Life of a McDonald’s Worker
McDonald’s is a great first job that will provide you with a lot of good experience that will help you throughout life. It is a very fast-pace job that will require you to multitask and be able to work under pressure, which at times may be stressful. When hired by McDonalds, one of the first steps (other than the lovely paperwork) is getting your new work uniform! You will receive two sets of black pants, two black crew member shirts and a hat (shown to the left). You are required to wear every part of this uniform including your own personal non-slip shoes to every shift, or you will be required to go home and change. Be prepared! The color of the McDonalds’ shirts can indicate the ranking of each employee. Black is for crew members, grey for crew trainers, red for crew leaders, blue for managers in training, and assorted colors for general managers. Your uniforms are an important part of your work, it shows you are apart of a team and it allows you to represent your place of employment.
Your first day on the job, you will be given a brief tour of the store and shown each position they may possibly put you into and the jobs descriptions for each position. The first position you are shown and usually start training at is called “the hole”. The technical name is OT2 (order taker for lane two) and money, but we all call it the hole since you are isolated in the back of the store at the first window by yourself taking orders and paying orders out (which can get lonely and stressful). A similar position you will be trained in is OT1 (order taker for lane one) which includes making all McCafe drinks, teas, and pushing for drive thru.
You can also be pushing for drive thru and not be in an OT1 or OT2 position. When “pushing” for drive thru, you are to put all of the drinks coming out of the ABS (automated beverage system) in order with the correct bags of food that match the order on screen. You can also help the person on handout by making sure they are stocked up with straws, cups, lids, drink carriers and make sure they have everything needed in order to get orders out successfully and in a timely manner.
The person in which you are helping by pushing is the worker in the handout position. Handout is the second drive thru window where food and drinks will be handed out to the customers before they leave our establishment. Your job in handout is to put drinks in order, make coffee and make sure the customer gets the condiments asked for. Sometimes the handout person (if store is busy) will be asked to help bag their food, drop fries or get stock needed depending on the situation. For example, when it comes to be approximately eight o’clock, we go single booth. Being single booth means that instead of using two windows we go down to one window and the worker in the handout position will have to start paying out orders and giving the orders out.
When helping out or being in the position of “running”, you will be looking at the picture to your left. When running, you will be bagging orders that appear on the left screen, which will be all of the drive thru orders. When an order appears, you will grab either an A bag (smallest), B bag or a C bag (biggest) and bag the food in a orderly fashion, including any sauces needed (below the screen), toys (below the bags), pies (in between the screens) and fries. Now that you know “running”, you will easily catch on to the position of “backing” which is an almost identical position. When backing, you will be bagging orders or putting food on trays that come from front counter. This position always requires you to give out cups, call out order numbers for the customer when their order is complete, and taking the trays of food out to the customer’s table.
Now that you’ve been taught each possible position that you may encounter, it’s time to learn the menu and how to work with the monitors. The picture to the left demonstrates the “home page” of the monitor. There are a lot more tabs and lots of buttons to know and memorize, which we won’t get to cover, but we will go over the basics. Also keep in mind that these screens change a lot, whether it be from new deals, getting rid of items, or getting new items! For example, about two months ago we got the Grand Mac and the Mac Jr (always more to learn). More often than not you will here a coworker saying “I have a promo!” This means that the customer has a coupon and that the manager needs to come take it off of the total, in which you will press the “promo” button to the right of the screen. The other more important phrase you will here is “what is the special request”. When there is no button to specify how the customer wants their food or drinks made, there is a “special request” button under grill you will be able to use, but you must remember to communicate these requests with your coworkers.
One of the most important important things you have to learn to do well when working around others, especially in the fast food industry, is communication with your coworkers and your customers. Communication is a key factor with your customers because it shows them you care about their service. You communicate with your customer, for example, by letting them know about how long their wait for their food will be. Commonly, you will have customers who come back and need food remade, whether it be because our grill made it wrong or it was rang up wrong, and the key to keeping these customers happy is to communicate and agree on what the problem at hand is, how you are going to fix it for them, about how long it will be, and apologizing for the mistakes made. Communicating with your coworkers will also be a key factor in being successful at this job, even if your coworker is in the back you can still talk to them through the headset. We talked about how to use the “special request” button, well, it shows up as just that, so you have to be able to communicate what the customer wants to either the grill people, service people, or managers in order to get the customers order correct.
It is important to be able to communicate with your coworkers on the job so that your shift and the store will run smoothly. Communicating with coworkers could mean, asking for help, dropping fries, help take orders, or even help bag or hand out the customers food. OT1 and OT2 will do a lot of communicating by asking what the special requests are, asking to correct a problem, or asking for a promo from a manager. The two positions that will communicate the most is OT1 and handout between making drinks, ice cream and stocking since the responsibilities are shared between the two workers.
