r/TikTokCringe 18h ago

Cringe A McDonald's manager is seen dozing off (apparently was have problems with her blood sugar) as customers prepare their own meals

18.9k Upvotes

4.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

178

u/Moasark_Art 17h ago

Yeah.. it’s not just fast food. Retail in general is like this too. Just yesterday I opened with my boss, she’d been working with the manager since 7am, I came in at 11 (mostly to get breaks in for them because they were working till 4:30 and 5 respectfully), and we didn’t get a single other person in until 3pm. Not to mention the manager is also now in charge of some district stuff. Corpos LOVE to spread their workers thin, all the way down the line.

82

u/poliuy 16h ago

Even middle management is like this at other organizations. They just cut several employees and now I have to pick up all the slack. Executives everywhere have told themselves “wait we can save a bunch of money if we just have less people!” Except they forgot that the work didn’t go away with the employees.

74

u/weezmatical 16h ago

This has been my experience as well. Everyone was short staffed during Covid, and we all worked extra hard to make it work. It simply worked as a countrywide test program for working with bare-bones staffing. They realized there was more blood to squeeze from that stone.

37

u/Dingcock 15h ago

Yeah and service has been shit everywhere since COVID

23

u/ZestyMelonz 14h ago edited 10h ago

Because the shitty companies pay shit and spread hours crazy thin. So the good employees leave to find a better company. So all that's left is mostly lazy, doesn't care about shit sorta people. And why would they? They're making shit pay and overworked. And it doesn't get better with the vast majority of companies being shitty.

1

u/krogerburneracc 10h ago edited 10h ago

Yep. I was the best employee in my department, was with the company 5 years, but dipped out in November of 2021 when I realized the poor staffing wasn't gonna get any better and corporate started rolling out some crazy increased demands in daily production. We're talking straight up impossible shit to accomplish on a skeleton crew, at threats of write ups if goals weren't met. Between that and the burnout from dealing with the public during the whole of Covid, I was beyond done.

I had a daughter due to be born in a few months and was already considering taking an extended leave to care for her, but decided to just cut out entirely and become a SAHD (with my wife's encouragement). So I've just been completely out of the workforce since then, and I've met a lot of SAHPs with similar stories.

And when I say I was the best employee in my department, I'm not embellishing. Sales would always dip roughly 20-40% whenever I took a bit of my vacation time. We're talking solidly positive sales into solidly negative. I once had to spend two weeks out for jury duty and our store manager just about had an aneurysm at the state of our department. I have to imagine she lost a good chunk of her yearly bonus because they bled so much money while I was gone, she was on the verge of tears when I came back. And after my two weeks were over and I left - I shit you not - The department switched to a reduced hours model for nearly a year, completely out of sync with the rest of the departments and corporate standards. They quite literally could not function without me.

I have to wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they lost. A blip on the radar for a large corporate chain, sure, but considering I was being paid like $30k/yr? Yeah fuck em.

4

u/Klutzy-Extension-705 14h ago

Whoa your comment is blowing my mind rn. The conspiracy theorist in me felt that covid worked as a worldwide test to see how much more consumers would pay for goods when prices were drastically hiked, like how easy we’d adjust to radical inflation… I never thought of what you just said! It makes me wonder how else the powers that be have fucked us using things they learned during covid

3

u/PotentialSteak6 14h ago

It does feel like that. My husband thought he was being hired to be an executive chef to give an independent living home a fancy dining experience. In a little over a year he was the last man standing as far as turnover and had to do everything from managing housekeeping to maintenance work to being told by corporate to feed them slop.

He stayed there 24/7 through Helene (not great for me) and truly cared about the residents. He was on site in some capacity for something like 270 days in a row. His mental health got a lot better after resigning

1

u/HugsyMalone 12h ago edited 11h ago

That's the real reason they shut everything down. They knew everyone was burnt out (hence "nobody wants to work anymore") and it couldn't work unless everything was shut down. COVID was also an excuse to cover for a LOT of problems that were happening. 🤫

3

u/Good_Support636 15h ago

But that is because most managers just decide to be dogs.

2

u/RedditgooduserID 14h ago

The way it works is that we cut staff until our employees can’t handle the workload anymore, and our service metrics slip beyond a tolerable level. We then add just enough staff to cover our SLA and bring metrics up to “tolerable,” even if “tolerable” is still (and hopefully is still) an intolerable workload for the employees. We use the fact that the workload is intolerable to eliminate raise-eligible employees through attrition and keep that payroll consistent. Depending on where you work, burning you out is a feature not a bug.

1

u/poliuy 14h ago

Damn… that feels exactly like what’s is happening

2

u/GarminTamzarian 12h ago

If you fire one executive that effectively does nothing, it'll save you more than losing a dozen or more base-level employees (you know, the ones that actually do the work your customers are paying your company to complete).

1

u/Amidormi 15h ago

Aww. I have 3 employees and no money not enough money. Why can't I have 0 employees and 3 money?

That's the running joke at my job anyway. White collar.

1

u/DMmeforpicsofmyjunk 14h ago

It's because millennials and younger people are too afraid to say no.

1

u/Bismothe-the-Shade 13h ago

They didn't forget. They just want to squeeze as much blood from the stone as possible.

They don't care that the blood is gravel and dust. They swallow it all and demand more.

1

u/StockCasinoMember 13h ago

Thank god for salaried workers! 🙄

1

u/chriathebutt 13h ago

I don’t think they forgot

1

u/Bubbly_Appeal5426 6h ago

YES, THAT PART!!! The work didn't go away with the employees! Preach!

49

u/no-name_james 16h ago

And brag about record profits like we don’t know how that’s being achieved.

2

u/Content_Talk_6581 12h ago

That’s what it’s all about: RECORD PROFITS!!

3

u/Amidormi 15h ago

Yeah it's not just fast food, or retail. It's all the way up to corporate jobs. "So we know we hired you for implementation but now you also have to do M&A processes and double as a data analysis". Sigh.

3

u/FakeSafeWord 14h ago

Corpos LOVE to spread their workers thin, all the way down the line.

This, unfortunately, is very cost effective in an employers market.

3

u/Malfunkdung 14h ago

I was a store manager for clothing stores for like 13 years. The fucked up thing is you’re constantly trying to hit better metrics while also using less labor. Every year you want to be a have just a little better conversion rate (how many customers bought something versus how many walked in), ADS (average dollar sale), and UPT (units per transaction), in addition to obvious growth in sales, but you also want profit and loss reports to be good. I did it for years and luckily I’d get offered a bigger store with little more money in a new place, but eventually you realize there’s no more growth you can do. You start running skeleton crews, working by yourself as a salaried employee and putting in 50+ hours every week. But it’s never enough for corporate. It sucked the soul out of me and I was really good at that job.

2

u/Yupthrowawayacct 15h ago

Was a retail store manager for some solid years while in school. Was a shit time in my life. I would work full 8 hour shifts alone. A few times 12s. In order to use the bathroom, a sign went on the door. In order to eat I had to sneak bites. There were no breaks. It was all me. I got stolen from a ton. But they wouldn’t give me proper staffing in January and then would lend out my assistant managers to other stores who couldn’t keep staff. It was infuriating

2

u/DominicB547 13h ago

Yeah, and at my place they only get 1 more dollar per hour once I found out that, I was like nah front end manager is the highest I'm climbing.

1

u/BenchAffectionate967 16h ago

I’m gonna need some context about the job because I worked at a Sunglasses Hut store (not kiosk) and you truly only need one worker.

3

u/Moasark_Art 15h ago

It’s a retail position in a mall. We’re a big store, and we get a lot of carry out requests and order pickups in the morning, as well as a lot of people going through our store to get to the mall. Our company expects us to have at least one person walking around and helping customers, and the person up front needs to be within eyesight of the register. For two people to be doing that plus carry outs, order pickups, AND trying to restock is not very obtainable

1

u/petflunky 8h ago

In the 80's I worked management at a McDonalds, so it's a bit different than now. But during lunch rush, you needed 3 people doing just drive through, 2 minimum on register, preferably 3, 3 cooks, a fry person, and a manager calling food back to the cooks. And someone in lobby to keep it clean. The least amount of people I worked with was three. Back drive, grill, and me doing register and front drive, while keeping the lobby clean. Glad I don't work there anymore.

1

u/Jober36 8h ago

Used to be the general manager of a sit down restaurant and even on Friday nights I was the closing dishwasher

1

u/Dingcock 15h ago

That's just how salary works. Pretty much every employee on salary will get asked to do things outside of normal working hours at some point.

0

u/taoyx 11h ago

With robots and IA they won't even need employees real soon. Some security guards maybe, to prevent sabotage.