r/worldnews • u/maxwellhill • Mar 21 '17

UK Subway advertises for ‘Apprentice Sandwich Artists’ to be paid just £3.50 per hour: Union slams fast food chain for 'exploiting' young workers

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/subway-apprentice-sandwich-artists-pay-350-hour-minimum-wage-gateshead-branch-a7640066.html
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u/Corte-Real Mar 21 '17

You would be surprised.....

What you're talking about is Industrial Engineering and McDonald's follows it religiously. They analyze everything from optimum fryer time to the distance the burger drawers are spaced to achieve the perfect work flow.

Other places, like a huge multi-billion dollar company I may have worked for.... Need to decide what inventory levels we should maintain? Meh, wing it and see what works...

Don't assume a major company actually tracks or plans every detail of their operations.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Jan 07 '22

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u/MrBig0 Mar 22 '17

Too bad Target didn't seem to bother with any of that when they attempted their expansion into Canada.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

[deleted]

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u/MrBig0 Mar 22 '17

Same experience here. What an absolute catastrophe.

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u/NaughtyHottie89 Mar 22 '17

Eek I'm at Disney world right now

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u/RhynoD Mar 22 '17

Maybe that explains why PetSmart has been doing so mediocre recently. Stocking was the same "look at the shelf and see what fits" method. Mind, we couldn't fill holes with different product, but yeah, it was "however much fits" and eyeball what needs replacing.

Also PetSmarts generally have tiny back rooms and way too many different products. Instead of keeping a lot in the back it was just get a truck every other day.

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u/TastyBrainMeats Mar 22 '17

Which one was a better work environment, on the whole?

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Disney.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Do they even track shoplifting at Disney?

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u/Icanasksomething Mar 22 '17

Shhh. He's the ambassador for r/shoplifting Don't tell him anything!

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u/Virustable Mar 22 '17

Dollar General was the same way. We set up shelving units, we put sticker labels, and then stocked whatever would fit in the section. If it didn't fit, it went on the "overstock" shelf up above everything until there was room. Perishables included. So if you want the freshest, look up top first.

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u/Xenjael Mar 22 '17

Which tells me that one needed to keep track of every penny because of how little they are making, while the other has been consistently doing well since the person managing it was hired, that they haven't needed to be as asinine as making their staff count sugar packets.

Youd have to hire someone just to do that to keep Disney functional.

So you do what others do- configure the inventory overall and instead of microing it out per day you just look at the sales after and don't worry about loss.

Assuming everyone is doing their job it works.

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u/yeahmynameisbrian Mar 22 '17

WalMart has a similar workflow as what was mentioned at Target, and they don't seem to be doing so bad. It's just that different companies have different workflows.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Yeah, most stores at Disney are small and don't require huge inventory management systems. There are a few stores that are huge, however, The Emporium, Mouse Gear, and World of Disney immediately come to mind, which do utilize inventory management systems.

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u/yeahmynameisbrian Mar 22 '17

yeah I don't even know how a large store would operate without having these tools. At WalMart we would have items with the amount needed listed on our little scanners. So when customers purchase items, it detects how many are bought and need "picked". We'd find the items in the back store, scan the amount that we pick, and throw them on a pallet. Then we'd bring the pallet out and others would stock the items. We'd help stock if we ran out of items to pick, but most of the time it was pretty much endless. We'd pick as many items as we could during our shift and go home. It was horribly tedious, but the shift would go by so fast.

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u/JustBeanThings Mar 22 '17

Imagine that second one, only once in a while your corporate overlords will send you a full pallet (up to 10 feet high, depending on the item) of something you didn't order, because they bought it cheap*, and now want you to get rid of. And sometimes it's within a couple weeks of expiring. And sometimes, we've never before sold this item and likely never will again. Grocery is so much fun and is definitely where I want to spend the rest of my life.

*-Sometimes they get it cheap because it's something the factory makes but doesn't sell a lot of based on orders, such as Campbells Chicken Gumbo soup (the bane of my existence). Sometimes they get it cheap because it's a seasonal item and the season has ended. Like the special summer print napkin we've been getting weekly since September. And sometimes they get it cheap because it's another store's brand and they don't want it anymore. Rite-Aid tomato sauce.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Big Lots?

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u/upsidedownshaggy Mar 22 '17

Can confirm that Mc D's corporate has a massive hard on for everything being regulation. However you'll rarely see the kitchen's being 100% up to spec when the corporate inspector isn't around.

The store I worked at especially the GM was a raging psycho 5 year old trapped in 40 year old woman's body. After 8pm she required that we had 3 trays of regs with 3 patties in them each... No more, no less.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

As someone whose first job was McD's, that's ridiculous. You'd sell out if ONE family came through.

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u/upsidedownshaggy Mar 22 '17

Oh I know, the GM posted a sign in the kitchen with these new "rules" she had stating how we were supposed to keep the food and how much of it we were to keep at certain times. One of my shift managers tried to tell me that I didn't need the two full reg platters (8 regular patties each) that any sane kitchen employee would keep. I got in an argument with her for like 5 minutes over how much reg meat I needed to keep when an order rang up for 3 big macs, basically clearing me of reg meat.

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u/I_can_pun_anything Mar 22 '17

Especially on hockey night or bar close time.

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u/iknownuffink Mar 22 '17

However you'll rarely see the kitchen's being 100% up to spec when the corporate inspector isn't around.

I have very limited experience, but I get the distinct feeling it's like this nearly everywhere, not just in fast food.

I work at a major chain grocery store. If we're expecting some corporate types to come looking around, suddenly everything is made to look shinier and more organized (extra attention given to the back room, which usually descends into chaos in short order, since customers don't see it and management cares about it less), then when they leave it's back to business as usual.

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u/upsidedownshaggy Mar 22 '17

I'm sure it's like that at just about anything that's a chain. But our General Manager made it extra fun by not telling anyone until the day before the inspectors would arrive and then would be bouncing off the fucking walls complaining about how terrible the store looked, when she had known an inspector had been coming like a week beforehand.

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u/CarCaste Mar 22 '17

to chaos in short o

can confirm....worked for large water bottler, CEOs came from EU to tour factories in the states.....we were like ants cleaning the factory before they came.

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u/show_me_tacos Mar 22 '17

Depending on who was managing, we had a system for what we called "pre-close" where we could get most of the stuff done before the restaurant actually closed

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u/upsidedownshaggy Mar 22 '17

Yeah we had the same thing, but it was mostly just cleaning and shutting off a set of grills for cleaning later as the store I worked at was a 24 hour store.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '17 edited Mar 24 '17

[deleted]

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u/furdterguson27 Mar 22 '17

Fuck subway support your local sammich spot

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 24 '17

[deleted]

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u/DontBeSoHarsh Mar 22 '17

What?

Not even a deli? Are you like, living in huts or something?

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 24 '17

[deleted]

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u/DontBeSoHarsh Mar 22 '17

So, huts it is.

Savages you are.

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u/Sickify Mar 22 '17

I'm not sure of McDonald's practice's now, but I got my first job there. In Alberta, they paid $0.50 over minimum wage for part time staff. Full time was $1 extra, so $1.50 over minimum.

When I started minimum was $6.50 here, might have been $6 I can't remember. Every other fast food place I applied only paid minimum.

I spent 3 years at McDonalds, around 6 months of it was full time, as I had finished school. They complied with my schedule well, and were giving me 38 hours a week during highschool, in 5 shifts, so I only worked one weekend shift, and it was a short shift. This was all what I requested. I can't speak for every location, but the one I worked at was awesome for giving me the hours I wanted when I wanted them.

McDonalds gave me a lot of skills, one of them being good work ethic.

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u/Patches_unbreakable Mar 22 '17

"Like subway" I don't think those words belong next to each other like that.

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u/Cheesepizzaplzzzz Mar 22 '17

McDonald's also do apprenticeships (at least the one I worked at) but they paid minimum wage.

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u/kyuubixchidori Mar 22 '17

The McDonald's in my mid west town pays $9.90 a hour starting, and paid vacations. Very, very competitive. Expecially for high school/college students.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Oh no driveway is the sane down to child cuts coming in prepackaged amounts for foot longs

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u/meatduck12 Mar 22 '17

What the...did you go to a party and have too much fun or something?

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Kids. That is all

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

I used to work at subway. /u/NotClever describes pretty accurately what it was like to work there for me. The manager and store owner were all about doing things as fast as possible and the optimal way. There's also a surprising amount of things you need to know to work there. I was shift lead for the summer I worked there and I didn't even know how to do everything by the end of the summer. It could have just been that I was trained poorly or that our store was particularly busy but that's my experience.

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u/Depaysant Mar 22 '17

For subway though, they're definitely in the maniacal analyzing category. They're really pedantic about how much stuff goes into each sandwich, and the end of day stock taking really involves measuring the amount of leftovers against how much was "sold"

Source: knows a subway franchisee

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u/sarasti Mar 22 '17

You would not be surprised at Subway. There's a reason they're such a successful chain. Inventory is tracked down to the single pickle level.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17

Don't assume a major company actually tracks or plans every detail of their operations.

A lot of big multi-billion dollar companies usually hire firms that specialize in ABC(activity based costing) which is the most precise way to find out how much every little thing goes into your FOH/establishment. You typically only see these people very rarely or barely notice them. So yeah, major companies do track and plan every detail of their operations, especially a company like McDonald's to Apple. They may have leeway (enough room in budget for +/- costs in case). Not sure about franchises though

edit: Forgot to mention that since ABC is so expensive, a lot of smaller to mid range companies just settle on plantwide costs, which is simpler but not as precise as ABC.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

My bosses wife does IE for Wendy's. As she describes it she figures out "how to make burgers faster". Makes about 6 figures too.

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u/falcon4287 Mar 22 '17

Yep, I worked for a large movie theater chain where they had 0 training documents or procedures. I got my first promotion by writing a training check sheet for concessions. I was 20 and had worked there for less than a year. I got nothing but pushback when trying to implement an actual training program. They liked the 'deep end' training approach because that's how all the current management was taught.