Technology

I work 1 day a week at Wendys because life is expensive.

25 years ago when I was a teenager, any fast food place had 2 sources of orders. The ones in the drive thru, and the ones in the lobby ordering at the counter. Thats it.

Now, the majority of the orders are doordash/ubereats/ect. Except here's the thing.

It's 4:12pm. You're at home, you order a daves double. Fair enough. It comes onto our screen at 4:12. Your order is probably ready for pickup by 4:14.

At 4:12 your order also went out to the drivers. They choose if they accept or not. I've seen completed orders literally sit there for HOURS. And I don't mean like 2 hours, but really it was 90 minutes.....

No. My one day a week shift starts at 3pm. It runs until 1am. I've seen orders that have a reciept printed at 11:30am. I'm showing up at 3pm. The order gets picked up at 9pm.

You know thats not even safe to eat at that point. It wasn't in a refridgerator. It was just on a counter. Sitting out. I've seen frostys get picked up that were just a cup of liquid.

One other thing I noticed. When I was 16, front counter basically never stopped. And if it did, it was like 2 minutes.

Drive thru used to always have a line out the parking lot, sometimes into the street backed up.

These days? It's like maybe 10 customers total in the lobby for my shift. And the drive thru gets a customer or doordash pickup every few minutes. No lines.

And the reason is simple. There's two reasons.

First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well....without direct control of the services, you're kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can't get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You're allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control? Do you even know if he's washed his hands? Wendys knows that I wash my hands several times a day. Wendys knows that the sandwich maker wears gloves when handling food. Wendys has no way to say if Joe the doordasher masturbated in his car 30 seconds after picking up an order. A LOT of people don't like that, and instead just stopped ordering fast food.

The second reason business has collapsed, is the portions. Everything is smaller, and they've found ways to make it shittier. Reduce quality. Reduce portions. Cut corners any way you can.

Wendys has two patty sizes for their burgers. A JR and a single. The single is bigger. I had a woman in the lobby a few months ago break my heart. She comes up, and politely tries to say we gave her a JR instead of a single. So we got our gloves on, opened it up, and.....it was a single.

When we told her that was what a single looked like these days, she was devistated. She asked "Whys it so small? It didn't used to be so small...."

And she's right. A single today is 6oz meat patty. A jr is 4oz meat patty. Those are weights before they cook. When I was a teenager, JR was 5oz, and single was either 8 or 10oz. I can't remember.

This means a single today is almost as small as a JR 25 years ago. They wonder why young people don't eat at burger shops like the boomers did in the 60s. It's because young people aren't interested in eating that crap. Then they wonder why the boomers aren't interested in eating there anymore either. It's because they're old enough to remember the burgers dave thomas sold when he was alive. They look like premium options compared to today. And even if you adjust for inflation, the burgers back then were still 40% cheaper.

So combine the two reasons. And you got a situation where you order food, from a fast food place. You pay $30 on an order that would have been $8 if you picked it up yourself. It gets to you soggy, cold, and bacteria filled 7 hours later. Would you ever order it again?

This is why the entire fast food business is collapsing.