Company: McDonald-s
Date: 2018-07-31
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Good first job to gain experience, but not much more
Pros: - Free meals for every 5 hours worked and a 15% employee discount on everything else
- Great for gaining experience working with customers, interacting with the general public, working as a team, handling money etc.
- Basically no prerequisites to be hired, easy to get it as a first job
- Very difficult to be fired, they care more about how reliable you are (show up on time) than your performance
- Very flexible scheduling, accommodating for student schedules
- Varies from store to store, but coworkers can feel like family after a while
Cons: Upper management: Corporate McDonald's likes to set quotas and goals for certain aspects of the store, and this causes the store's management to enforce silly rules that leave the customer and employee frustrated. For example- corporate McDonald's wants a certain percentage of sales to go through the slow and limited self-serve kiosks, so we often have to pressure customers into using them even though most people, including the employees, prefer the register. We sometimes get around this by just ringing up a drink on each kiosk and then changing it at the register, which counts as a kiosk purchase and boosts our numbers. Either way, it's a big hassle just to meet corporate's requirement for us.

Management: Management can be an issue at my store and is my biggest complaint. There's sometimes up to five managers at the store taking the place of regular crew members because we're frequently understaffed, and it's hard to know who's in charge. There's a clear lack of communication, as I sometimes get different instructions from different managers, and I can get in trouble for whatever one I don't do. The management at my store is also obsessed with drive-thru times; if we mess up a customer's order, we have to ask them to park even if we can easily fix it in the drive-thru. 

For example, one customer ordered an iced mocha coffee without whip cream, and we accidentally added whip. We removed it for her in under 10 seconds, but my manager told me I should have asked her to park to keep the drive-thru times down. This is ridiculous, and just causes frustration for both the employees and the customers, who sometimes argue about being parked for longer than it takes to just fix the problem in the first place. 

Training: At my franchise store, there is none. Corporate-owned McDonald's stores actually have an extensive online training program, but my franchise-owned store provides absolutely no training- you just have to ask and learn as you go. My first day was on drive-thru during a Sunday morning breakfast rush, I had to learn quickly.

Other: Customers are terrible, but that's not specific to McDonald's. What seems to be specific to my McDonald's, however, is a language barrier. Our entire kitchen staff and some of management speaks primarily Spanish, so communication can be difficult. I've gotten in trouble for not following a manager's instructions because I couldn't understand her.