I worked for Burger King from 1998 to 2000 and again from 2008 to March 2011. During 98′ – 2000, Burger King was a franchise company and they actually cared about the customers. The store I worked for was well staffed and the managers were friendly and employees were encouraged to go out of their way for their customers. Food was made quickly and efficiently and the kitchen crew was utilized for cleaning tasks during downtime but always had enough employees during busy periods. Everything ran rather smoothly and no one every felt overwhelmed. The parking lot, bathrooms and dining room were routinely taken care of and occasionally mopped or scrubbed as needed.
Since then Burger King has gone was taken over the corporate because corporate felt that we weren’t bringing in enough revenue and doing things the way that they had wanted us to. This dramatically changed the company. Labor became an issue when minimum wage was increased. The breakfast and lunch shifts at Burger King make the most of their business, so the dinner shift became the scapegoat, therefore instead of having enough staff we were always told that labor was too high and people had to be sent home early.
As a result, employees complained about working less than 15-20 hours a week. After the dinner rush is when most of the cleaning begins, but since the rush was over and people were sent home, it was generally up to 2 employees to take care of filtering the friers, a sinkful of greasy dishes some of which were left there from lunch, a fry hopper machine, a meat well, a floor littered with sesame seeds and other random pieces of food because no one had the time to sweep up.
So while one person is taking care of that the other person is dropping their own meat, fries, making sandwiches on the burger board and the specialty board for both the in-house and drive-thru orders, while a manager and an expeditor complain that its taking too long for you to wrap, microwave, and mark your sandwiches. The night would get progressively worse as the person who was supposed to finish the pre-close cleaning work would generally get sent home because again labor could not go above 15% even with managers not on the clock because they were salary. The dining room person was generally scheduled to go home before the dining room closed so if it wasn’t clean by then the manager had to take care of it.
The drive thru had to be stocked up before the drive-thru person went home. Meanwhile breaks were also supposed to be given out to everyone, which generally didn’t happen. They gave breaks to the minors because it’s a legality but generally no one in the kitchen got a break because of the dinner rush and needing to get some cleaning done, if a break was given it would only cause the closer to fall behind. The specialty board was supposed to stay up until 10pm, but since the pre-closer was generally scheduled to leave at 9pm, leaving only the closer in the kitchen, the specialty board was generally broken down between 7-8pm which we would get yelled at for doing, but the dishes needed to be taken care of because there wasn’t time for the closer to do them later.
The closer would have to take care of cleaning the broiler which was supposed to stay up until the store closed but was generally taken apart, cleaned and put back together 2 hours before closing. The closer also took care of spraying the floors, wiping the grease off the hoods that covered the broiler and friers, the back of the friers, the shake machine parts which were taken apart by the manager and finally the closing dishes. Basically this meant that if you ordered anything 10 minutes to close you would get a burger that had been marinating in its own fat for over 2 hours or chicken or fish that had probably been cooked before the specialty board was broken down.
We were always told that we were wasting too much product, we were supposed to follow a kitchen minder system that constantly told us to throw out product because it had exceeded the hold time settings, rather than keep someone waiting for fresh product to cook for up 5 minutes or hear the manager complain about the waste, often times product was kept beyond its hold time, this included everything, fries, meat, chicken, fish, etc.
Also the cash handling procedures were never properly followed and resulted in many unexplained shortages. A cashier was to verify their draw before their shift and before they left, often times cashiers were told to get off the clock before they had a chance to verify their drawers or there were other people in their drawer which was also not supposed to happen. Many times a drawer would be assigned to a manager that had already left for the day, after they had left just for someone to have a drawer or if the drive-thru person was on break.
Many of the practices above were never present when I worked for the company as a franchise between 1998 – 2000. If you go to a high volume Burger King chances are that they are a ‘show store’ or a training store which means that they follow the corporate policies a bit more closely than the lower volumes stores that I described. You can generally notice the difference in the speed of service, quality of food and the amount of employees.
I have worked at Burger King for 17 years……Yes a fool I am ….no raises for even the hardest working employees for the past 3 years, no vacation, sick,or personal time. I feel that there is no care for the employees at all. I see the store falling apart and really don’t care anymore. Eventually it will only be the minimum wage workers who aren’t going to care about anything more than what they have to do……and all this new stuff the stores are getting…ridiculous waste of money…BK can never come up with their own ideas.
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