From Scheduling Specialists to Shared Store Managers: How Does McDonald’s Turn People into the System’s “Living Body”?

Foodthink Says

If Part One took us into McDonald’s kitchen and revealed a small factory running at breakneck speed in 90-second cycles, this follow-up will show us how that factory is managed and kept going.

From price anchoring in combo meal design to ever-shrinking store spaces; from scheduling specialists and shared store managers to intelligent systems that try to predict everything, McDonald’s is pursuing maximum efficiency through a highly calibrated operating system.

But within this system, people remain the greatest variable. Standardised processes, digital tools and KPIs turn every employee into part of the machinery, yet they can never fully replace human experience, judgement and on-the-spot responsiveness.

This article is adapted from the 61st episode of the “Food Talk” podcast. We once again invited Jiang Ke, a former McDonald’s shift manager, to chat about the business logic behind a box of fries and a rota, and about how, in a fast-food system that puts efficiency above all, workers are quantified, managed, and yet find ways to coexist with that system. As consumers, behind every swift order placed and every meal collected on time lies a vast web of labour powering this enormous machine.

This Episode’s Guest

Jiang Ke | A food-industry novice who loves analysing stores, food and operations. Enjoys meals with Brother Yong’s videos.

This Episode’s Hosts

Yu Yang | Foodthink editor, who as a child got “beaten up” for insisting on having McDonald’s.

Li Ye | An ADHD-er who has played Airplane Chef on an iPad, wrapped shawarma, and run a breakfast shop.

Large Fries, Medium Fries, Small Fries — Which Fry Should I Choose?

Yu Yang: During your time working there, did you get to see the cost prices of McDonald’s ingredients?

Jiang Ke: Actually, as a shift manager you already have access to the cost price of every ingredient, and they’re all consistently low. Why don’t you pick a single item you like ordering?

Li Ye: Fries.

Jiang Ke: Fries are one of those things that’s not so easy to pin down, because each staff member tends to give a slightly different amount. The standard portion is defined as filling the bag until there’s no empty space left at the top. But in practice, with that standard, customers actually end up with less than they’d expect.

Li Ye: Here comes my favourite question — large, medium or small fries: which one gives you the best value?

Jiang Ke: If you order them à la carte, none of them are really worth it. If the selling price is 12 or 14 yuan, the cost might just be over one yuan. On pure ingredient cost alone, it’s remarkably low. But if you get fries as part of a combo meal, the per-portion cost works out to around seven or eight yuan, which is relatively better value.

Li Ye: So is there much difference in volume between the large, medium and small sizes?

Jiang Ke: It really depends on how each person serves them. Student part-timers, for instance, will keep stuffing fries into the bag. A lot of shift managers see that and think, goodness gracious, that’s already enough for two portions.

Yu Yang: That really upends what I assumed. I thought McDonald’s was a thoroughly standardised operation — that only little cafés or university canteens had wobbly-hand aunties and uncles doling out uneven portions. I never expected McDonald’s to have its own inconsistencies.

Jiang Ke: Yes, there are actually standards for how much goes into each portion of fries and the approximate weight of each soft-serve ice cream. But it all comes down to staff training. If the training isn’t thorough enough, they’ll just think, I’ll stuff the bag full and call it done, or I’ll swirl the ice cream until the lid won’t close, and that’ll do.

Li Ye: Right — so we really ought to thank the university students.

From One Burger to a Four-Piece Combo: The Psychology of McDonald’s Pricing

Yu Yang: Let me ask a rather practical question — what’s the best way to order at McDonald’s so it works out cheaper?

Jiang Ke: Best not to order à la carte at McDonald’s — it really is expensive. Say you order a burger: a chicken burger might be 22 yuan, a Coke is about 10, fries are 12, and that already adds up to 36 yuan. In practice, very few people do order à la carte anyway. Most people go for a combo meal and feel they’re saving a lot. Take the three-piece combo we just mentioned — if you order a combo and add an order of Chicken McNuggets, it’s still just over 30 yuan. But you think to yourself, “A portion of nuggets is 12 yuan on its own,” and suddenly it feels like you’ve saved over ten yuan out of thin air!

Essentially, it’s about inflating the unit price so the combo feels especially good value, which drives up purchase rates. This is a very important psychological concept: price anchoring. Many chain restaurants use a similar unit-price-uplift strategy to encourage spending. You might start out wanting just a burger, say just over 20 yuan, and fancy a drink too, but burger plus Coke à la carte is already 30 — so why not add a few more yuan and upgrade to a four-piece combo, right?

Secondly, if you genuinely eat there every day, the McCard is still worth getting. But if it’s only a few times a week — say once a week — and you like a bit of variety, I’d recommend a cheeky hack: have someone on Xianyu or Taobao place the order for you, and you’ll get the McDonald’s Gold Card pricing.

Li Ye: And this price-anchoring effect also boosts customer satisfaction. Everyone’s happy with combos — the producer makes a profit, and the consumer feels they’ve scored a win too.

Yu Yang: The Flexi Meal at McDonald’s went up in price a while back — the Double Cheeseburger and the Filet-O-Fish are now 14 yuan 9.

Li Ye: Some people have said McDonald’s should just switch to making macarons, since the burgers are the same size. Others reckon the meat patties inside have gotten thinner too — is that actually true?

Jiang Ke: I’m not really up to speed on this latest price rise, since I’ve already left. But from what I understood before, the patties are all the same — whether it’s the meat in a Double Cheeseburger or a Big Mac, it’s the same beef, the same patty, the same thickness. The reason people feel they’ve shrunk might be that the supplier started making them smaller at source; I suspect that’s possible. But there’s an even more likely explanation: the burger doesn’t meet the Golden Quality Standard (the Golden Quality Standard means that if a burger goes unsold for over ten minutes, or fries go unsold for over seven minutes, they get binned). A patty is at its largest the moment it comes off the grill, and once it’s sitting in the warming cabinet it keeps shrinking. The moisture evaporates, the meat darkens or dries out, and the patty shrinks.

◉ The Flexi Meal, now priced at 14.9 yuan.

Yu Yang: It feels like years ago the Flexi Meal was 11 yuan 9, then it went to 12 yuan 9, then 13 yuan 9, and now it’s 14 yuan 9.

Jiang Ke: Right, the Flexi Meal is essentially McDonald’s cheapest combo meal. Ordering a Double Cheeseburger on its own costs 23 yuan, right? With the Flexi Meal, it’s only 14 yuan 9 — so it still sounds like a bargain.

Li Ye: I’ve figured out why a single Grilled Chicken Burger used to fill me up as a child — it’s because I was small and my stomach was small, so of course I was full. Now I feel it’s gotten smaller, and while it may genuinely have shrunk, the other possibility is simply that I’ve grown up.

Why Has McDonald’s Done Away with Toilets?

Li Ye: And in recent years I’ve noticed that so many McDonald’s branches no longer have toilets — you have to find a public toilet in a nearby office building. Is that another cost-cutting measure?

Jiang Ke: Yes. I mean, the old impression of McDonald’s was, wow, this restaurant is huge, so many seats, so spotless. But now, because McDonald’s is pushing into the lower-tier market and opening more outlets, their positioning has shifted too — from that grand, flagship feel to something more like an everyday necessity, and the stores have shrunk accordingly. Before, the dining area and counter together might have been five or six hundred square metres; now it’s just two hundred or so.

If it’s that small, there simply isn’t room for a toilet. And even in branches that do have one, opening it to the public means you need more staff to clean it. If it isn’t cleaned promptly, customers can file a complaint. McDonald’s has strict standards for toilet cleaning — a staff member must check at least every fifteen minutes, which is quite demanding on headcount. So doing away with toilets is part and parcel of their drive to cut costs and boost efficiency.

◉ Some McDonald’s restaurants used to have toilets, but no longer open them to the public. Image source: Jiang Ke

The More Stores, the Fewer Store Managers?

Yu Yang: During peak hours, who decides how many people staff the restaurant?

Jiang Ke: Staffing at McDonald’s is quite complex, because it’s not just the shift manager and full-time employees — beneath the full-timers there are lots of part-timers too. It’s a very intricate staffing system.

McDonald’s has a role called the “scheduling specialist”. We build the rota once a week, and every staff arrangement is adjusted according to sales — in other words, we schedule based on projected sales for each hour of each day the following week. For example, if tomorrow’s projected sales are 20,000 yuan, we work out the labour hours required from that figure — say, 150 labour hours. Then, excluding the shift manager on duty and the fixed-schedule full-time employees, we work out which part-timers can come in. Obviously, the allocation varies across different periods. Take a single lunch hour with projected sales of 3,000 yuan — that 3,000 needs to be matched to a corresponding allocation of labour hours. Essentially, sales determine the labour hours, and those hours map to full-time and part-time staff.

So for any given store, the variable is sales. You can project sales from historical data, but it’s very hard to get them right, especially when unexpected events happen — for instance, a school nearby is holding its sports day today. That kind of thing happens quite regularly. And the labour productivity figures are forecast on the assumption that each person has to do more than one person’s worth of work — there’s a labour productivity ratio in play. The minimum standard seems to require one person to do the work of 1.1 or 1.2 people. Even if you only expect one person to do one person’s work, that standard is still set by head office, and it’s hard to say whether it’s been set too low or too high.

Li Ye: So you could reference the 90-second service time standard.

Jiang Ke: Yes, that’s one of the most important metrics for the whole restaurant’s operation — it ties into bonuses and all sorts of things.

Yu Yang: When you couldn’t cope during a rush, did you ever request additional staff?

Jiang Ke: We did. If peak hours got too hectic, you could tell the scheduling specialist that you needed extra hands tomorrow or next Friday. They would then adjust the rota depending on whether your sales were genuinely higher.

Yu Yang: How mobile are the part-time staff? Do they typically work at one store, or do they go between several branches?

Jiang Ke: The concept they’re pushing now is “shared staff”. It’s not just part-timers — full-time employees can be shared across a few neighbouring branches too. If one of those stores is assigned to you, you have to go. For example, if a brand-new store has fewer staff than it needs, neighbouring branches will send employees to support it.

In practice it’s not just regular staff — managers and higher-level managers are shared too. McDonald’s calls this sharing concept within its system “NGO”: shared store managers, shared staff. So how does it work? Before, each store had one store manager. But with McDonald’s rapid expansion in recent years — its target for 2025, for instance, was to open 1,000 new stores in China — well, when I joined, I thought, if there are 1,000 new stores, there must be lots of store manager openings. I assumed their management trainee programme would be solid enough, so I signed on. But in the end I found there were actually fewer store managers than before. One store manager was expected to oversee several stores — that’s a shared store manager, and the title changed to “Super store manager” as well. More stores, fewer store managers.

Yu Yang: Has pay changed at all because of that?

Jiang Ke: I’ve heard that managing one extra store gets you an extra one or two thousand a month. The base pay for managing a single store was probably just over 10,000 yuan to start with. But it varies from region to region.

Li Ye: When they cut the number of store manager positions, did they add new roles underneath to absorb part of the store manager’s former responsibilities? After all, a Super store manager is overseeing many stores at once.

Jiang Ke: So that ties into adjustments at every level of the NGO system. A Super store manager now has to run several stores, but if you go by what one store manager used to handle, there’s no way they can cover everything. So those responsibilities get pushed further down to the other managers within the store. Below the store manager are the Salaried managers, who take on more of the work the store manager used to do. And whatever the Salaried managers used to handle gets pushed one more level down — onto the shift managers (Hourly managers) to pick up a portion of. So across the board, everyone’s workload has increased.

◉ Nowadays, trays pile up on McDonald’s waste bins far more readily than they used to. Image source: Jiang Ke

Yu Yang: It still comes down to a cost-cutting and efficiency strategy — the roles being trimmed are the mid-to-senior ones. Store managers command higher pay, so cutting the number of store managers and redistributing the work to the lower-paid shift managers brings down the overall cost.

Jiang Ke: Exactly. Opening a new store and hiring a fresh store manager might cost 10,000 in salary, but getting an existing store manager to take on the extra duties only costs another one or two thousand, and the store still runs — so you save on labour costs. It’s the same with scheduling: previously the rota was built at each individual restaurant, but later they felt that having a dedicated scheduling role at every single store was too expensive. So now they set up a scheduling specialist role across a whole area — say, twenty stores — which sounds like it should save headcount. But in practice, first of all, the specialist can’t factor in individual strengths when building the rota; they can only work from the information in the system. So the schedules they produce rarely reflect what the restaurant actually needs day to day.

Yu Yang: It feels like McDonald’s is taking an operations-research approach — trying to maximise efficiency and profit through top-down planning. But in day-to-day practice, once the scheduling specialist has built the rota, surely your store still has to readjust it anyway, which could even take extra time.

Jiang Ke: In principle, having a scheduling specialist is probably the more scientific way of doing things. But in practice, the specialist can only schedule based on the tags the system has for each employee. The system records which courses that person has completed in McDonald’s learning platform — pouring drinks, frying chips, wrapping burgers — and that’s taken as proof they possess those skills, so the scheduling specialist can assign them to those stations.

McDonald’s expects new employees to finish the basics of four or five stations within about ten days. In reality that’s unlikely, especially for part-timers. Employees are required to complete the theory, and they tick “Completed” in the system, but they may not actually have mastered those skills — so there’s an information gap. The scheduling specialist doesn’t see that gap; they can only build the rota from the system tags, assuming completion means competence. The extreme scenario is that a shift gets rostered with nobody who actually knows how to wrap a burger.

So the so-called management team at each restaurant has to carve out extra time and energy to pick up the work those specialists were supposed to handle. But the system doesn’t allocate those labour hours to the managers, so they can only squeeze the extra tasks into their own schedules. And there’s no corresponding pay for it — that portion of the budget has already been siphoned off to pay the specialist, deducted from the restaurant’s labour costs.

Yu Yang: You mentioned earlier that a number of metrics affect bonuses — are there specific KPI thresholds you have to hit, like a minimum sales target, before you qualify for one?

Jiang Ke: Yes, the bonus is essentially a management tool, because there’s nothing else left to manage you with. The bonus is determined by things like whether the restaurant meets its sales target, the complaint rate across the restaurant, the waste rate on products — all of these feed into the bonus assessment. It’s a very detailed spreadsheet.

Yu Yang: So for you, keeping the store’s waste down is critical. How does waste typically occur?

Jiang Ke: If a store followed the Golden Quality Standard to the letter, it would throw out a lot — chips, meat, anything that falls outside the standard has to be discarded. In practice, though, standards get relaxed, so waste is a bit lower. For instance, if a batch of chips has been sitting out for half an hour after frying and is completely inedible, that gets logged as waste. Burger patties that have been sitting too long after grilling also get binned. Each restaurant may apply the standard slightly differently. By the book, everything past the limit should be thrown out and logged in the system — how many beef portions, roughly how many servings of chips.

◉ Chips and burgers thrown in the bin. Image source: Qingtai Yinwu

Li Ye: Can this be called food waste? And is it a lot?

Jiang Ke: Under a restaurant’s day-to-day standards, it’s never that much each day. We measure it in pre-prepared portions — not how many finished burgers are lost, but how many raw meat portions. If meat is managed well, it might be a dozen or so portions; chips will be more, and even that’s because we don’t follow the Golden Quality Standard to the letter. If we actually adhered to the Golden Quality Standard, the amount discarded would be enormous.

◉ The store enforces strict rules on staff meals and the handling of leftover food. Image source: Qingtai Yinwu

Yu Yang: I remember McDonald’s ran an advertorial about “Mai Mai Agriculture” — they invited some farmers in to talk about how they grow things, and the message was all about how, behind the supply chain, McDonald’s brings fresh food from the land to the table. But in reality, everything arriving at the store is already pre-prepared. The “fresh” they’re selling isn’t the same concept as freshness in a traditional restaurant.

Jiang Ke: Exactly — all the vegetables arrive pre-cut and vacuum-packed. And no matter how much they market the wholesome origins of an ingredient, the moment you look at the ingredients list it’s a long, long string of additives used to maintain the texture. However fresh they claim their raw materials are, however premium their potatoes, the chips are loaded with food additives.

Li Ye: So marketing the ingredients as healthy and fresh is a bit of a bait-and-switch. How can ultra-processed food loaded with all these additives possibly be healthy? The very method of production is inherently unhealthy.

◉ A Regenerative Agriculture Programme advertisement displayed on a McDonald’s tray.

Yu Yang: But I think there’s a real contradiction here. On one hand we push back against ready meals, which shows we want to eat fresh food. On the other, we accept ultra-processed food like McDonald’s. We hold two contradictory attitudes towards food.

Jiang Ke: I suppose it comes down to what people prioritise — taste or efficiency. If you cook for yourself every day, it obviously takes a lot of time. With McDonald’s, you can have your meal in 90 seconds — it’s incredibly convenient. In a way, that’s one of the really wonderful things modernisation has brought.

McDonald’s Smart Systems: Are They Really Smart?

Jiang Ke: Speaking of modernisation — McDonald’s has a whole suite of smart systems, but in terms of how they actually run, I’d say they’re only marginally useful at best. There’s a forecasting system called the Smart Production System, and every store is equipped with one. Every fifteen minutes it generates a forecast: projected turnover for the next quarter-hour, and the items customers are likely to order, so staff can prep in advance. Say the system forecasts that someone in the next fifteen minutes will order a spicy chicken burger — then my storage should already have a spicy chicken burger patty ready to go. But we all know that any system like this runs on a delay, and it forecasts on the assumption that there are more people on shift than there actually are. The system might think the store has five people on shift at that moment and run the simulation on that basis, but in reality there might be only two. Meeting the forecast becomes almost impossible.

So in theory this system sounds expensive to run, but from what I know, no store actually uses it. Everyone relies on experience — a staff member will ask the manager how many chicken patties to fry, the manager does a rough mental tally, ‘fry three, I guess,’ and never looks at the system.

Beyond the Smart Production System and the scheduling system, McDonald’s has an ordering system and loads of others. Building all these standardised systems essentially means the demands placed on people go down — the idea is to reduce the human workload. But in practice, first of all, the systems aren’t that user-friendly; secondly, the forecasts aren’t that accurate; and thirdly, the standards aren’t that rigorously enforced. If there were a dedicated person monitoring whether staff are actually producing according to the Smart Production System, backed by a strict oversight regime, people would probably make much more use of it.

◉ The two screens McDonald’s employees have to monitor: McDelivery on the left, dine-in and takeaway on the right.

Li Ye: It sounds as though the system slots each person into their own ecological niche — the manager has to learn the Smart Production System and oversee how each employee produces. The person frying chips has to fry them to the Golden Quality Standard, so that accountability can be traced back later, making management more straightforward. But really, people are the biggest variable of all.

Jiang Ke: Exactly. The whole aim of designing the system is to eliminate reliance on people — to do away with as many non-standardised variables as possible. But the reality is that every manager applies their own standard. Some managers think chips that have been sitting too long shouldn’t be sold; others look at them and think, ‘They still look fine,’ and sell them to avoid waste. So it really comes down to the individual, and in practice the system can’t be fully enforced because of cost and people issues.

Li Ye: It feels a bit like turning people into extensions of the system — or the system’s living body. But as things stand, it seems incredibly hard for humans to actually integrate with it.

Jiang Ke: That’s right. But it does still serve a purpose sometimes — the ordering system, for example. That one’s easier to forecast against, so it works a bit better than the others. It’s like your AI: to meet a standard that actually reflects reality, it needs enormous amounts of training data, continuous recalculation, and the costs are steep. It’s not as though you build a system once and just use it forever; you have to keep updating and iterating the calculation methods to get more precise predictions about the future. I actually think McDonald’s may have realised that nobody’s really using it much, so their investment in it isn’t that high. But the informatisation process has been ongoing throughout.

Yu Yang: McDonald’s actually started investing in informatisation quite early on. I read a book that said McDonald’s has been pouring resources into digitised production lines since the 1950s, developing alongside computer technology.

Jiang Ke: Yes, McDonald’s management really is remarkably advanced. It may not be that useful yet, but you still have to recognise what sets it apart from other food businesses — its genuinely forward-looking commitment to using systems for control. Take the ordering system: if you get the order quantities right, the restaurant runs without a hitch. So it’s certainly more efficient than simply throwing people at the problem — it’s just not quite as efficient as they’d hoped, not yet.

◉ McDonald’s: Exploring the Miracle of the Golden Arches recounts how McDonald’s was born in America’s mobility-driven modernisation, tracing its evolution from a drive-in restaurant to a global fast-food giant.

A McDonald’s for the Memories

Yu Yang: If you’d asked me in the ’90s or the 2000s, I would have said McDonald’s was a truly magical place. As a child, I’d tug at my grandmother’s sleeve, begging her to take me there. They even had a Soft play area where you could park the little ones, and classmates used to throw their birthday parties there. But the last time I went for a meal, I felt a faint sense of oppression. Maybe sometimes when I duck into a McDonald’s to sort out a meal, it’s really because my life is being squeezed — I simply don’t have time to cook for myself.

And I feel like a lot of these things are tied together. When I walk into a McDonald’s as a consumer, I feel my time being compressed — and that demand for quick service inevitably transfers onto the workers, who then find themselves facing extremely fast-paced, high-intensity labour.

◉ McDonald’s still hosts birthday parties and other events today, though staff say hardly anyone books them any more.

Jiang Ke: I feel it’s a genuine transformation — McDonald’s has become more fast-food than ever. That sense of companionship and togetherness it once built through the physical store facilities has migrated online. On the internet, there’s endless chatter about the “McCult” — every new product draws a wave of eager tasters who then post their recaps online and interact with fellow Mc-devotees. It’s become a kind of collective memory.

Li Ye: When I was little, you’d see kids doing their homework at McDonald’s. Now it’s everyone hunched over a laptop or glued to their phone — either in a meeting, doing sales, or pushing insurance — all working from McDonald’s. You also see delivery riders collapsed on the table, exhausted, waiting for their next order. Combined with the dim yellow lighting, the whole place gives off this airless, stagnant feeling; you just want to grab your food and get out.

Yu Yang: When McDonald’s first arrived in Hong Kong or Beijing, it really was a symbol centred on the family. Then in the last couple of years, with Dreamcore having its moment, for those of us born in the ’90s, McDonald’s has become a recurring nostalgia icon — whether it’s the old mascot clown or those famous 9.9-yuan coupons, people dig them up and turn them into treasured memories.

Jiang Ke: So why do people still love McDonald’s? I think nostalgia accounts for a large part of it — even if there are plenty of burgers out there that taste better, it’s hard for any of them to claim the market position McDonald’s holds today.

Li Ye: Yes, and something I’ve noticed is that the kind of fast-food chain I remember was unlike every other restaurant. The kitchen was visible, and McDonald’s was an open space where you could watch the staff working inside. As a child I genuinely thought they were robots — it felt like they were just endlessly frying chips and wrapping burgers; surely a machine would do all that? Who would fry chips forever?

Jiang Ke: Working inside, I felt like a robot myself — except a robot that has to handle far more complex situations than an ordinary one. Because the job demands the precision of a machine and the flexible problem-solving of a human, both at once.

– This is Foodthink’s 828th original article –

Editor: Li Ye

Layout: Xiao Shu

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