From a Children’s Paradise to a Workhorse Restaurant: McDonald’s 90-Second High-Pressure Cycle

From a Children’s Paradise to a Workhorse Restaurant

Jiang Ke: I have always been interested in the food-service industry. When I was looking for a job in March 2025, I even asked DeepSeek how I could systematically learn about the food-service industry. It recommended several large fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, KFC, Yoshinoya and Lao Xiang Ji, and also said that McDonald’s is known as the “Whampoa Military Academy” of the food-service world. At the time, I happened to see that McDonald’s was recruiting on a job-search app, so I decided to give it a try.

I have many friends around me who are particularly fond of McDonald’s, but I am not the sort of person who, in the conventional sense, belongs to the so-called McDonald’s cult; I only manage to eat at McDonald’s a few times a year. Before I worked at McDonald’s, I had little understanding of it; my main impression was simply that it was a very popular restaurant. After working at McDonald’s and taking part in actual operations, I realised how enormous its overall scale was, and I gained a clearer understanding of its status as the world’s No. 1 food-service company.

Yu Yang: I don’t eat at McDonald’s very often either, but in my childhood, I did feel that McDonald’s was a vibrant, modern space. Lots of young children went there to play, McDonald’s aunties looked after them, and there were clown performances. But in recent years, I have felt that McDonald’s has become a relatively quiet place. The “workhorses” say nothing; they just keep on eating. When you actually start working at McDonald’s, what is it like?

Jiang Ke: Yes, over the years I have felt that people have a consistent impression of McDonald’s. As a child, you might be rewarded with a McDonald’s meal only if you had done well in an exam. Why did I say I did not eat there very often before? It was because in my hometown, a county town in Guangxi, there used to be very few McDonald’s in that area. But there were many knock-offs, of the “Mcxx” kind. Since the genuine McDonald’s arrived, I have noticed that the average spend per person is fairly high. In the past, a meal at McDonald’s cost more than 20 yuan. A meal might cost a little over 20 yuan now as well, but overall prices have risen, so the service you get for the same per-person price is certainly different. McDonald’s positioning is not the same as it used to be; it used to be a very warm community.

Yu Yang: Now it feels more like a workhorse restaurant.

Jiang Ke: The generation of that time has grown up and become the new workhorses.

Li Ye: McDonald’s in the past was a bit like today’s Xibei; it was the choice of this generation of parents. They were both family-oriented, and staff would specifically take children and play with them inside. That is why prices tend to be a little higher.

Jiang Ke: Right, all of these additional services come at a price. If you set up a children’s play area in the restaurant, you would definitely have to consider rent and the use of space, and you would also need one or two staff members there to look after the children. All of this involves costs, and as things stand, it seems unlikely to be feasible.

It Turns Out McDonald’s Is a Small Factory

Yu Yang: The McDonald’s back kitchen looks open-plan, and customers can see into it from outside. In your actual workflow, how does this space feel? How many areas can the McDonald’s space be divided into in total?

Jiang Ke: The simplest job is to deal with customers on the dining floor, clearing plates, mopping floors, or taking orders and asking for favourable reviews. Apart from the dining floor, for new staff, the first station they learn is making drinks; in McDonald’s jargon, this is called the “C line”. Making drinks is actually quite complicated: five or six types of drinks, different amounts of ice, and you also have to keep up with the pace of serving orders. Some employees in their sixties may not be assigned to the drink-making area. This is a fast-paced station. Because basically every order at McDonald’s contains at least one drink, when it is especially busy, you are almost constantly making drinks.

Apart from the drinks area, the most important one is our production area, such as the area for assembling burgers, and the fry area, where the chicken wings are fried. It is broadly divided like this; when it is especially busy, it can actually be divided even more finely. Within the fry area, because McDonald’s chicken wings are coated on the spot, there is a dedicated wing station for coating wings, and a station for frying the fries, called the fries station.

For example, the production area may have three people: one person puts the different burger buns into the bun warmer according to the orders, and this station is where the order is started. Another is responsible for grilling the meat, and this is the grill area. The third person handles assembly. This is the most standard assembly line at McDonald’s. In practice, this standard is rarely met. If it is not busy, one person does all of these tasks.

Yu Yang: Then, as a duty manager, would you keep working at one particular station, or do you oversee the whole operation?

Jiang Ke: In principle, a duty manager should not be stuck at a station. For example, you cannot keep coating chicken wings in one place. You need to maintain overall control of the operation. The best-suited station for a duty manager is the serving station or, in other words, the consolidation station. From this station, you can see both the customers and the kitchen.

Yu Yang: From a workflow perspective, what do you do first when you arrive in the morning to get the day’s work started?

Jiang Ke: When I arrive at 5 in the morning, only the duty manager and one employee are there. To keep labour costs under control, not everyone needs to be present. At that time, there are relatively few orders. The duty manager does some administrative work, while a fairly all-round employee does some production work. First, all the machines and equipment have to be switched on. They need a warm-up period; for example, the coffee machine has to warm up for half an hour before it can run normally. This also includes the grill and the fryer; they both need a heating-up process.

The duty manager has to take temperature readings for all the freezers, cold rooms and chilled foods, around a dozen different temperatures, and then upload those temperatures to a system to check whether your equipment is up to standard. For example, to determine whether a thawed item is acceptable, you have to check whether its temperature is between 1–4 °C. The grilled chicken thigh, chicken wings and the chicken thigh in the Spicy Chicken Burger are three items that need to be thawed.

After the equipment has warmed up, our meat-grilling staff grill and fry the pork patties, beef patties and chicken patties used for breakfast, and these foods also need to have their temperatures checked at this point. They all have a temperature standard; chicken, for example, must be 165 °F. Once that standard is reached, the data is likewise uploaded to the system to prove that your grill is working properly. If a food-safety issue were to arise, we can say that there are various standards being implemented and that there are data records.

Li Ye: From what I have heard, it means that the duty manager, or really any employee working at McDonald’s, has to be a multitasker—the kind of person who has to do many things at once. For someone like me, who has ADHD and whose attention is already very scattered, could it be that I am actually very good at this kind of work?

Jiang Ke: Although the work is fragmented, you actually have to be very clear-headed. As you carry out one step, you must already have thought through the next, or even the step after, and worked out what exactly you need to do.

For example, between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m., only one employee and one duty manager are working, and it is another busy period. By then it is also close to closing time, so you are unlikely to have prepared a lot in advance. You therefore need to remember how much of each item you have on hand, and if you do not have enough, how long it takes to prepare each one: for example, chicken nuggets take 3 minutes to fry, chicken wings take 7 minutes to fry, and fries take 3 minutes to fry. In other words, you need to organise your work according to the orders and the different preparation times for various foods.

Li Ye: You have to keep a clear head and know what to fry first and what to grill later, so you can organise things properly and avoid getting flustered.

Jiang Ke: Yes, many customers cannot understand why you have no chicken wings. They may not realise that chicken wings need to be coated and fried on the spot. All they think is: “Wow, this is fast food, and I place an order only to have to wait more than ten minutes—you are really unreasonable.”

Li Ye: Then are there customers who just want to eat them straight after they are fried, and would they be willing to wait?

Jiang Ke: Many customers make this request. McDonald’s has a concept called Golden Quality. For fries, for example, once they have been fried they must be sold within 7 minutes; if they are over 7 minutes old, in principle they should be thrown away. But from the perspective of actual operations, I do not think any restaurant across Beijing or anywhere in China has met this so-called Golden Quality standard. The time window is simply too short: a batch of fries takes 3 minutes to fry, and they only have 7 minutes to be sold. There is not enough staff, and it is impossible to have someone dedicated to standing there watching the fries.

Yu Yang: It looks as if every step of working at McDonald’s is a standardised operation that requires cooperation with the machines, but in reality it also tests how you arrange your workflow. You mentioned earlier that the fryer temperature is fixed. In such a busy situation, could some things become scorched because they have been in too long?

Jiang Ke: McDonald’s equipment is quite intelligent. There are seven or eight different fryers, which can be set to different temperatures and corresponding times. For example, the frying time for fries is 3 minutes, at a temperature of 160 °C. When the time is up, it sounds a whistle, like “beep beep beep beep” or “VerVerVerVer”, and at that point you need to lift out the fry basket for the fries.

This kind of situation puts a certain amount of psychological pressure on us, because the sound is particularly shrill, like the whistles one can hear in many factories. In effect, it is trying to safeguard product quality through these measures. But if you stay in the fry area for a long time, you can feel a bit dizzy, because piercing sounds keep ringing out.

Yu Yang: It sounds as if McDonald’s back kitchen is like a small factory, and it is quite highly automated.

Jiang Ke: McDonald’s is indeed like a factory, not the ordinary kitchen as we understand it. This touches on a rather interesting piece of knowledge about McDonald’s. One day, a customer brought a piece of fruit over and asked, “Could you peel it for me?” We told him, “Sorry, we don’t have any knives here.” Yes, McDonald’s does not have knives. When lettuce reaches us, it is already cut into lettuce strips and packed in vacuum packaging. For example, there is a dedicated tomato slicer for cutting tomatoes.

“Crispy Fries Have No Sauce”

Yu Yang: Roughly, what proportion of a McDonald’s store’s overall orders are delivery orders?

Jiang Ke: In terms of order volume, a restaurant may have 700–800 dine-in orders, and the corresponding number of delivery orders is 100–200. But in terms of revenue, the average price per order for dine-in is around 27–30 yuan, while the average price per order for delivery is around 50 yuan. I don’t remember the details particularly accurately, but the average prices differ greatly, so in terms of revenue, delivery may account for around one-quarter to one-third.

Because the minimum order value for delivery is fairly high, it is impossible for an order of just a cup of cola or a single burger to be delivered. Some discounted combo meals are also not sold online; for example, the much-loved “broke person’s combo” cannot be ordered online.

Yu Yang: I used to see many McDonald’s delivery riders wearing red, but I have seen fewer recently. Does McDonald’s still have its own delivery riders now?

Jiang Ke: McDonald’s used to publicise that it had its own delivery riders, and many customers mistakenly thought we did too, but in fact, for cost reasons, McDonald’s now mainly works with third-party platforms such as Meituan, JD.com and Ele.me. These platforms assign store-based riders to McDonald’s, meaning there is a fixed number of riders at McDonald’s taking its orders, but their obligation to take those orders is certainly not as strong as that of McDonald’s own delivery riders in the past.

A common situation is that, when it is raining heavily, the price store-based riders get for taking an order is the same as the price they normally get, probably around 6.5 yuan or 7.2 yuan. But once it starts raining, the per-order price is soaring everywhere else. “Why should I come and take your McDonald’s order?” So at times like this many store-based riders do not take McDonald’s orders, and a severe shortage of delivery capacity occurs. At that point, McDonald’s is no different from all the other stores: it outsources the order to all the platforms.

On one occasion, it was hailing, and many riders did not want to run deliveries. Nobody even took that order for an hour, but we had a lot of orders, so all we could do was call customers one by one to apologise, asking whether they wanted to cancel or wait a little longer. Customers would say, “Why not just have your own riders deliver it?” Then we had to explain to them from the beginning that we currently do not have riders of our own.

Yu Yang: Then do you get complaints from delivery customers?

Jiang Ke: Our order volume is fairly large. Including delivery, we get around 1,000 orders a day, and complaints are a regular occurrence. The most common complaint is when customers tell you face to face, “I feel the fries aren’t quite OK” or “this meat is a bit cold”. This means we have not observed the Golden Quality mentioned earlier, so we immediately remake it for them; the duty manager also has the authority to do so. If delivery customers call to complain, we may agree to give them a voucher.

All of the above are complaints that do not involve the McDonald’s system. Complaints that involve the system are divided into three levels. The first level is that, every time an order is placed via the mini program or app, the customer receives service feedback, and that feedback is recorded in our McDonald’s system. If a complaint says there is a hygiene problem, it will be reported to headquarters through this channel, which will then affect your store’s score, and this score in turn affects the store manager’s bonus. I do not know whether you have ever encountered employees at McDonald’s asking you for a positive review; this is to boost the store’s score.

Jiang Ke: The second level is receiving complaints on delivery apps or Dianping; we look after the ratings on these platforms. The higher my rating on a delivery platform is, the more push exposure I get, and this actually affects delivery revenue.

The third level is calling McDonald’s complaint hotline to make a complaint. Within McDonald’s, this kind of situation is even more urgent; it requires you to analyse and deal with the matter immediately. Once, I had a customer complain that I had not put sauce on his fries, but he had ordered crispy fries, and in principle crispy fries do not come with sauce. I explained to him that crispy fries have no sauce and that, if he wanted sauce, he could add a note to his order next time; I could give him as many bags of ketchup as he wanted, or I could have a delivery rider bring him some ketchup right away this time. But he would not back down and wanted to call to complain about me. Then we immediately received a call from headquarters about the matter. In the end, though, the matter was resolved: as long as you have solid grounds, headquarters will not record it in the system as the restaurant’s responsibility.

Yu Yang: It sounds as if, when it comes to complaints, McDonald’s is relatively more reasonable than current food and beverage businesses, such as delivery platforms or tea and coffee shops.

The 90-Second High-Pressure Cycle

Yu Yang: Every time I order at McDonald’s, seeing the staff working together to put out the food inexplicably gives me an exhilarating feeling, as though you are all fighting a battle together. Perhaps some people feel the same way. But in fact, we do not really understand what kind of pressure you face during peak dining hours.

Jiang Ke: Rush periods are indeed quite exhilarating. They mainly fall into two kinds: one that I can anticipate, and one that is completely unforeseeable and comes out of the blue. For foreseeable rush periods—say, breakfast from 7 to 9, lunch from 11 to 13, and dinner from 5 to 7—and similar busy times, we first arrange more staff and stock up more; for example, ingredients such as vegetables and meat are kept ready in the nearby freezers, or we fry more fries, pour more cola, and coat more chicken wings. Generally, with these preparations in place, things come together quickly, and we can immediately pass the meals to the customers at the front. The whole process feels smooth and easy.

But if 10 orders suddenly flood in, and at that moment you find that you can’t find the burgers and there are no fries left, a serious bottleneck occurs. Because our standard fry time for a batch of fries is 3 minutes, if I have not a single fry left now, but customers coming to McDonald’s usually also want fries, that means none of these orders can be completed during those 3 minutes.

Jiang Ke: McDonald’s has a standard meal-serving time of 90 seconds. I don’t know whether you have had this happen at McDonald’s: your phone tells you that your meal is ready, but when you reach the counter you find it has not actually been prepared yet, and then the staff member says to you, “No problem, just wait until I call you to come again.” This is because the system requires orders to be completed within 90 seconds. To meet the 90-second target, I can only take a photo first, and then call you to come and pick it up once I have finished it. If the customer is in a hurry, they may think this is a deceptive act: “It isn’t even ready yet, so why did you call me?” This kind of rule gives customers a very unfriendly experience.

Li Ye: In fact, it is not friendly for workers either, because in effect the employee first notifies the customer, and then the customer in turn pressures the employee to hurry. It gives the sense that the conflict is being shifted onto workers and consumers.

Jiang Ke: It certainly can cause some conflict, especially during peak periods, but there is nothing to be done. This 90 seconds is effectively a hard standard, and you can only break this 90-second standard if you are already completely swamped on that day.

Yu Yang: It sounds as if you are in a highly saturated working state every day. Then what are your pay and benefits like?

Jiang Ke: Pre-tax, it is 5,000 yuan; after deductions for the five social insurances and one housing fund, take-home pay is just over 4,000 yuan. Actually, by Beijing standards, this pay is still quite low. The hourly wage is around 21–22 yuan. It may have been raised once at the end of 2025, to around 23 yuan. And your monthly working hours cannot exceed 200 hours, so your pay is basically at the level of just over 4,000 yuan.

– This is Foodthink’s 826th original article –

Editor: Yu Yang

Layout: Ming Lin

  Scan the QR code to send a tip and support original food knowledge  

▼

▼

Click a keyword to access more article collections.

Seeds | Agricultural Technology | Policy | Fermentation | Nutrition | Fruit | Fisheries | Events | Recruitment | Food Delivery | Wet Market | Livestock Farming | Food Talk | Sharing Session | Book Club | Harvest Festival | Smallholder Stories | Climate Change | Rural Development | Cooperative Economy | Urban Farmers | Food Safety | Digital Technology | Biodiversity | Pandemic and Food | False Solutions | Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme

Beijing | Hebei | Shanghai | Guangdong | Guangxi | Henan | Sichuan | Jiangxi | Xinjiang | Shaanxi | Hong Kong | Chongqing | Zhejiang | Jiangsu | Guizhou | Taiwan | Inner Mongolia | Philippines | Canada | Russia | Mexico | Italy | United States | United Kingdom | Germany | Netherlands | Thailand | Sweden | Japan