look up to.

The leadership style of these people trickles down to each employee.  If a manager is always harsh and cold, his or her employees will become quiet and fearful.  The same is true with open and friendly management.  The trick is to avoid each extreme.  People don’t listen to a boss they think of as a friend and will only work so hard for someone they hate.

Grades for Everyone

Once a year, each store goes through a full operations review, or F.O.R.  The review, or grade, is administered by a corporate McDonald’s employee called a field consultant.  These people are responsible for a large number of stores and are, in essence, the only people a store’s owner has to listen to.  Even though the date of the review is known months in advance, the day is still hugely stressful.  This is because failing the review can mean losing your job, and each mistake is meticulously recorded.  Every aspect of the store is measured and broken down into three categories: cleanliness, service and food safety.  Each employee’s knowledge and ability to follow procedure is observed and recorded.  These scores along with hourly operational scores form most of the food safety and service scores.  The remainder is composed of how clean the store is and how well each piece of equipment functions.  While all three categories are important, cleanliness and food safety are easy to pass with proper preparation and training.  Each store starts the day with a perfect 100% score and points are deducted for each mistake made.  A passing score is 85%.

Being a McPerson

This year will be my sixth review day.  While they all have been difficult, two stick out in my mind.  During my second year working at the Brimfield store, our review day fell in the middle of summer.  As I was promoted to swing manager roughly six days prior, I had no real idea of what I was doing.  Sadly, neither did anyone else.  In the month leading up to the review our store manager was…relaxed.  I didn’t know this at the time, but the store just wasn’t ready.  Remember that 85 needed to pass?  We got an 85.3.

My job, as usual, was to take orders up front.  Front booth order takers usually stand four feet away from the window, between the person handing out orders and the person bagging them.  In front of me, there is a cart with various condiments and plastic utensils on it.  This cart is also where the person bagging the order places the food so the person in the window can hand them out.  Beyond taking orders the other half of my job is to know what is in each bag so they go out in the right order.

This would have been simple, bu the two other people I was working with had never worked in the middle of the day before.  Instead of spending my time doing my job, I had to try and covertly teach them how to do theirs.  They are good workers and tried hard, but the three of us had never been a team before and it showed.  Teamwork while moving quickly requires efficient communication–skills we didn’t have yet.  The same was true of the other people on the floor: individually good at their jobs, but lacking in teamwork.  Because of this, many small stupid mistakes were made and everything felt tense.

Beyond teamwork, experience was also a factor.  Learning how heavy a full large Coke should feel takes time, but when you need to move a hundred cars an hour it makes a difference.  The same can be said of how old coffee or oil smells.  So while it’s a simple job in theory, if you want to do it well, learn to pay attention to everything you can.

The second review day stands out as completely the opposite.  While working at the Streetsboro store, we spent three weeks preparing.  The day before was especially key in my eyes.  Every single person worked the position they would for the review, allowing us to become relaxed and develop a flow.  Other than small mistakes, the day went very smoothly with a score of 93%.

Post-Shift

When people talk about how much they hate or love a store, whether they work their or not they are in truth talking about the people.  People give what is otherwise a cold efficient machine character and culture.  Personally, I find this to be especially true.  The chemistry between me and the people I work with is paramount to my success.  I truly wish this was a priority in each store as well as something we could communicate to our customers.

I’ve had many jobs during my working life, but McDonald’s is honestly the only one that has stuck.  While I understand that I will not make my career out of working there, I understand why people do.  Over the past six years, I’ve formed countless relationships, and many friendships–even found a wife–all because of the people I’ve met while working.  It is these ties that allow McDonald’s to transcend feeling like a job to fell like a big family.

Works Cited

Reno, Krystal. Personal Interview. 17 Apr. 2012.