I worked at a McDonald’s as a shift manager.
On my shifts, if I notice things are going bad in grill and they can’t keep up, I help out. We have two sides with the second one being three steps away from where we bag orders. If I need nuggets and I see they’re slammed, I don’t scream at them about it over and over, I put on some gloves and get the nuggets. If I have to remake food quick, I’ll go remake it instead of having the customers wait forever because they have a shit ton of orders. If side 2 is slammed and the only person on it is struggling, I help them. We’re right by the interstate so we get a ton of business.
We’ve been struggling with staff for the longest, we’re down to a few managers, and the people we do have isn’t able to keep up well.
Today I was support for someone else’s shift AND my boss was there. I was put on side two and all the orders were coming to my side, I mentioned it, it literally shows on the screen what side has an order. The line is all the way to the road yet I’m keeping the store times low with food damn near on my own. I did get help though, after an hour, after the rush, and finally the glitch ended. Then I had to go on side 1, which had the grill and fried products but the guy they had was moving so slow that I had to still work my ass off to do most of his work while making food since the person wrapping doesn’t know how to make food yet. They were screaming at us for going too slow the entire time despite knowing what was going on. Hardly helping out at all. And then they shoved me up front to cover the shift manager’s break with little service workers while my boss dipped to the back office. Ok fine, but the shift manager isn’t making sure her shift is going smoothly and instead slowly doing the very thing that the support manager is supposed to do and checking product but without helping at all. When I do it, I do it with haste while making sure that the up front is good and that my shift manager isn’t struggling.
This is an ongoing issue, it’s like a lot of the salaried managers just don’t care to do more while we’re all dying. One of them actually stepped up and started to, but unfortunately I wasn’t working with her today.
At the end of it all I’m very visibly unwell and haven’t had a chance to just breathe. We still have our next expected 2 hour rush coming up that I’m the one that has to stay and work that, not them. We are the lowest paying store in the area now, we hardly keep enough people to keep up with demand and as managers, it should be our job to keep our workers from overworking themselves and quitting, but they don’t care, they never even care whenever I mention that I’m about to fall out, I’m getting stressed, or problems like that glitch. They look at me like I’m stupid, even though they tell me how great of a job I do.
I told my boss today that I have to go home, because my heart is hurting and I feel like I’m about to fall out, my vision is straight up warping. My boss explained to me about how she helped (you know after the rush), but she wasn’t the one running around working things out, it was ME. She told me that if I leave then to never come back, I told her that I’m not killing myself to work there and good luck.
At the end of it all, it’s me that gets screwed over. Either I stay and potentially fall out, or leave and struggle while finding a new job, but considering they don’t even pay me enough to eat enough that I’m not rapidly losing weight because I’m starving outside of work, that I can’t even afford to go to the doctor to fix my health issues that are getting worse and that I’ve told them about even while living with my dad and paying bills, or not getting my paid vacation for two years because I came right before the start of this one, you gotta wonder if it’s even worth it.
If working there is legitimately killing me, why stay there? Now I gotta figure out what to do next, but I hope they enjoy losing one of their best managers while everyone else hardly puts in any of the effort I do to make the store run smoothly. I fucking knew getting manager of the month was a bad sign.
TL;DR: Upper Management hardly does anything while I’m running around to support them. I have worsening health issues, they know this. Heart started hurting, vision started warping, the post title.