Company: McDonald-s
Date: 2014-05-18
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Bittersweet
Pros: Easy to get hired
Most managers are nice and willing to help you learn
You're always busy so time passes fast
Flexible schedule
Cons: Little training. I was just hired and their idea of training was a series of interactive videos and spending about 2 days with a crew trainer for ONE area of the restaurant. When you are assigned to any other area of the restaurant, you are given minimal instruction and expected to catch on right away. There are crew trainers all around you, but they are busy as well, so they can't give you instruction on what to do. To save time, they fix your problem and tell you to take the next customer. But since you never learned what to do, if it keeps happening, you are yanked out of that position and dropped into another position with the same minimal instruction on what to do. Some jobs are easy and go smoothly as long as the equipment is working properly. But since you aren't trained, when something goes wrong and you need help (and it ALWAYS happens during peak times), your work piles up quickly. Customers are waiting and your service time goes up making the managers frustrated. And if a crew member clicks your order off the screen before you have a chance to look at it (which happens a lot when you're new and learning to keep multiple orders in your memory at once), you can mess up a customer's order and yep, you guessed it-- you get yanked from that position and moved to another position. 

All in all, you never really get a chance to learn and get good at one position because you're being moved all over the place before you're comfortable in the first place you're assigned. You start to get the feeling that you are in the way all the time, never knowing what to do. Managers pick up on this and send you home early. So there's this nervous energy where you always have to "look like" you know what you're doing and stay busy.

I'm a very hard worker and I learn quickly. Since I started working here, I feel like a complete idiot. A majority of the coworkers at my store have been there 3 years or longer so they know the ropes. So with me just coming in, I look like a total screw up. Most of the managers are understanding and very helpful. But it only takes one bad manager to ruin your view of the job. I'm not a complainer but I did expect more from such a large company, in the area of training.

If you have a bad manager, your life will suck. Other cons: Some of your coworkers are very young and barely do the minimum. And when they are slow, (texting and socializing) it slows you down because the restaurant operates as an assembly line. Benefits aren't all they're cracked up to be- at your pay rate, you can't afford insurance. There's opportunity to advance to management, but the downside is that you won't be financially rewarded for the additional responsibility and stress you take on.