$15.00 Per Hour, My A$$

I think it’s probably been close to 15 years since I actually sat down in a McDonald’s and dined on their fine cuisine. So my reaction to the absurdity of paying counter, grill and floor personnel $15.00/hour was based solely on the perceived demands of the jobs and the relative amount of work required to perform accordingly.

That was until today.

I had a meeting scheduled with a supplier of mine for 8:30 this morning at the McD’s on Port Washington Road in Glendale. Usually these meetings consist of dropping off a sample for quoting purposes, discussing the details of the job, shooting the poop about business a bit, etc. So not much time is spent either consuming anything or observing what’s going on behind the counter and on the floor.

As it turned out today, my contact forgot about the appointment. So I ended up wiling away about 25 minutes with really nothing much else to do other than order a Diet Coke and observe the goings on around me. Both things gave me a new perspective into the $15.00/hour issue. If anything, I’m even less sympathetic to complaints about the minimum wage rate as it relates to workers in this particular field and, specifically, at this particular franchise.

Having gotten there about 10 minutes early myself, I went to the counter to order the Diet Coke mentioned above. In front of me were 4 other people waiting to order, as it turned out, only coffees. Behind the counter were at least 6-7 people, 4-5 of whom were engaged in nothing more than conversation. But since the line contained only 4 people, I could understand why only 2 of the 6 or 7 were actually working.

That is, until I found myself waiting for nearly 10 minutes to get my meager, medium Diet Coke, as one employee slowly took and entered the orders into the terminal while the other slowly fetched the coffees. And when I say slow, I mean slow like deliberately slow. You’d have to put effort into the kind of slow I observed.

And not only slow, but inaccurate. At least one of the coffee orders was muffed and, when it finally came time for them to take my order (which, for the counter worker consisted of taking my money and handing me the appropriate cup), I was left standing with my hand outstretched in half turn on my way to the self-serve soft drink dispensers, as the counter person put back the large cup she initially held out for me to grab and replaced it with the proper size cup, which she could have put into my outstretched hand, but decided to just plop on the counter instead.

It might seem like I’m going into a lot of detail for a simple order, but there’s a reason for this.

Just as there’s a reason to note that, throughout the 10 minute wait to pay for the privilege of basically getting myself a medium Diet Coke, the persistent cackling on the part of the other 4-5 unoccupied or semi-occupied employees grew louder and more boisterous. Because what this made plainly clear was that, rather than have it take 10 minutes to process 5 people ordering almost nothing, they could have opened another station. Assuming the same level of production, 5 people might have been processed in 5 minutes, which wouldn’t be bad at all. But that would have required the manager, who was also engaged in the bantering and cackling, taking notice of the situation and instructing one or two of the others to hit the counter and help out. Which, of course, didn’t happen.

After finally getting my self-serve drink, I picked out a booth in order to await what I assumed was to be the imminent arrival of my contact. After killing some time deleting unwanted emails from my smartphone, I began checking out my surroundings while waiting for the appropriate amount of time to pass before calling my contact to see what was up. What I observed was a person whose job it was to keep the dining area clean, basically, chatting up everyone and anyone (whether they wished to be chatted up or not) while departing customers bussed their own tables and new ones tried to search out the ones that were well enough bussed to reuse. Once again, the manager (who actually walked through the dining room before disappearing into what appeared to be some sort of small office area with one of the non-working female employees) could have pulled this person aside and pointed out that she might want to do a little less talking and a bit more working, Once again, didn’t happen.

Call placed. He forgot. I’m out of there.

But not before forming an even more committed opinion regarding the absolutely mind-numbing absurdity of paying any one of the people I observed there anything more than they are currently being paid, because if you look at the amount of work accomplished versus the time spent (most of it, doing nothing), they’re at the very least more than adequately compensated at the current minimum wage.

$15.00/hour? No way in H-E-Double-Toothpicks!

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I’m adding this, lest someone attempt to misconstrue this piece as being racist in nature (due to the predominant demographic of the “workers” employed at the franchise in question).

I could have as easily written a similar piece concerning the service at Sendik’s on Silver Spring, where the demographic of the “workers” is entirely different. The service and attitude in general towards work, at times, seem to be much the same in areas such as the deli counter, help desk and check-out. Work in all those areas often times takes a back seat to socializing. The difference being that I am not aware of Sendik’s employees being targeted by SEIU in their effort to unionize minimum wage staff, while promoting a preposterous minimum wage rate.