Company: McDonald-s
Date: 2015-03-15
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Pretty bad
Pros: - Flexible hours
- Better than being on the dole
 - Not much else
Cons: - Awful, awful managers. Bullying, backstabbing, gossip and verbal abuse from managers towards staff was rife and tolerated. Managers, for the most part, were people with few other options in life career wise, and had only wound up managers because they'd been there the longest and were full timers. Many were overbearing bullies who were more concerned with power and berating people than actually doing their jobs.
- Understaffing. The store I worked at was perpetually understaffed. One one occasion I had to run the entire kitchen by myself during the dinner rush. I was running around like a chicken and sweating like mad but the manager on at the time also had the audacity to complain that I was working too slow and needed to pick up the pace! While other shifts were generally less hectic than that, understaffing was still an issue, and managers rarely came and helped out. By the end of a shift I was always very tired from running around like mad for 4, 6 or 8 hours.
- I was essentially fired when I turned 18 because I became too expensive to employ. They cut my hours down to one 3-4 hour shift per week after I turned 18 as I didn't want to work overnight shifts (I had uni). To add insult to injury the shift I got was always from 11am until 3pm, the kind of shift that is short but just ruins the day. I ended up leaving not long after that.
- Favouritism was rife, if you were friends with the managers and joined in on and supported their bullying of other employees you got good shifts and lots of them, if you were the type that just shows up, does their thing and goes home, then you'll get minimal shifts and at bad times.
- The franchisee who owned my store was a sleazy creep, he was in his 40s and always hit on the (underage) female staff.
- Pay was poor but that's to be expected in a place like McDonald's.
- I was frequently denied legally mandated meal breaks due to understaffing, and I was almost always forced to stay back at the end of my shift anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour, again, due to understaffing. I was also denied toilet breaks on numerous occasions because the store was 'too busy', on one occasion I had to wait for nearly an hour to use the toilet, and when I did leave to use the toilet (despite my manager telling me I wasn't allowed to because if I had held on much longer I would have wet my trousers), I was abused by the manager for disobeying him and he threatened me with a written warning and to take it to the store manager.