Back in the day when I worked at a very busy McDonald’s we would be serving about 1000 orders an hour over lunch time on a Saturday. This was achieved by batch cooking the burgers 12 regular, 6 Mac/quarters at a time on a basically continuous basis, it then went in the chute or production bin (determined where the wrap and call person was based) for the till people to take and serve to their customers as soon as they had placed their order (obviously grills would take longer and sometimes the burger might take a minute to come) allowing quick turnover. I would have had probably 9 people working the grills on those days, 7 working two lots of 10:1 grills and 2 working the 4:1 grill, then probably two on fries, 3 on chicken/fish and 1 or 2 on back room + floating. We’d be producing a tray of burgers every 60 seconds or so ( patties took if I remember 42-44 seconds at 182c) and a tray of quarters about every 2 or so minutes (118 seconds cooking time).
We would then have maybe 14 tills with half a dozen or more runners backing them up to get sometimes upto 100 customers through a till in an hour.
Whilst generally the job was **** those couple of hours were pretty cool, but the days of a 12-6-6 (or even a 9-4-4) continuous are long gone.
So yep food used to be cooked and then held for upto “10” mins the the chute/bin and now the meat/chicken/fish etc are cooked and stored and then assembled when ordered.
I feel the main culprit is just the number of products now offered as the quality isn’t better, the speed of food delivery is slower and the human interaction aspect has completely disappeared.
The days of walking into a busy McDonald’s and ordering a cheeseburger and walking out 5 seconds later are long gone, especially if say a few people have ordered before you because even though you just have a cheeseburger and they have 7 happy meals and 9 main meals theirs will be fully put together before your order is even looked at, rather than your server turning round and taking that cheeseburger from a waiting supply.
If you read all that well done, not sure what got into me especially as I wrote it in a phone whilst in bed.
