The Fast Food Worker
For about three years, I worked as a fast food worker at Burger King. For about half that time, I worked as a manager there. Fast food jobs are notorious for being the most unskilled jobs in America. Don’t have a degree? Looks like you’re going to be flipping burgers your entire life. Get used to the phrase, “would you like fries with that?” Sure, most fast food restaurants do not require their workers to have a degree in order to be hired. However, the notion that fast food work or management requires no thought and all unskilled, physical labor is not true.
A crew member at Burger King is thrown into the hot, grease filled kitchen and told to make X amount of sandwiches in under two minutes. The amount of X all depends on how much a customer orders and could range from 2 sandwiches to 10 sandwiches and 5 fries. First, the worker begins toasting all of the buns they need. Then, the worker takes the sheets of wax paper and strategically marks any special requests about the sandwiches (no ketchup, extra pickle, etc.). After marking all of these requests on the wax paper, the worker flips all of the sheets over for the sandwiches to be assembled on them. Remembering the order of the sandwiches on the already marked wax paper on their work table (which is referred to as a “board”), the worker takes the buns (sometimes all of the same buns if the customer ordered all regular burgers but most often, different types of bread) and places them on the wax paper that they correspond to. The worker takes tongs and lays out the appropriate meat on each bun. Now, the more difficult part: the toppings. Not only is this worker remembering what toppings go on what type of sandwich but they have organized the sandwiches in their minds to know which customer wanted ketchup and which did not. If the worker puts ketchup on the wrong sandwich, it is now covered in ketchup and he/she has to waste the bun and burger, toast a new bun and grab a new wax paper and start over with that one sandwich. This might not seem like a big deal, but when the worker is in the middle of a lunch rush, they have just wasted a sandwich while more orders are coming in and it set them back about fifteen seconds.
Sometimes when it is really busy, the worker will prioritize sandwiches. If two orders come in through the drive thru right after one front counter order, the worker will quickly make the drive through order first in order to “make speed of service” a.k.a. get the sandwich to the window in less than two minutes. However, oftentimes, another drive thru and front counter order will come in directly after. If one of these orders is more than just a few sandwiches, the worker will start falling behind. If the worker runs out of chicken tenders or simply drops something on the floor and has to cook more, it’s considered a catastrophe to the manager AND the customer that is waiting. Not only has the worker just wasted food, but they have wasted more time.
Not only do the workers deal with pressure from the managers, but the customers treat them horribly. Working up front is not as stressful as working in the back concerning how much you have to do in such little time. However, it is more stressful dealing with customers than making sandwiches. “I’ve been waiting three F****** minutes for my Whopper! You call THIS fast food?!”. Oftentimes, the workers are called “disgusting” when the customer gets angry about something. Because of the fast pace the workers are forced to keep up with, sometimes the sandwiches aren’t as neat as the customers would like them to be. “My sandwich is falling apart! Those losers back there don’t give a S*** about anything!” Once when I was manager, a customer received a wrong order: she did not want tomatoes on her Whopper and accidently, in the midst of making about 30 burgers, one of my workers accidently put tomatoes on it. She exclaimed, “Are you really that stupid that you don’t understand how to not put tomatoes on a burger?! Why don’t you go to school or something?!”. Comments like this obviously hurt me but I couldn’t even begin to explain the pressure that all of my workers (and the pressure that I) was under in that restaurant. I would just apologize, waste her Whopper, and (while the workers in the back were STILL getting slammed with orders) ask them to make her a new sandwich.
As a manager, we would get yelled at by our district managers for wasting food. Food gets cooked at the beginning of lunch and would be held in pans for a certain amount of time. If the food didn’t sell in that allotted time, we are supposed to throw it away- it is considered no longer sellable. Our district managers were so concerned about wasting food that they would literally advise us to just sell the food anyways. There were so many instances where I’d have the workers throw away the food and then the NEXT order would be that same food they just threw away. They would have to cook new food- so although the food would be fresh, the customer would complain because it took so long to make, I would get in trouble for not making speed of service, and I would get in trouble for “wasting” food. If the customer actually complained to the district manager (a common occurrence) it would be a triple whammy. If however, I didn’t cook the customer new food, they would complain that the food was old and cold. I literally could not win.
So how does this relate to Mike Rose? Not only does a fast food worker exhaust him/herself in the kitchen or running around taking orders and making drinks, they constantly have to use their mind. What goes on what sandwich? Should I waste this food or should I sell it? How much time do I have left to make this order? How should I prioritize these sandwiches? Their minds are going at 100 miles an hour and all under the pressure of their managers and the bad attitudes of the customers. In the two minutes they are allotted to finish each order, they probably make about 30 difference decisions. And in the end, they are just considered lazy, unskilled, stupid workers. I am actually disappointed that Mike Rose did not address the fast food worker in his book because it is the extreme of “they don’t use their minds” when they actually really do.
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