McDonald’s High-Tech Makeover Is Stressing Workers Out
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is a problem because unemployment is currently very low, and the lack of staff leads to longer serving times which leads to fewer customers as they shift to competing chains which are properly staffed to handle crushes.
The article states that McD's turnover has increased
clearly did not read the linked article
The study disagrees with you in even stronger terms:
"we find that increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers, and increases the likelihood that low-skilled workers in automatable jobs become nonemployed or employed in worse jobs."
... which hardly seems voluntary.
”McDonald’s and its franchisees haven’t seen an increase in crew turnover over the last year, nor is there a correlation between the new initiatives and turnover, spokeswoman Terri Hickey said in an emailed statement.”
I’m not sure what this article is meant to convey other than a vague swipe at progress.
Can someone describe what “pokier” means in this sentence?
Look up the work poky - this is a derivative of that.
"(of a room or building) uncomfortably small and cramped"
As a noun, it generally refers to a detention room, or jail. (For example, on "NYPD Blue", the "poky room" was where they detained suspects for interviews, and within it was a lockable cage.)
McD's usually gets my orders wrong, not that they're even particularly hard. It's been really hit and miss... I wonder what the satisfaction/turnover at places with smaller menus is... In-n-out, 5-guys, etc.
I can also see the reason for slowdown. Before, they had a cashier queue to control the flow of orders. Now with mobile and kiosk orders, they've pretty much tripled their traffic of orders while keeping fulfillment the same.
I don't understand the problem, McDonalds is not in the business of helping its employees, it is not in the business of creating quality, healthy food. Its business is squeezing as much work and money as it possibly can out of its workers and customers. This is a huge success by that metric, and I am sure it is the only metric the upper management really cares about.
McDonald’s said it employed 235,000 people, including corporate and restaurant workers
I worked fast food for 2 years, one full time. I did not mind it one bit, in fact, as far as jobs go, I liked it for the most part - the only really shitty part of it was the terrible pay and smelling like grease after your shift. My sister worked with me and she enjoyed it to. It's also not particularly physically demanding.
Retail, on the other hand, was very soul sucking to me. My hypothesis is I'm sensitive to the bright lights they use in retail stores.
Having also worked in fast food, I disagree. Manual labor was a whole lot worse on my body and paid basically the same.
What seems different these days is that most of the workers aren't high school kids. That was the case in the 80's. Something about the job market where people are trying to use entry level fast food jobs to support an adult life.
That's the whole point of this article though. The workers in a busy McDonalds restaurant today are being expected to make 10x the output you did as a teenager in the 80's for wages that are less than what you made, inflation adjusted. A line cook in 1985 made about $4.50/hr, which is $10.50 in 2018 dollars [0]. In 2018, federal minimum wage is $7.25, and the are plenty of McDonalds employees making that much across the country.
A line cook in 1985 made about $4.50/hr
I was the same as you, in the eighties I worked at McDonald's and it was pretty fun. 90% of the staff were under 25 years old and most were in school. Either college or still in high school. You could have interesting conversations while you worked and the menu was vastly simpler so it was pretty easy to get the hang of doing everything.
Yeah the pay wasn't great but there wasn't much else a young person could do that paid more, and very few people were trying to support a family or even fully support themselves. There was healthcare for full-timers but it really wasn't as big a deal then. People did not freak and think it was the end of the world not having insurance, and in any case many of them were probably still covered by their parents.
Ahhhh pre-recession optimism.
Lester: "Well, I'm sure there have been amazing technological advances in the industry, but surely you must have some sort of training program. It seems unfair to presume I won't be able to learn."
I worked out in the woods of the northwest as a logger and would like to disagree. There are certainly jobs that are worse in all the metrics you've listed. Personally, I couldn't wait to get a fast food job after I quit.
McDonalds crew members make $8.50 an hour. That's $17,680 at 40 hours a week.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/McDonald-s-Salaries-E432.ht...
It's food for thought. We should not blind ourselves to the way institutions allocate resources in our society.
Yes. Revenue, not profits. Why? See: Amazon
EDIT: dragonwriter's verbiage is preferred. Better we address it now before pitchforks get handed out.
Or, more simply, stop using high taxation on wage labor income to subsidize preferential taxation of capital income.
This is exactly what advertising does, and it works great.
There are other ways, but in any case this assertion is a fantasy.
If you look far enough into the future all manual labor will be performed by machines. Don't be afraid of it, be aware of it. Adapt or die.
This means in my local McDo they've cut the checkouts from 5 down to 1, got rid of probably 2 staff on checkout and pushed that work to customers. They've restructured to make processing more optimised - previously the cashier gathered all items for the order, including packing fries. Now one person does all drinks for all customers and puts them on a stand, sandwiches seem to work the same as before, though they've more specialised ovens from what I can tell. The person picking the order does the fries I think, depending on customer volume.
I know in drive-thru that the person taking orders on the intercom has other duties, that must be a burn-out role, picking orders and doing a customer facing role at the same time (ie in parallel).
Wait time to get food is longer IME (I go about once a month), definitely longer than Burger King now when McDo used to be shorter. If you want to pay cash you have to wait for the checkout too, even when there are no customers ahead of you.
None of this is to do with automated machines (AFAICT) but it makes jobs more easy to shift to machines, eg prepping drinks and placing them on the stand ready to pack in to individual orders.
Rising Minimum Wages Encourage Automation [0]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2017/08/27/ne...