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Comment by logshipper | Hacker News Reader

> The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such.

I worked nights at a McDonalds about 4 years back (first year of university) in Canada. You are spot-on about them treating humans as the weakest link.

For instance, I noticed that every carton in the freezer contains an illustration of the item inside (in addition to names in English and French). My understanding is that they simply do not trust their workforce to be able to read the contents of the carton and will gladly slap an image on top to remove any unpredictability from the process.

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They’re just not assuming that all their workers are fluent in English nor French, which 1.8% of Canadian residents are not (according to the 2016 census).

And there's a not always inaccurate stereotype about the back-of-house at 'real' restaurants being entirely immigrants who only speak enough English to communicate with the servers.

When I was a dishwasher at The Old Spaghetti Factory I was the only one who spoke English and had no convictions.

I used to do package design for frozen and refrigerated foods, stuff they sell at Costco. We were always doing little illustrations showing how to, like, open a bag of croutons and pour it onto a salad. As if we were drawing the manual for how to put on an oxygen mask in case of depressurization. I always get a kick out of looking for those things on food packaging these days.

Labeling something in every way imaginable is basically a free way to reduce the long tail of errors.

I think there's a wide gulf between that and "treat literally everyone like they have the intellect of a toddler" kind of policy making which you see advocated for a lot on Reddit (less so here, but sometimes). McDonalds definitely does that, but my impression is that it's more of an acknowledgement of things getting missed in that kind of work environment than people being stupid. When two school buses pull up and you've got every machine beeping and buzzing things need to be stupid proof.

Even as a customer of groceries, I would appreciate that.Makes it easier to skim.

Exactly, you find the stuff faster, which is probably the point. I shd label my RF component drawers with pictures, the idea is good.

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