Fancy-Pigeon

Anxiety Abundant, Deeply Depressive

  • She / Her

Trans bird girl trying her best! 26, Ace, and looking for ways to retry my younger years.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i think a lot about how every fast food drive-thru in the country has been gaming the metrics for 10 years by asking every customer to pull forward so the order timer stops. corporate has to know it's going on, unless this is the most effective "snitches get stitches" campaign in history, which to be fair I can believe and respect

fuck metrics, if you want to know if people are working you can come out and fucking watch. if you don't trust your employees it's because you know you're not paying them enough and never any other reason


rachelmae
@rachelmae

every time i see a big scary red timer hanging over the drive-thru window at a restaurant i make sure to be extra nice to the people behind the counter


caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

Everywhere I've ever worked that had aggressive metrics — basically, everywhere I've ever worked, sooner or later — has had things in common. Namely:

  • the metrics were 100% clear-cut useless as a genuine measure of literally anything (except "metrics implemented" for some manager somewhere)
  • policing the metrics directly drove perverse incentives on staff behaviour
  • gaming the metrics started, not "as soon as people figured out how", but simultaneously as the metrics rolled out. Because the gaming was designed and deployed via, effectively, a shadow policy hierarchy enacted by exactly the same managers designing and deploying the metrics at every level
  • because if the metrics were actually for anything they claim to be for, they'd indict a whole lot of shit managers. Managers, however, have class solidarity
  • metrics are unachievable ludicrous bullshit by design, because they thereby engineer the above race-to-the-bottom in workplace conduct and conditions, corruption, and employee-destroying immiseration, but in a way whereby all the (awful, glaringly obvious) visible results can be, whenever it's necessary to be seen to do something, constructed as a sackable offence committed by any given frontline worker management don't like

Pupperpotamus
@Pupperpotamus

Man I fucking hate metrics, or "Key Performance Indicators" as they've been called in my previous jobs. Because of KPIs I've had to

  • Lie to customers to sell bullshit £1 screwdrivers because of a KPI called multisales where if you sell just the item the customer wants (even if it's a £800 part with 60% margin) then that's regarded as a bad thing
  • Collect the mailing data of people who were already getting our spam, reaching a point where someone once got 5 copies of our summer sales leaflet
  • Being super uncooperative with refunds because if you returned something it counted as a negative transaction on your scores, tanking your average sale value for the day
  • Actively encouraging people not to spend money when they would say "actually, i will have those batteries you just offered me" because I didn't want to have 2 seperate low value, non-multisaled transactions
  • Intentionally log multiple bugs for functionally the same issue to pad my numbers, despite the fact this is actively worse for the developers
  • Use holiday allowance for doctors appiontments because they were regarded as sick days by the system and I had been told off for time off ill
  • actually on that last point I got a discipliary for going over the usual allowance for sick days despite the fact I had been doing 12hr 6 day weeks for most of the past 12 months (crunch sucks yo) and at no point did they consider that this may have a toll on the mental and physical wellbeing of the staff
  • Slacking on my buddying/onboarding/training of a new employee because the company were still on my ass about KPIs and time spent training wasn't time spent doing bug entry and revisions

Also, Maplin were really sloppy with their metrics. The stick they were trying to beat me with about Margins, Average sale, Multisales, P&C sales.... all of that shit... also showed my Year to Date figures. Let me tell you, seeing that your gross YTD being deadass £300,000, with a margin of 54% (i.e. how much revenue was made after stock price and logistics) fucking radicalised me man. I was earning £11k a year back then. Knowing that I generated over £150,000 for the company and saw less than 1/10th of that myself... and seeing the regional manager on 5 times my salary turn up in his company bmw X5 twice a month to play peggle in the managers office aaaaand seeing that the company still went bust 2 years afterwards...

It just made me see the absurdity of it all. You look at a company like that and see that it's losing all of its money to exec paycheques and loan repayments and just go... why tho. The stores made money hand over fist. Literally was the monthly finances '£12000 on Robux' "help me my family are starving" meme


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

it makes me think how wild it is that 90% of the time I look through the window in drive through there's a big monitor showing security camera feeds of cameras pointed at employees and nobody else.

i'm reminded of the time a mcdonald's in las vegas started handing out little hourglass egg timers to people in the drive-thru and if it ran out before you got your food you got a free item or discount or something. it was weird, intrusive, and quite honestly infuriating, so you better believe i set them down sideways

Might as well, those metrics are impossible to hit anyway. We used to have the Big Red Scary Timer when I was working fast food in the early 2010s and it started when the customer pulled up to the order box, not when they proceeded. I think our target time was 2 minutes, which the customer could easily eat up half of or more if they didn't already know exactly what they wanted. It's all just stupid bullshit rich people make you jump for to earn the crumbs. And of course they don't trust poor people.

You can't ever really be upset at a fast food place if they, fuck up your order or close early or ask you to pull up or are kinda rude at the window. They really don't get paid enough to give a fuck and, that's fair. I remember being told that a good raise after the first year was 15 cents, and it was really hard to care after that.

yeah this is why even if I'm upset about a fucked up order i don't get on anyone's case about it. at the end of the day, it's still food and i went there to eat so there's no reason to throw a fit at people who aren't paid enough to deal with that kind of stress

and that's also why people who treat fast food workers like garbage go immediately on the shit list

local friend of mine thinks I'm weird for not ever telling the employees that my order is wrong. but I'm not the kind of person who wants to risk somebody else's job just because they put red onions instead of green onions on my food.

on the list of things that can go wrong in a day, that ranks as "small potatoes."

I will sometimes let employees know that something went wrong, but that I don’t care and I don’t need anyone to fix it and I’m not registering a complaint, because the next customer that experiences the same problem might be a Karen or similar and they might raise an unholy stink

but usually I just let it go

This is the kind of thing where corporate technically knows, but corporate won't admit knowing, because if they acknowledge it they'd have to do something about it, and if they did something about it it'd show in their metrics that performance took a drop, and it'd impact bonuses.

So nothing will be done about it.

where i worked the timers were just pecking order enforcement and no one even bothered to pretend otherwise. The target number was impossible to reach because it was almost entirely out of our control, which meant that from the store manager on down no one was ever doing a good job and everyone was always on thin ice. Franchise HQ held the store manager responsible for it, who held the shift managers responsible for it, who got anxious about getting in trouble and yelled at us about it nonstop. I now assume any kind of pointless exercise in tracking numbers is specifically designed to create a chain of people who hate the people above them for yelling at them and the people below them for not moving faster when they're yelled at.

Goodhart's Law in action

Once you start using a measure as a target, it stops being good as a measure. People eventually start gaming them. Aiming for the number, instead of what it represents.

At the first store I worked at we'd just have someone hop into their car and drive through our empty drive-thru lane a bunch during the last half hour of peak, it really can't be overstated how less stressful it is working at a store that doesn't have a drive-thru.

While I'm on the subject I want to grumble about the time we were expected to get customers out of the line in under 45 seconds even if they ordered a breakfast wrap that took no less than two minutes and ten seconds to warm up in our single oven.

in reply to @caffeinatedOtter's post:

I worked a lot of "temp-to-permanent" agency jobs at the start of my career and there was no more reliable indicator to get ready to jump ship than when some middle manager decided to make it a requirement to track your productivity in some way, usually with a shitty little spreadsheet or form saying how many of each task you did in a given day.

It never worked, it never encouraged anyone to work harder, and they always seemed mystified when staff turnover went through the roof and morale went through the floor.

in reply to @Pupperpotamus's post:

Yep, worked on the Chester branch until 2014, after I'd had my second consecutive 36 hour Christmas holiday (out at 7 on Christmas Eve. In at 7 on Boxing Day) I decided I would rather do literally any other job on earth.

Fuck that place. Hope it goes bust again.