I’ve worked fast food jobs for the last 7 years of my life, it’s the majority of my job experience. I’ve worked at 6 different restaurant locations now, and mcdonalds my far has the most “rigorous” training experience, and I think everyone who does fast food should start there.
Mcdonalds actually goes through the effort of treating food safety and allergies like a health hazard, as they are. other resturaunts training has felt lacking in the importance, especially on the floor training. I’m not sure if mcdonalds has their own higher standards, or if it’s just the area that I work in but, whenever I work with someone who hasn’t worked at mcdonalds in the past, it feels like they are too relaxed on procedures when it comes to food safety.
Does anyone else feel the same way? what has been your experiences working in mcdoanlds vs other stores?
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I’ve heard about how the CEO of a hotel chain have their employees from the execs down train “The McDonalds way” and their service vastly improved
IMO McDonalds is the gold standard for entry level and minimum wage employment. Regardless of what you think of the cuisine, every location and every employee, with few exceptions, clearly follow the same set of rules, and many of the employees are young and inexperienced.
Anyone who suggests they don’t doesn’t understand how difficult it is to have thousands of locations and produce generally the same quality in each and every one.
I can go into a McDonalds and expect the same food whether I’m in NYC or Montana. That’s not the norm for the absolute majority of fast food. Only a top tier, hammered out process that costs millions over years can produce that.
I say this as someone who doesn’t like their food but can respect what they’ve accomplished.
I think the experience speaks for itself. I and millions of others eat McDonalds semi-regularly and it’s never made me seriously sick, or anyone that I know of … besides symptoms of overeating, because it’s delicious.
Literally no-one says they don’t have good training standards. Why would you think that? You just made that up for your little post here
I worked mcds back in the mid nineties. They have pretty good standards, but like anything, it is subjective to each store to maintain. Ie. How good is the management?
When I worked at McDonald’s when I was 15 I was doing the training and a cockroach walked across the training computer.
As far as food safety goes? I have no idea. Chick-fil-A has a gold standard in so far as customer service. They will actually speak to you in complete sentences which is nice.
Yea another thing is McDonald’s will hire most people. Kids are gonna fuck up your order, people who just got outta jail and haven’t worked in 2-3 years. People in half way houses etc.
Not dissing any of those people BTW. When you have a large pool to draw from its gonna be easier for people, who aren’t fit for the job, to slip through the cracks.
I’m not surprised to hear that. McDonalds is by far the most consistent fast food place, not that I go there very often. But I’ve never had a single issue any time I do.
Fuckin’ Burger King you need to check the bag as they hand it to you because there’s a 90% chance they fucked something up
If McDonalds is gold status. Culvers is platinum status.
I mean with how much money that company has they should
I feel like this comes down to the individual restaurant, I didn’t find my training there to be any different from any other job. We were making fast food items and there is not much to be trained on. Especially considering most people who work there probably know what at least half the items on the menu are and at least the most popular ones.
“I think everyone who does fast food should start there.” Bro this isn’t a career you just get to GM and die. Fast food is a shitty broken industry and I make more money as a pizza delivery driver than I do a manager.
Most of my job experience is fast food management too and you’re degrading yourself
Well, legally, they have to have some kind of food safety training here in the UK and I’d imagine it to be the same throughout the rest of Europe
Are employees required to throw McDoubles on the ground before putting them in the bag, or does that only happen at locations I visit?
Depends what you mean by high training standards. McDonalds across the board (in the “restaurants”) are famously very consistent vs other chains. In that aspect, I think yeah training is high. How they are trained as staff in routine work, keeping up standards etc is rarely questioned by people. That’d be popular opinion if those standards is what you mean
But is that what people mean? What people usually mean is the skills as chefs. McDonalds chefs know how to make what’s on the menu’s in the precise ways as instructed. However that’s not a high standard. They aren’t creating the burgers from scratch, baking the bread, creating the sauces, making the ice cream etc. Much of it arrives frozen and gets throwing into specific cooking methods for specific amounts of time et voila it’s done. I was trained at subway to bake the bread each morning but I wouldn’t even consider myself someone who can make. I don’t have the first clue how to bake a loaf of bread. Someone who worked in a McDonalds and spent 5 years flipping burgers isn’t going to get a job as an actual chef somewhere.
The training standards for McDs I.T Sector is incredibly high also.
As much as people shit on Trump there’s a reason he eats MCD’s internationally. Can reliably get about the same quality at any location.
I worked at McDonald’s in high school, and my experience was the exact opposite.
The first thing that was weird was that I called to get an interview, and I showed up with a few other people and we were being “interviewed” at the same time. But despite not knowing us, asking any questions, etc., the interview was just a short sit down telling us when we’d be starting.
When I started, I found out there was a binder in the back with training information, and I kept asking if I could see it. And they always pushed it off. There really was no training at all. I was completely lost at the register as it was a really old system where items were listed under abbreviations that didn’t really match their names, and some items were under unrelated items. I can’t remember exactly (as this is back in the 1990s), but say I wanted to enter a grape soda (for some reason I recall those being difficult to find in particular). I would need to type in say, “XBC” (making this up because I can’t remember exactly what it was) to get to the Big Mac menu. And the purple soda was listed under there, and I’d type in, “NFD” (these are all made up—but the system was like this).
I would get really flummoxed.
At the time there was a Mad TV sketch called Jazzy Burger of a guy who was utterly lost working at a fast food restaurant, and I HOWLED with laughter because it felt identical to my experience. The guy working there was lost so he tried giving the food away for free and eventually got so stressed he tried crawling out of the drive through window.
I don’t think I would have laughed as hard if it weren’t identical to my experience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-goNuTL87U
But it was uncannily mirrored what my experience was like (except the guy in the video actually had a trainer).
That’s the Golden Arch standard baby.
I think ppls beef is with the quality of the food
Idk, maybe my standards are too high but my McDonald’s in 2018 would always reset the hot food timers, even when training tells you to discard. I ended up just discarding it anyway against the wishes of management because fuck them
Consistency of stores is relational to population density.
Possibly the most disgusting place I’ve stopped at was a McDonalds in middle of nowhere Midwest. I would not doubt that even a mom and pop place in the area would be 10x cleaner
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I think I read McDonalds is terrified of a Jack in the Box type scare and imposes higher quality/ safety standards than the government on their suppliers.
Idk where you’re from but that can’t be true here in the UK. I haven’t had a half decent mcdonalds in probably 10 years. The food is always cold or just barely warm, items are ALWAYS missing and the restaurant tables are always filthy. That and the fact the ice cream/milkshake machines are never working. It’s probably down to lack of staff and them going on delivery apps, but mcdonalds has fallen off a cliff in every way.
Trump ruined any credibility they had
Regardless of what you think of the product McDonalds is a very well run company. I worked in advertising and it meetings with McDonald’s owners were always the most interesting due to how tightly run everything is.
I also had lunch at the headquarters restaurant outside Chicago and it was a machine of efficiency and service. Everyone was stubbed and wearing ties.
All I ever heard was that McDonalds was a great starter job because they had high training standards. Meaning it was a good leg up to go elsewhere.
Not sure if this is unpopular.
Never worked at McDonald’s, but what I will say is anywhere I’ve been in the US, a Big Mac is a Big Mac.
They’ve done better than most other brands at creating a consistent product across the country
Im not suprised, some of the fastfood joints have excellent training. I worked at Wingstop and was amazed at the training scheme they had
There are 2 mcds near me. The one across town has whatever regular mcds hours are and they have never gotten anything wrong, ever.
The 24/7 mcds around the corner would constantly get things wrong and they would straight up refuse to fulfill orders after midnight until breakfast claiming they were cleaning, if you could even get them to respond at the speaker. I think they ended up firing everyone because we showed up one day and there’s a chipper old lady working we hadn’t seen before. Since then they haven’t gotten an order wrong, but it’s still 50/50 on if they’ll take orders late at night.
I worked at a McDonalds a couple of years ago. My training was being thrown onto the fry station day 1 with no training except for hygiene and a brief tour of the kitchen/staff area.
Then I was moved onto the drive-thru where my training was a stoned dude that just pointed at stuff and mumbled what they did.
I quit after a couple of months.
Is this unpopular? The only good thing McD’s has these days is how consistent they are. I imagine training has to do a lot with that, besides stuff like standardized ingredients.
I’ll just leave this here
Yeah no. The last time I went to McDonalds was over 10 years ago. Some fat girl was twerking in the kitchen throwing her weave all over the place… it was disgusting. Chikfila is definitely the standard as far as fast food. Do I believe they are a cult? Yes. I’ve never experienced a wild incident or issue like with McDonalds though.
I’ve never worked at McDonald’s, it as a parent of kids with allergies, I can confirm the main reason we eat there as much as we do is because of the consistency of the product everywhere, and because they have always been FAR ahead of the curve with allergy information.
Having said that, no other restaurant or fast food joint I’ve ever been to can totally fuck yo orders like McDonalds and it’s not even close. McDonalds seems to be the Michael Jordan of fucking up orders. I don’t know why because because they clearly print off everything all the time and you can see the order on the bill in large print, but nope, still wrong.
McDonalds is a franchise. It depends on the franchisee. There are two McDonalds near my office, one is impeccable and spotless, the other one is gross and sticky. The gross one is cheaper but I will always prefer to pay the extra 60¢ to eat at the clean one
OK, I am getting what you say, I appreciate McDonalds for doing that, but two things come to mind: Why do they do it, how many things went wrong before they start doing that? Secondly their food is one of the biggest safety hazards in life…
Yeah, I was honestly kind of surprised at the standards when I worked there. I was on the grill. It was hell and I’d sooner get rammed by a rhinoceros than work there again, but everything there was dialed in.
high training standards for fast food i guess. not high standards for actual career work, like at all.
It’s gotten better for sure. About 2 decades ago it wasn’t but I think since McDonald’s has made its move to be more refined, they also improved it’s training standards to the point where it’s actually a great entry level employment opportunity for teenagers.
I’m only gonna comment here solely to share my experience, not to say you’re wrong considering it’s literally just one experience vs. hundreds more saying the opposite.
I worked at McDonald’s for exactly 1 shift. During my onboarding shift (where we filled out forms and whatnot in a new hire group) I was told at my restaurant that there would be someone there to train me, cool!
I show up 5 minutes early and literally nobody knew who I was 😭. The manager at the restaurant was super busy, pulled some random teenage employee to tell me how to do the chicken nuggets, sprinted off and I didn’t see him for basically the rest of the night. Teenage employee has zero interest in helping me out, I ask if I should be wearing a uniform and they don’t have one ready (because they didn’t know I was going to be there evidently).
A horrid shift goes by where I literally am wearing my own clothes and basically just guess working based off the teenage employees explanation and during closing I ask the manager of the store where I can find the schedule and he says to check the break room, I do, I’m not on it, I ask him, he said I’ll be on it when a new one gets printed, I ask how I’m supposed to know when to come in next if it isn’t posted online or in a group chat, he says to call the store to check. Ok 😑.
A week goes by, I call, they say I’m not working. Repeat that 3x in a row and by that point I basically gave up. They clearly didn’t know who I was and didn’t even have a uniform for me so I stop calling.
Flash forward 3 months later, I’m literally on vacation, and I get a call from McDonalds asking me why I’m not there and that I have a shift.
Quite literally the single worst work experience I’ve ever had in my entire life 😃
Put the fries in the bag
Ive been inside hundreds of McDonalds kitchens over the years and watched the workers closely as i do find their work in the kitchen somewhat interesting.
I would never eat a McDonalds by choice, i would never recommend that anyone else eats at mcdonalds or any other fast food restaurants mainly due to health reasons, fast food is not good for you, and yet despite most of these kitchens being absolutely disgusting, id still say they’re safe to eat at.
Ive seen tons of gross shit, but none of it ever directly impacts/comes into contact with the food, for example, Ive seen many dead lizards/roaches inside and underneath the fryers/grills or above the ceiling tiles and while some of you may find that revolting, the reality is that unless it’s coming into contact with a food, a dead bug/lizard is harmless in the grand scheme of things, if you take issue with the fact that there might be a dead roach on the floor underneath the grill that your patty was cooked on, you probably shouldn’t eat out, furthermore, you probably shouldn’t cook at home either after all, what if there’s a dead insect underneath your oven?
All that matters is that food is handled safely, and that proper safety precautions/procedures are followed. Even the most rundown and jaded crews I’ve seen still follow the rules.
In my experience, McDonald’s is actually quite impressive, the amount of work it takes to maintain/grow an operation on a scale like that is nothing to scoff at.