In the movie
9 1/2 Weeks, there's a scene where the guy is throwing dollar bills on the floor, telling Kim Basinger to crawl towards him and pick them up. He throws them on the floor, bill by bill, with this little smile on his face.
Attention certain people: Please stop paying for your food in this manner. Not only does this pointless exercise in forced superiority waste time (why give the money one bill at a time when you can hand them all over at once? Morons.), it's FUCKING RUDE. I know Playboy just issued "Women of McDonald's" (either they've issued it or it's in the works), but I am not a fucking stripper over here. I've even had people throw their change at me. Not really
throw, just this little underhand toss with a fog-thick air of condescension. It's usually about one bill a second, all singles. *fwip*..... *fwip*..... *fwip*.... They don't even set it on the counter, they flick their wrists and toss it at me, like they throw toys for their dogs to fetch. And mostly only men do it, gross middle-aged men like the one who came to Center Stage with his wife and kids and every time I walked past him, he licked his lips and stared at my tits. This was back in October, I don't know WHY I didn't tell his wife. "Excuse me. I'm 18 years old, you might even have a daughter my age yourself, and your 50something husband keeps fucking slobbering on my tits. Please tell him to fuck off before I tell him with a seam ripper."
And you know, not all of us behind counters are that far beneath you. How many of you rich Naperville hags ever worked two jobs while going to school in hopes of maybe actually, oh I don't know, getting a REAL JOB someday? Kids come in here all the time saying they want to work here. I just WISH some bitch would tell her kids that I'm working her because I'm probably a high school dropout (that happened to a guy I know) so I can say, "Actually, not only did I graduate from high school, I'm working another job on top of this one and waking up at 4 AM four days a week to go to college in Chicago so someday I won't have to deal with bitches like you who feel entitled to be rude to me just because I have to work these two jobs just to afford the car to drive to them, and you're a rich skank who never worked a day in her God damn life and you're too damn lazy to even keep your ugly-ass kids in line. No food for you. NEXT!"
In a post a while back, I mentioned the scaling back of the employee meals. They've just been shrunk even more:
-No Deluxe Big Breakfasts
-No Double Quarter-Pounders with Cheese
-No 10-piece nuggets
-No trading out items in meals (which means I can't have a biscuit instead of a hashbrown for breakfast) except fries or hashbrowns for apples
-No drinks larger than a small (16 oz.) (and we can't have refills)
-No hot chocolate
You can tell they're only letting us have the salads and apples because if they didn't, then it WOULD be their fault for making us fat. I'm up to 130 pounds now- more than I've ever weighed EVER. And I hardly eat on school days because shit's too expensive in Chicago, and when I get home I have to do my chores and homework and go to bed. No time for food. And I gained so much weight that my work pants don't fit any more, so I told them that THREE FUCKING WEEKS AGO and they STILL haven't even ordered them yet.
It's good to know we're so appreciated by the company. We make all their money, spend seven hours standing in one place with no break because we got our breaks an hour and a half into our nine-hour shift, and the only thing we're going to have to eat for the next seven God damn hours can't be any bigger than a Big Breakfast (biscuit, sausage patty, palm-sized splotch of scrambled eggs, hash brown. WAY less than you think.)? While the company is losing money and they're losing one CEO after another to heart disease and colon cancer, they get all the money they want even though the company would be just fine without them. People credited the CEO for the new "i'm lovin' it" shitheap of an advertising campaign. No, morons, that's the marketing and advertising people who are responsible for that, assuming it was even people in the company and not some consultant. Board members are marginally necessary at best. Globalization my ass, you can't even have nationalization if you're unwilling to pay the cooks enough to live on. If you're going to cut my employee meals, then start fucking paying me a decent wage so I can afford to buy lunch elsewhere.
When are these suits going to realize that while the removal of skills from the job prevents us from unionizing and has made us disposable pawns, WE STILL PAY THEIR FUCKING SALARIES and whether they like that or not they still have to recognize that. McDonald's won an award for its uniforms (the white short sleeve shirt with a tie, tucked into waist-high pants, topped off with a canvas visor? Ohyes, there's no better combination to exude sheer professionalism.), which were designed by people who will never have to wear them. The meal and break policies (we get one half-hour break PER SEVEN-AND-A-HALF HOURS, which gives them the right to give you a break an hour and a half into a nine-hour shift. Who cares if the person has to stand there with nothing to eat for seven damn hours?) were designed by people who will never be subject to them. The time targets (90 seconds from the time a drive-thru order is placed to the time they drive out, for example) are tested in a "restaurant" where no one ever changes their order after they've paid for it, no one lets their kids spend ten minutes deciding what to eat at the counter, and everyone knows exactly what they want and never asks any questions. Sure, you have to work in a restaurant to get a job at HQ-
for a minimum of one week. If they never worked in a restaurant before, they work for a week in the pretend restaurant and go on with making up bullshit rules to govern thousands of people they'll never meet and thousands of conditions they know nothing about.
Time targets are complete bullshit and they make the customer experience worse, not better. If I'm running for front counter, I should be the only person to push the button taking an order off the screen to let the computer know that order's done. What happens is some manager pushes the button as soon as the order's paid for. If it's busy, this means I have NO FUCKING CLUE who gets what food, because there are fifteen people waiting for food but the screen says there aren't any orders waiting. I have to take one article of food from the HLZ, look at each of the five receipts on the counter, and try to determine who gets what and that's assuming the cashier actually put the receipt on the counter- sometimes they just ram it into their pocket or give it to the customer. If there aren't any receipts to be had, I have to walk around hollering "Which order has a double cheeseburger?" and all the customers think I'm a fucking moron. Even better is when the cashiers don't get rid of receipts for completed orders- just leave them on the counter. I ask if they still need this food, the response I get is "... I don't know." Sometimes they don't put in whether the order's for here or to go- they just always hit "for here" and when I come to the counter with an armload of food they say "You need a bag, it's to go" like I'm supposed to infer this from the "for here" on the receipt and the screen. And the customer thinks I'm an idiot again, because they said "to go" but don't know that the cashier's too dumb to put it in the order.
And that's only on my side of the kitchen. Lorena once took a basked of fries out of the fryer FIFTY SECONDS EARLY just to meet a time target. No word on whether the fries were any good. She also yells at the person taking the money in drive-thru, even though for all she knows the money-taker is waiting for some old lady count out eleven bucks of change. Who gives a fuck about the food quality or the fact that the customers can hear your loud ass yelling "COME ON COME ON!!!!!11!!" clear outside the store, as long as times are good?
This is the credo of 21st Century McDonald's:
We don't care about the actual customer experience, as long as the computers say it was great.
We don't care about the well-being of our employees, as long as we can continue to give them the bare minimum compensation for their efforts.
We will attempt to create a modern image with fake hip-hop music and white breakdancers, but we will not allow employees to have the tattoos, multiple piercings, or "unnatural" hair that the people in the commercials have.
We will claim to celebrate diversity, but no one but Indians will be allowed to have nose piercings.
We don't care about how the general public's opinion of fast-food jobs reflects on the industry as a whole, as long as the unskilled nature of the job keeps turnover high and wages low.
We don't care about the fact that charging 15 cents for nugget sauce is going to cost us customers, as long as the customers we have will pay for barbecue sauce for their fries when they can have ketchup for free.
Matter of fact, we don't even care about the public's opinion of the food and the company, as long as we can cheat employees (either directly by cutting employee meals, or indirectly by cutting wages) and customers out of a good meal.
