Comment by idiotsecant
3 hours ago
The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system just enough to keep their jobs is a wild one.
3 hours ago
The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system just enough to keep their jobs is a wild one.
Employee games the system, people wait too long for food, people wait too long for food so they stop eating at the restaurant (this was my solution, it's fast food cutting it out is pretty much only a plus), people stop eating at restaurant so restaurant raises it's prices, more people stop going, restaurant closes.
The naive take is to think any one of these actions happen in a vacuum. Plus if this is happening at any scale at a restaurant then the manager probably told them to do it.
I feel like I could think of a way to word a letter that pointed out the problem without pointing out specific locations or people.
I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it.
I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.”
But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.
Would something like the following work (other than sounding a little self-important), or is there another concern?
"Dear McMoo corporate or regional management, I've noticed an operations issue at a McMoo location, which I think probably affects many of your locations. I think the issue might be denying your management accurate data signals, while adversely affecting customer experience and brand, and unnecessarily increasing stress to your workers. [...]"
Sometimes it's worth writing such a letter. If I were in corporate, I'd want that serendipitous letter, about something important I didn't know. (Well, unless my promotion was riding on the worker metrics program I proposed being seen as a success, and my bosses believe more in perfect winning success with the very first shot, than they do in iterative refinement and learning.)
It's more uplifting to write letters of praise for an employee/location. I wrote one recently, to a big national chain. The only tricky part I've found is that I try to imagine corporate rules that might've been violated. For example, I might not want to say, "I told your employee my special-needs child loves your multinational chain ketchup, and the employee immediately fashioned a toy dog out of a dozen ketchup packets, and handed it to my delighted child, all while singing a song from a Disney movie." (In my imagination, that could get the employee written up 6 different ways.)
The impulse is to out the bad system, not the poor souls stuck in it. Thus the ultimate decision to say nothing, as there is no way to affect one and not the other.
You can just complain about seeing it at "every location you've been to" (because this is true, I've yet to find a McDonalds in my city that doesn't game the order system). It shows the problem is widespread without blaming anyone too specific.
This reads like someone who either never had one of these jobs and is left to try to use their imagination, or someone who is knowingly misrepresenting what consequences are awaiting low-level employees purely by choice.
Either way, the conversation would be better without your involvement.
Oh, I've felt that when they marked my order done and hadn't started yet.
But, like you said, I realized what they were doing, and how they quite possible NEED to do it just to keep dumb management happy.
So of course I didn't say anything.
With each year it's more and more evident what 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires' is not just an observation but more like a medical diagnosis.
> The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system
While waiting their <$20 fast, cheap food.