Working in food sucks in general. I would know I’ve been doing it for almost 14 years now. You drive to the store. You enter the store. You order your food. If there are any complications with your order you’re told right then and there.
But I’ll never forget the day my job introduced mobile ordering. It immediately made everything worse in almost every way. Customers ordering shit we ran out of, shit we no longer offer, setting the pickup time 5 minutes after placing the order then getting mad when it’s not done on time. All this while we can’t communicate with the customer at all until they arrive to find the order incomplete because we couldn’t contact them to figure out what they wanted to do.
Then door dash became a thing and all those exact problems became even worse. It slows down the entire store to the point of disrupting the customers who came in to order.
Why the fuck would you go through a third party system to obtain food when you can just go get the fucking food
Basically if you use mobile ordering or a delivery service you’re a big part of why food service has done nothing but get harder and more frustrating. And I do hold it against you.
Edit: I don’t think lemmy understands how unpopularopinion is supposed to work…
Edit 2: Considering how many people clearly disagree with me and seeing how few upvotes this post has gotten, lemmy clearly has no idea how unpopularopinion works.
Glad to know the Reddit custom of ignoring that still lives on.
Food ordering/delivery services are a double edge swords. Its convient but it “keeps you in your pod”.
I am not bothered by these services as long I can still go to the restaurant itself and get the food in person.
Does it not bother you that your experience in the store is made worse because these same companies demand we take care of mobile/delivery orders before helping customers inside?
It bothers me a bit, but you’re blaming the wrong person here. The problem isn’t the person using a valid service. The problem is the capitalist machine treating people like shit. The stores having awful inventory management software or over burdening employees is not the customers fault.
I talk often with the pick up and go crew. They like their job and seem to be treated reasonably well given the late-stage capitalism we’re all living in. If I found out they were miserable I wouldn’t order anymore. I do find out about flaws in the system and do what I can to remedy that on my end.
I can almost guarantee you they’re lying.
I have several regulars that always praise me for always being polite and helpful and nice. What they don’t know is that if I didn’t act that way I’d be reprimanded or fired for “not having a good attitude at work”
You’re not wrong that it’s the companies fault I’m understaffed but it is definitely the customers fault that I’m overworked.
Like if you walk into a super busy restaurant that’s clearly understaffed, why would you stay? Why would you not go somewhere else? It would be faster for you and make the employees day that much easier.
But people would rather stand in line for half an hour which just makes everything worse for everyone.
I’ve told this story so many times I feel like a broken record, but here goes.
I was a manager at Burger King (like in my other comment) but it was a bad store with a horrible store manager.
A mother and her teenage son came in asking for a job application. Naturally the mother started asking me questions about the job, do I like working there, etc. I told her everything she wanted to hear but also everything my store manager wanted to hear.
The thing was, my store manager was behind me doing other stuff but definitely still within earshot. There was a mirror so I could see if she was looking toward me, so as I was explaining all of this great stuff and looking very enthusiastic, I was slowly shaking my head “no” to signal that everything I was saying was a lie. I was trying to protect her from sending her son into this terrible, crushing work environment.
Luckily the mother appeared to put two and two together and while they walked out with the application, I don’t believe they ever sent it in.
Sounds like you need a different job, you work in a awful environment that you recognize is a problem so why do you stay? I’m in the industry and if it’s such a problem I would leave, it’s not like kitchen jobs aren’t always available
Being a former fast food worker I can’t stand when I go into some store and they’re telling me to wait because they’ve got orders in drive-thru. When I worked in these restaurants I was always told that you immediately take care of dine-in customers.
I think a huge part of the problem is intentionally understaffing restaurants. When I was a manager at Burger King I was expected to run drive-thru and front counter on my own so that that employees could focus on closing duties. How are you supposed to run a shift when you’re too busy running around doing everything your store manager refused to schedule for?
I don’t go to Burger King often but when I do, I see the exact same thing. Customers inside are pissed off, there’s always one person running the entire front (one time it was a kid that looked about 16 years old) and the place is just backed up like crazy.
This is the real answer here. The pandemic showed food/retail industries that they can get by with a skeleton crew and still make profits. Oh? What’s that? Our employees are suffering levels of burnout at an unprecedented level? Fuck em we’re still making money.
Add to that customers getting pissed at a store for being short staffed and taking it out on the overworked employees instead of standing in solidarity and having some common fuckin decency
THAT’s the lead on this story - if it were implemented differently it could be much better, expanding people’s choices without taking away existing ones. It’s like those amusement parks where if you pay extra on top of the already exorbitant rates to begin with, you can cut in front of the line, so rich people can make “the poors” stand there, literally at the very front of the line, for hours on end as those who pay extra cut in front of them. Thus even if the price of a regular ticket were to remain the same, what you get in return takes a nosedive in quality, essentially taking something away from you, compared to the way it was before. (Okay so I never go to such parks, I am far too cheap for that, that’s mostly just how I imagine it would be:-)
I’ve seen restaurants that refuse to pay their workers (cough Chipotle cough) get short staffed and literally shut down their in-person service, so if you show up at the door, the only option was to pay the extra fee for the “convenience” of the pickup option. Same food, same door you physically walk through, a register literally one foot away from the other one… but you need to pay more for the privilege.
It’s all about the money.