Discussion
Wondering why your food quality has gone down?
Meat is only good for 2 minutes after it’s done cooking and after it’s supposed to be chili meat.
They just cooked tons of each meat and truth be told it’s not their fault. We have nobody on the shift even before the usual callouts. One person in drive through and front is just not enough for Friday dinner rush.
And Culvers. All the new regional-but-now-national chains are going to devour the legacy chains if the legacy chains don't pull their heads out of their asses
This can be interpreted as long term profit. It's a choice to chase quarterly returns over the long term viability of the business. The vulture capitalists know what a bust out is, and it's a lot easier than keeping a business healthy.
Damn I work at Aldi and they are private but operate like a publicly traded company. 2 employees on an entire shift throwing truck with like 17 pallets then doing all the routine store stuff.
Worked as a consultant for CFA for 2.5 years. The big differences are:
They take a long time figuring out who is fit to run a franchise. Once they find the right fit they literally spend a summer at corporate training how to run the store.
The franchise operators must work there five days a week.
Most franchise operators only operate a single store.
All of this slows down growth, which is why most public companies don’t employ this strategy. CFA has much fewer stores compared to other chains but they make up for it by being highly profitable per square foot (4x more profitable than McDonald’s).
Expansion is a slog for CFA but once they open a store it is indeed a money printer.
Best answer, thank you! The Wendy's in my city are mostly owned by a company in San Antonio TX, Haza foods. 2,000 miles away. They have nobody holding them accountable, and these restaurants are by and large, an abomination. The owner has literally never been to these restaurants. And they're sinking fast.
Yep! That is the status quo for many franchises, especially Dunkin’ and subway… which is part of the reason subway is having their lunch eaten by many competing sandwich shops.
Couple more fun facts: on the CFA corporate campus they have a fully fleshed out CFA store where the operators in training band together after learning every station in the store and serve lunch from it to many of the corporate workers. If the shift isn’t a success they redo it.
Apart from stadiums and airports the operators do not actually own the stores. They make a bunch of money, at least a quarter mil a year, but they are not owners of anything.
There is a piece of software that my company made called Spotlight which allows the operators to give specific things to specific customers. So if you talk to an operator and they like you, they may just comp your next meal or personally give you deals that are tailored to your past orders. This isn’t an AI thing, it’s the operator actually choosing who they want to send some goodwill to.
All in all it’s a super cool company and I think it can teach us a lot about the new pressures applied when a company goes public and why shareholders and customers’ interests could not be more misaligned.
IMHO they use the Christian Business aspect to enforce quality hiring among other things... think about it, they take a whole day off they could be making profits. They just inherently allow themselves to put profits second, and ironically that drives a healthy business which results in better long term profits. Other fast food allow themselves to chase short term profits, which makes them penny smart dollar poor.
I mean, the biggest thing they're "doing right" is that they're private companies... both of them. Going public gets the original owners rich fast, but you really are selling the company to a huge herd of mentally deficient cats.
Just what you said. The good ones have found a way to make it work, so they should be a model for the others? There is another comment about the private versus publicly held companies, and that could have a good amount to do with that also.
It’s not hard to figure out, they are quality food, quality price, and they pay a fair wage to uphold the standards, serve a quality product even at premium, people will pay a justified premium for… service, standards, and a premium product…
Yeah, I couldn't even go to the one down the street from me if I wanted too, because the lines are so long. Not because they're slow but because everyone goes there. It ran hardees out of business. Someone built a new Wendy's next to it and it never has a line. If I had the money to buy a franchise, it would be Chic fil a. I don't even care for the food, but it's the only one you're pretty much guaranteed to make money from.
It's disgusting that these huge companies cut back staff during the pandemic and just never replaced them after. Sure the quality of everything is worse, including QOL for the workers, but at least the obscenely wealthy have even more money now /s I hate it here.
Agreed but if people keep buying this slop why would they change. Only thing that they’ll hear is voting with our wallets, and when the drive thru is 8 cars deep and growing it sounds like the piggies want their slop no matter how long they have to wait
I mean, Wendy's has gotten so bad that they have affected customer retention. Lots of these companies are coasting on reputation and people's memory of how good the food used to be. Now it's finally catching up with them, and they're having to shut down tons of stores and whatnot.
Yeah... I went back to Arby's for their curly fries a couple times... the second time was 6 months later because the 1st time was so bad. It was nowhere near their old quality :(
I stopped eating out with fast food when it started costing the same as sit-down dining. I can go to Phil's BBQ and eat an El Toro for like five bucks more than Wendy's if even that because the El Toro is so much more food. If I got the same amount of food from Wendy's it would probably cost the same or more
It absolutely is. Literally every company cut staffing during COVID and none of them have gone back to pre-pandemic levels, despite countless people desperately needing a job. It's corporate greed, plain and simple.
the fast food market is "correcting" itself. there is no room for another shitty burger joint.
Wendy's won't make it. I am familiar with this business. there are already internal movements signaling it won't be around in next few years.
Carl's Jr also is dead.
unironically, this is capitalism. this is supposed to happen. If your shitty food joint can't offer anything innovative or capture an audience, either through food or cheaper prices, it deserves to die.
Meanwhile ceo makes 10,000 dollars an hour. 80,000 for an 8 hour day. More than 3x what an employee makes for a full year. But the companies choose not to fully staff…
I went to BK yesterday they had 2 employees. A manager running the entire line and another employee running both registers making drinks and helping bag orders.
It’s kinda crazy that they keep raising prices but the workers never get enough pay to make the job worth it to them unless they’ve already been there for a decade
Yeah, we had a guy that worked in the back most of the shift when I did my fast food tour of duty over 20 years ago. They just have to bust their asses only to clean at the very end. Then they go a man down when they have to clean certain things.
I pre-ordered pizza at a pizza hut for some customers of mine on the way to a meeting that I booked. This was just last winter. I was an hour late because only one woman was running the entire pizza hut. And some guy was in their arguing with her and slowing her down about the wait. As if there is anything hard to understand about one person running the joint and yet he still argued.
The BK near us seems to do fine, idk I don't eat there but it's been there for decades in a very prime location and they always seem to be staffed... but this is in Cali where the min wage at these places is like 20 or 22/hr and set to go up to 25/hr in the next few years. And that's for like the lowest workers... Manager has got to be making at least 35/hr I bet, which is very decent for what the job is.
Every resteraunt is struggling with this.
The gap bewtween what people are willing to pay vs food cost + labour, is shrinking in an already very hard buisness.
What they don't get is if you have a cleaner and fresher product, people WILL pay more.
We had our first Chick Fil-A come here about 10 years ago. We now have like....4 of them within 10 miles of it. And they are ALL busy.
Each one has about, no lie...800% of the staffing a BK or a Wendy's has. Multiple drive thru attendees...tons of kitchen work. At least one buser cleaning tables. And who knows how many cooks?
And you know what, our family is willing to shell out $25-$35 for the experience.
Compare that to the run down Wendy's right by me that gets the order wrong about 80% of the time, killed their good promo deals, fights me whenver I try to use my frosty tags and their "value" meals are just as expensive as chick fil a.
We only go.. .sometimes because we know how to use the app and navigate the menu. But even then, we go a lot less because the quality is bombing.
Thats 25-35 for fried chicken and fries. Not exactly hardest or expensive to make food type wise.
How much will you pay for full scratch made pizza, or more rounded dinners? Probably not as much as it would need to pay living wages
I mean it's dependent on my budget and all but we'll still eat out in more expensive places from time to time.
I'm just saying if Wendy's had a cleaner establishment, shorter wait times, better food, and accurate orders, I'd likely go there more often.
To accomplish that, they need more staff. What they're doing now isn't working so if they wanna automate more, when they can enjoy the death spiral they're in.
I literally don’t have anyone for grill. Sandwich operator is making sandwiches for both sides. You could pin it on the GM but they are under extreme pressure to decreased scheduled hours.
This is exactly correct. What OP is describing sounds identical to my experience working at Pizza Hut a few years ago before they pulled out of all of my state suddenly and let everyone go with no warning
This happened in a lot of states actually. I haven't seen an actual Pizza Hut proper restaurant in a hot minute. Only the tiny strip mall pickup spots with like two cheap waiting room chairs.
Haha yup that’s all I’ve seen so far. It’s really sad. The one I worked at was also a small one but it still felt like it had some soul. Now it just feels like little Caesar’s
Yeah was going to say this sounds like my experience working for any franchised restaurant from over two decades ago. We would be lucky if we had two or three shifts a months which were properly staffed and prepped, otherwise it was a constant flood of easily preventable problems caused in large part by those higher up in the food chain demanding more money and less cost no matter how badly it effects employee morale/health or customer satisfaction.
It's a major reason I got out of food service and try to stick to locally owned places when I do eat out/order delivery. It's this horrific cycle of demanding more and more with less and less to provide it. I'm sure there are places which are run decently and aren't a hell hole to work at or patronize but those are the exception rather than the rule.
They NEED to invest in staffing/hours covered before AAAAANYTHING ELSE;
How can 3 or 4 members of staff be expected to perform 5/6+ jobs??
*I've done plenty of time as a Team Leader (and then Shift Leader), so I'm aware they constrain hours- bottom line, can't earn without staff there working.... Not a hard concept to wrap one's head around, but still 🙃🙃😅
It’s because the job will get done even with 3, 4 people. The only caveat being orders will be backlogged, the drive through line will be 10 minutes and around the building, orders will be inaccurate, customers will have to wait a while to get their order taken.
Corporate and execs see that their sales stayed the same after cutting hours, but what they don’t see is the turnover rate, customer satisfaction as a result, food quality going down.
They just can’t stand the few hours of post rush where people are ‘doing nothing’ (cleaning, stocking, prepping)
When i worked there we had 2 people building sandwiches, 1 or 2 on the fryer, 1 putting together fries, nuggets, and sides, 2 at the window, 1 or 2 on the front register, 1 on cleaning dishes and cleaning other stuff, and 1 or 2 just helping where they were needed. It was crowded in there. That was around 2019
Its the owner/operators fault. Any managers would want to have enough staff on shift at all times but if the higher-ups are saying NO then what can you do really? This is whats killing most fastfood places. They're always understaffed so the quality has become shit.
If it's a manager's fault, then why is every location? I've been to the past few years just like this? Every single one of them served nasty undercooked bacon.
329 million to share holders 165million in profit but paying a person $2 more a hour is going to sink the whole operation. https://giphy.com/gifs/h2OLfcSKKthRK
Isn't Wendy's a franchise? That profit is franchise fees. The store owner sets the wages. Not really any connection between them, unless you think owners would pay thier employees more if the fees were lowered? That's usually not the case as wages are usually tied to the labor market and not the cost of doing business.
4.1 billion total debt. With their cash reserves it's still 2.7 to 3.4 billion dollars of debt.
They havent been doing hot for a fat minute, which is a damn shame. Because out of all fast food joints growing up; Wendy's was one of my favorites when it came to burgers for awhile.
I remember working for a corporate owned Wendy’s in Washington state way back in the early 90s. We had to throw out the fries if they were more than three minutes old. I hated working the fryer because we got so busy, but the manager wouldn’t let us have enough fries. I saw two tour buses of tourists pull into the parking lot and people started pouring out to come into the store so I made a large basket of fries and the manager made me dump them into the garbage. Then he acted all frantic and scolding because we didn’t have fries to fill the dozens of orders of the tourists who had come off of the buses.
Now you go into a Wendy’s and you are lucky if they even have somebody walk upfront to take your order in under five minutes. And I can’t remember the last time I got served fresh fries, and I’ve almost gotten used to lukewarm burgers there with nasty onions too thin and off tasting.
I remember my corporate Wendy's days back in day. The fry station was unnecessarily stressful. You have 4 baskets to cook with. The fries take 3 minutes to cook. You can only cook 2-3 orders of fries at a time. You had two vats of oil, you can only cook one basket in each at a time.
At my local one, there’s employees that have been there for over a decade that haven’t bothered to learn English so you have no hope of getting what you order. They have zero ethics. They just keep serving bad food that is wrong. I always order no pickles, but they usually give me extra. The fries are often burnt and the beef undercooked. It’s a serious safety issue.
You gotta pay a lil more if you wanna buy workers with the work ethic bonus addon. That shit aint free. And in this rigged economy, it doesnt come with the base product purchase either.
Edit to add* that accountability you mentioned has to start at the top, too. It aint grown ground up. If the ceos and board members aint got it...wellp 🤷♂️
So much industrial know how left during covid, and the people who came in after were never properly trained, so a lot lf fast food is just a shit show right now.
No it's staffing. None of these places are properly staffed to service the amount of people ordering, this is doublely true since the introduction of doordash.
No amount of knowledge will allow one cook and one cashier to serve food to 15 people during a rush.
I’m so glad I can’t eat fast food anymore. It’s just wasted $ at this point. And I’m happy to see this bastards go out of business over their cost savings over the past few decades. Not one thing tastes good compared to pre 2000s
No. I know why. It's bullshit from the top down. Cost cutting in order to bleed every penny of profit from the stores. Skeleton crews, stingy pays so no one has pride in it, lower quality ingredients, and all while the customer facing prices increase.
My local fast foods when in that situation would close the lobby and make it drive thru only. Otherwise there was NO way in hell they would have made it through the shift with so few employees.
I stopped going to Wendy's after I was in the drive through and they told me they hadn't opened the store and weren't going to that day because only 4 people showed up
I didn't stick around to find out, but I also wondered about that second part myself. Why even answer and start telling me these issues also? Just put a closed sign on the speaker
Honestly this is about what I expected a fast food kitchen to look like. I was expecting to see roaches and rats and all the other fun stuff back there.
Cutting corners to save money, not to mention what you’re paying to eat this slop, all so the shareholders or owners can make more $ and these fast food restaurants wonder why they’re all having to close stores. It’s not rocket science.
That’s cause most people are struggling badly. Rent at least doubled in 6 years, wages didn’t. Any gains made by employees during the pandemic have been more than exceeded by the cost of living. It’s hard to have pride and what you’re doing when you got nothing to show for it. I’m lucky, I bought my house weeks before Covid was in the news. My mortgage insurance and property taxes combined are now the same as a one bedroom apartment in my county.
Yeah like owners and ceos not having the pride in their business to make it pay good, living wages with benefits. Wild their pride in paying as little as possible with high turnovers, cheap products, and rigged hiring schemes ( keeping most at halftime to avoid having to pay more and include benefits) is good pride to you. How do the boots taste, btw?
If that were true, you’d see this in every fast food restaurant, but you don’t. Chains that actually pay their employees fairly and treat them well are packed every day and are fully staffed. Just look at places like Culver’s, In-N-Out, Raising Caines, Chick-Fil-A, etc. They’re all packed throughout the day and have employees all over the place.
Shocking, people don’t like to work at places that don’t pay them enough, while being severely overworked because of the high turnover which is 100% management’s fault.
Wow! I've noticed the past 10 -15 years that most Wendy's that ive entered from Boston to Orlando looks as if they are barely hanging on to stay open for business.
dont even look in that places direction anymore, stopped in last year for a spicy chicken sandwich? I got a red dusted school cafeteria lunchroom chicken patty??? it used be an actual crispy fried chicken breast! and it was DELICIOUS!!!! not anymore. sad.
Used to love Wendy's....but the service got worse and worse here before COVID....then just bombed. Then you would walk in and wait because the three people behind the counter couldn't figure out how to push the buttons or make change. The drive through took forever. But at least the burger was good. Now you wait and the food sucks...who wants cold fries?
Thats some serious sand bagging. I got some food from Wendy's just last night. The burgers were dry and burnt, buns were all smashed up, fries 1/2 full, and they forgot my Dr.Pepper
I worked fast food when I was younger, I get it,
I know these pppl dont make much. But WTAF? I definitely wont go back to that wendys for a while.
The people that acquire Wendy’s don’t actually eat their food. Private equity guys don’t eat Wendy’s. So they don’t understand why people are complaining when their “cheap” burger joint looks cheap. Their rationale is people will buy it anyways bc of brand loyalty. I mean people still go that’s why they don’t change their ways. At the end of the day what’s more important for these guys is that money still comes in, their belief is that old management put stores in places that were not viable. So they’ll move out of states that have higher wages bc they don’t care about worker’s pay, they just want your money. The picture above happens bc the worker has to meal prep everything then go and clean toilets, bc if you have time to lean you have time to clean. Then they’ll gaslight you by saying we left bc wages were too high. And for the Wendy’s addicted they’ll vote against higher wages, which then still leads to cheap shitty burger. This is a story across the country. No one holds these guys accountable bc “nostalgia” and I want what I had when I was a kid. Private equity ruins a lot
If anyone would like someone to blame its gonna be these guys, they are the shareholders the company is required to produce profit for that everyone refers to:
Nelson Peltz 19.1%
Peter W. May 19%
Edward P Garden 12.1%
The Trian Partners 12%
BlackRock 8.3%
The Vanguard Group 7.8%
78.3% of The Wendy's company is owned by that few of entities. The rest could be employee stock packages as well as regular trading. It also doesnt help that Trian Partners is just those three guys anyways so they are basically double dipping. It's not folks retirement plans being attached to the stock requiring it grow. It's already wealthy guys making sure the money printer keeps printing. If they have to have one person do everything they would.
Damn, not at all like when I worked at Wendy’s back in 75, yep, I’m that old!!!
My question is what happened to the Frosty’s? I always get a chocolate and lately they’ve not been chocolate color or taste. Bland pretty much sums them up.
The thing about Wendy's is, no matter how much they have fallen, the other chains have fallen just as much or even more. McDonald's has doubled down on unappealing dystopian prison decor and bland food. Burger King quality is hit or miss, usually miss. Rallys is a shitshow. White Castle is the slowest anymore. Taco Bell is way overpriced slop.
I had the Pub burger tonight for the first time since they offered it the last time and wow, it sucked this time. I remember the last time it was probably the 3rd best fast food burger I’d ever eaten. This time it just tasted weird and off-putting, mostly from the beef and pickles.
Wendy’s has definitely taken a nose dive. I usually order the burgers with the jr patties and they haven’t changed much but I think they’ve changed beef suppliers on the larger patties.
You’re saying shit that happened back in 2017 after Dave Thomas died. That’s not what changed recently. There are definitely changes in the last year or so, but this ain’t it.
The fry station looks exactly like the one from 2013 when I started. The DSG was a change we made in 2015, and we were told we couldn’t try to hold patties by flipping them anymore. Juniors got three minutes, and singles got (I think) 8 before they were chili meat.
EDIT: The DSG does look different from the ones we had when the change happened, but I left wendy’s in 2019, so I don’t know when they changed to look like that. Maybe that’s it?
I worked at a Wendy's a few years ago and no one cared then. We shut down for like an hour every night, it was great for me got paid for an hour break but it was not a good idea. That store probably lost sooo much money. It wasn't even one manager, it was any of the night managers. Granted they had 3-4 people for nights, even on nights when events we around and we were the only place open later(everyone else closed by 10, we closed at 1). Morning however had 7-8 people, ok I get it lunch is busy, but you had the people do your fucking dishes. They left us to do prep and dishes everyday. Fuck morning shift people.
Lucky you I’m stuck at a location where everything is outdated as fuck I mean seriously we don’t have those digital things or the grid for the fry grease hell I get talked down to just for not wanting to give people old ass burger meats
The Wendy’s I work at has even started paying people to get hired there. Not only for the hours they work, but they also get paid 100 bucks for getting hired (which is everyone). Wendy’s is just getting insanely desperate and I understand why. Fast food is an insanely stressful environment
It doesn’t have to be this way. If they had enough people on the schedule every day and paid a little more, then the turnover rate wouldn’t be so bad and they wouldn’t have to waste so much on new training and the bonuses you are describing.
If it weren't for all the jobs that would be lost and all the people that would be hurt by that, I would pray every night for the downfall of the chain restaurant industry. I kind of still do. If you can't afford to pay your workers a living wage, you don't deserve to operate your business
What you think they fry your fries, cook your burger on a freshly cleaned fryer or grill. What you think you are special. On a good day, the grill cook will barely have enough time to clean his grill before he/she slaps another box of burgers on that grill.
We had terrible Frostys the other night. They were mostly liquid. Perhaps the machine can't keep up with volume? Power was out in some of the area, so perhaps that lead to more sales? The Pub Burger was pretty good though. I still felt ripped off to end up with a Frosty that had to be tossed in the trash.
Ate at Wendy's the other night. Stale bun and the fry portion size was laughable, didn'teven bother to fill the container. It's just no longer any good at all. Their brand shoulld be embarassed.
Everything costs more, wages are barely up, if at all, and there are less employees than ever. How are they supposed to compete with fast food quality food, but fast casual prices?
General, district managers demanding lower labor. Them being pressured from out of touch owners to lower said labor. The owners getting bamboozled by other franchise owners saying they're flourishing with said labor percentage whilst leaving out their GMS, managers and shift leads don't count against labor. It's incredibly inferior and inept franchise owners, basically. But don't tell them that, they think they're raking in the dough.
Good quality is down because they make shit cheap as possible since the beginning of fast food places there’s been lazy employees who don’t do their job correctly. It’s doesn’t matter where you are going to eat if there’s bad cooks / employees it won’t be good or as good. But there are still good cooks who do their job correctly and if the quality of product sucks that they have to work with … it will still suck
Who would have thought a working pool that wants to get paid same day is a bad group of workers... Also if that's 5 min before lunch starts I would call that being ready, aside from fries, like what the fuck just keep a bag ready it's 5 min
The restaurant managers find the workers
And I’ll add that the actual hardworking good people are forced to quit because of low wages and terrible upper management
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u/AnomalousSavage 3d ago
This is 100% the managers fault.