Comment by hamdingers
2 hours ago
Data has ruined fast food (among many other businesses).
When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. You order on a tablet, and 10+ minutes later an overworked employee sets it on the counter and scurries away, probably after realizing it's not a drive-thru order. The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. There's at least one alarm going off constantly.
Back then they were run based on someones intuition of what makes a good customer experience. Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.
It also feels like a K shaped economy thing. Everything not premium has to be optimized/automated/enshittified to hell.
Fast food, in my lifetime, seems to have moved more to the lower end of the demographic spectrum in terms of customer base.
Some combination of wealth driven taste changes and health concerns within the top half on the customer side.
The problem with fast feedback loops is that they filter out long term signals. The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. So the kind of dashboards that modern managers demand, offer nothing but the most obvious, short term "insights", that you might as well eliminate the man in the middle and feed the data directly into a set of simple decision rules.
> The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted.
Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
Everyone quotes Goodhart's law, but I think the McNamara fallacy is even more important nowadays. It should be read aloud to every CEO every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
3 replies →
Right, but those short term insights can deliver short term value, often lots of it. That value can then be redirected into an index fund and generate real long term returns. There is no financial incentive for QSR execs to look past the next fiscal year, or even quarter when liquidating customer loyalty is so lucrative.
> When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered. Unfortunately, after merciless teasing by other chains, they relented and only assemble to order and cook to order in some cases. Huge increase in lunch latency; ordering via the app can help a little...
It keeps getting worse, too, because everyone in the store is heavily evaluated on the KPI of 'time to serve an order.' But except for drive-thru, the staff control the timer. If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
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.
>If you delete the order off the screen, the computer that does all the metrics thinks you've served it.
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.
Yes, I remember that too. They even had this one promotion back in the day where you could start some timer after you ordered and if you didn't get your meal in 60 seconds you did get something for free (was it the full order? I dont remember).
It's been so obvious for a long long time now, but people still keep believing that smart things make you faster or give you a better life or whatever, but that just doesn't add up. It's just frustrating, often takes longer and the only reason it is there is to grab your data. There is no other reason.
Edit: Found it. You did get a coke for free. Damn, 2004. https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
I'm too young to remember this particular promotion (though I certainly ate a lot of fast food in 2004). Data grabbing can't be the only reason, though. It's so much more expensive now to pay a large staff at a restaurant that isn't busy most of the time. Raw materials are more expensive, labor and benefits are more expensive, and the result is a combination of higher prices and lower quality outcomes. If the outcomes were the same the prices would be quite a bit higher.
The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.
That brought back some memories. I would always order a Filet-o-Fish which they made fresh due to the low demand.
TIL there's burgerschachteln.de, because of course there is a person collecting burger packaging on the Internet.
1 reply →
The machines were right; truly civilization peaked in 1999.
> ordering via the app can help a little...
I’ve used the app once - it was slower than ordering at the kiosk, I was bombarded by ads and promos, and they didn’t pre cook my food.
> ordering via the app can help a little...
It can? I used it once a few years ago and they wouldn't start making the food until I was in the parking lot.
At the McD's nearest me, they will start when I'm at the nearest stop light; if I get stuck on a long red, timing is pretty good. At other locations, starting in the parking lot is still a little faster than if I had ordered in the store; drive through may be faster from the parking lot, but if the queue is full to the order point, if I order at the regular point, my order is usually ready by the time the orders in front have been taken care of; the order point is usually placed so the pipeline works smoothly at peak volume.
Sure. It's definitely in the "a little." But given how slow the kiosks and apps are to operate, due to all the animations and cross-platform frameworks, getting that order done before you get in the car to go means the order starts when you pull into the parking lot, rather than after you go inside and poke buttons on the kiosk 37 times.
Or in the slim chance that there is a line it's good. But I've rarely seen a number of kiosks insufficient to prevent lines.
They only changed this recently.
Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.
Because there’s been a decline in experience across so many fast food and fast casual restaurants over the last ten years, regardless of when they were founded, it seems like something industry wide (maybe data is part of that) rather than a business cycle.
I totally agree, and I think this is why using a traditional, Deming-style Quality Assurance framework is so valuable.
Data is useful, but only to a point. A process-first approach (guided by clearly defined quality characteristics) is going to produce more meaningful and sustainable results: products and services that customers value more, lower costs and less waste for the company, and happier and more empowered employees.
In Australia McDonalds, Hungry Jacks (Burger King), and KFC aren’t fast. And McDonalds barely passes as food.
I can have a succulent Chinese meal at my table in less time than either of those big-three, and my local roast chicken joint about 30 seconds after I sit down.
shout out to succulent Chinese meals
The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.
Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order.
I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.
The experience now is definitely worse but even back in the early 2000s, owners tracked drive thru service order times and the managers constantly reminded us of this.
I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store.
They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
They still seem to be gaming the system these days. I constantly see them clearing the order out and printing the ticket to stick it somewhere temporary so their time metrics look low, but now I get a notification in the app my order is ready when it actually is not.
In some ways, it feels like cosmic balance that DT gets priority. Hear me out:
In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.
At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT.
(Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)
> Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.
I get what you're saying, but a downside to what you're describing is guaranteed waste of food. If food is prepared based on expectations, there's no way that all the food will be ordered before it goes cold/end of hours, and has to be dumped.
> Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.
If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
My read on this, beyond data and MBA's, is that all of the slack has been pulled out of the economy.
This is a silly analogy but it's like integer truncation has been applied everywhere blindly. Staffing model says you need 2.5 employees on average to handle the load? You get 2. Everywhere with everything.
Yeah, because all those employees are now doing much better paying jobs elsewhere instead of a low paying job like cleaning a dining room. The dining room at a McDonald's functions just as well at the 80% dirtiness as it did at 10% dirtiness. It's like how you can go to India and there'll be like 400 different employees at a hotel. One will usher you into the door. The other will hold the door. The third will say "Welcome, sir!" and lead you to the front desk while a fourth tells a fifth to grab a suitcase.
That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.
Throughout the corporation teams are optimizing for what gets them promoted and I bet they're doing very well.
Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.
I have no special insider knowledge here, but I'm reasonably sure McDonald's relative drop in the hierarchy of global made-to-order food providers is a combination of increased competition, more health conscious and eco conscious customers, and younger generations choosing to spend higher amounts on sit-down experiences when bothering to eat out. They're largely franchisees who make the staffing decisions anyway. McDonald's corporate ensures portion sizes, ingredients, and preparation are the same everywhere, but I don't think they're dictating to franchise owners how many staff members they need to keep on hand.
Again, caveating I'm not a franchise owner and don't know the details in depth, but the bulk of what McDonald's collects is the rent on the stores themselves, which is fixed, and royalties are a percentage of gross sales, not profits, so they shouldn't have much reason to care if franchises are profitable as long as they stay in business.
It's fast food. The focus is on price over all else. If they maintained the staffing levels from back then, then instead of poor service you'd be complaining that a Big Mac costs $15.
Except that, adjusted for inflation, a Big Mac was cheaper at that time.
Regardless, it would be even more expensive without reductions in staffing. It's not like they could be hiring twice as many employees at half the cost each and are just choosing not to. Fast food is a highly competitive market.
I've seen the same changes. The most noticeable is, now that they are no longer required to be visible at the front counter in case someone comes in to order, because of kiosks, the workers usually specifically hide anywhere else, to minimize the chances of being disturbed by customers with their endless requests ("I've been waiting for 15 minutes for a large fry...")
Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). I won't speculate if it's been "worth it" since it'll devolve into an off-topic political debate, but basic economics does predict that since labor costs twice what it did 10 years ago, they'll do everything to minimize how much labor they buy. Couple that with what you said, basically, using "Moneyball" techniques to finesse everything with all these optimizations, we get the operations we see now in all retail establishments.
And even if there are states that haven't done the minimum wage changes, the markets that have are so big. The national businesses that have adapted to it have proven out their barebones-labor model there - why wouldn't they roll out most of the changes nationwide?
I think if someone launched a fast-food place or a drugstore in 1995 that operates with the type of skeleton crew they use today, it would fail overnight due to people having a choice. But today, since essentially 100% of retail operates this same way, they don't experience any pressure to do better.
> Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California).
In-N-Out allows us to discard this notion. They've maintained full staffing while simultaneously paying staff above-market rates (even in California). They only charge 30 cents more for a basic cheeseburger, and the burger is much higher quality, so even that is hard to attribute to wages.
In-n-out not only has high wages, they’re staffed to the nines. I’m talking 20-25 employees during rush time. You don’t see some, because they’re in the back peeling potatoes for dinner rush 6 hours later.
In-N-Out is, IIRC, completely privately owned by the founder's family. Every location is directly controlled. Their customers are the people buying burgers.
McDonalds, of course, is 5% corp-owned flagships and 95% franchise "opportunities". They don't have customers, they have tenant farmers who work the land leased to them.
In-N-Out is a low-margin, high-volume business, kind of like how Walmart is.
They literally can't cut staff because they only make money due to the incredibly high number of meals they serve per hour. So they have to serve as efficiently as possible, which requires that fully-staffed kitchen and counter, or there wouldn't be enough time in the mealtime hours to do that volume otherwise. It's just as impossible for them to cut any staff as an airline could remove pilots from the cockpit, in that the whole operation would cease to function.
McDonald's and the rest are never going to be In-N-Out though because it would take years of operating at steep losses in the hopes people would notice how fast and tasty they'd become. I can't think of a mature company that's ever pulled off going from "boring mainstream place" to "cult favorite" like that.
2 replies →
Different stores in different chains have a very different attitude. There is a Taco Bell in Ithaca which has a staff that has some esprit de corps and then another where the dining room is disgusting.
that doesn't sound like data, that sounds like capitalism
hamdingers
Name checks out.
Minnesotan, perhaps?
what you are describing is basically company ownership or high level managers of the store are just keeping kicking out legs of the table and waiting to see if it will still stand up
because you and others keep going back to the store no matter how bad it gets, they keep testing what other cuts they can do
eventually it will be just one employee sitting in the corner watching several humanoid bots doing all the work and just required to press the reset button when they glitch
maybe even a single human remote employee doing that for 100+ stores
vandalism will get insane and then corporations will just get congress to pass felony laws to slow that
$20 burgers will also slow that
I miss pizza