McFail

Since I was in a hurry to get where I needed to go this evening, I decided to stop at a McDonald's in the Stroud, OK travel plaza. It seemed quiet enough when I walked inside, but after I went to the bathroom, it seemed like at least one full bus had pulled in, if not two. However, I would have figured that the staff would have been able to handle it, having been on the other side of the counter. Only... not. At first, there were three cashiers up front, but two of the three simply walked away from the registers without warning or explanation; they each simply left half a dozen customers standing in line when they abandoned the position. As such, it took me 35 minutes just to place an order. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but it was just before 8 o'clock when I got there and my receipt shows 8:32PM.

During this time, there was only one person up front. There were at least three people working the drive through even though it had fewer orders; none of these people came over to help. There were also plenty of people in the grill area making sandwiches; because they were working so quickly in the back, food was getting cold before the front counter customers received their orders. Heck, there were two people making french fries. But through all this, nobody came over to help out up front. The manager was nowhere to be seen, except for one instance where another customer demanded to speak to her; the manager simply gave a terse apology and went back to doing apparently nothing.

When I got to the counter, the cashier seemed clueless. I asked for a large #3 with mayonnaise to go; I wasn't in the mood to try and order anything more complicated and I no longer had the time to sit down and eat. This simple order, however, left the cashier unable to actually ring it up. I have no idea what the problem was, but she had to get help from another employee just to enter my order. Even once I ordered, however, it took another several minutes for me to get my food. There were ten orders on the front counter screen (eight displayed, plus two pending), which left it impossible for anyone behind the counter to figure out who needed what.

Even once I finally received my food, about five minutes later, things still weren't right. I found I'd been given a medium order of fries and a medium drink instead of the large I'd ordered. I told another employee about this and she simply snapped at me to tell me to wait a moment. When she returned about fifteen seconds later, I explained the problem; the employee told the still-confused cashier to fix it and walked off. Every person I dealt with in the store was exceptionally rude. I'd add names, but conveniently, nobody was wearing name tags. Behind the counter, the floor was a mess; fries, cups, and stray sandwich wrappers littered the ground. The order of fries I received was cold and unsalted, the drink was watered down, and my sandwich had condiments oozing off the side before I'd even opened the box.

In short, my experience at this location could have been a training video on how not to manage a McDonald's. Nearly everything that could have been done wrong was done wrong. Every person in the store on that shift needs to be retrained, particularly the front counter order taker and the manager on duty.

I'm going to pass this along to McDonald's corporate, in a slightly abridged form. I'm willing to bet that I won't even get a response, but it's at least worth a try.