Plasma Ring

at the taco bell i worked at we would unplug/replug a wire in the drive thru timer box that reset it

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.

This is why I do it. Those metrics mean nothing if they're inaccurate.

I'll ask them to do it even when nobody else is in line, just so that corporate doesn't bear down upon us.

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

fucking taco bell has a display in the drive through comparing different locations near by and their times and I wanted to jump through the window and break it

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.

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.

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.