My first job was at Rally's hamburgers (called Checkers in some places). It was one of those double drive-thru places that didn't have inside seating. I was 16 and was working for minimum wage which, if I remember correctly, was $4.25 per hour. What follows are the three key lessons I learned in the two years I worked there.
1. Good employees are worth more.
After a few months there my boss called me outside for my first performance review. He said that I had done well and that $.10 was the average raise for his employees. He asked what I thought I deserved.
"10 cents," I said.
He looked surprised. "Why so low?"
"Because you can find anyone to come in here and sweep floors, make sandwiches, etc." I told him.
"Put yourself in my shoes," he said. "It's tough to find good employees, and it's easy for you to go get another job making minimum wage. If I want to keep you, I need to pay you more than the McDonalds across the street. Good people are hard to find." And with that I got a big raise compared to the other store employees. I think it was 50 cents per hour more, but I don't exactly remember.
2. Lots of bad employees don't add up to a few good employees.
At Rally's we had timers that measured the length each car spent in front of the drive-thru window. Our goal was to average less than 30 seconds per car through the lunch rush. Since all the food was made fresh, this could be very challenging. It took 5 minutes to cook a burger or chicken sandwich and we could only hold them a few minutes, so the key was to constantly have some in process, always projecting how many you should have getting done every few minutes.
Each side of the store had a sandwich maker (sometimes two) to make the burgers and a coordinator to bag the order and hand it out the window. The grill person and fry person served both sides. One day I was working the grill and the sandwich maker on the busy side (driver's side window) was a bit slow. The coordinator for the side was our general manager (a common position for a GM during the lunch rush). I started picking up some of the sandwich maker's slack by cycling the burgers on the grill in larger, less frequent batches, and helping to make sandwiches for big orders. The GM too, started making some sandwiches. Eventually the other side was getting backed up, and frankly our sandwich maker was slowing us down, so the GM sent him to the other side of the store to help with their sandwiches. Now they had two sandwich makers. I ran the grill and made sandwiches, the GM coordinated and bagged the orders and made sandwiches too. We ran sub 30 second timers through lunch without a sandwich person.
It wouldn't make sense to most people. How do you get things done faster with fewer people? By getting the roadblocks out of their way. We knew what had to be done. We were the fastest sandwich makers in the store. We had worked together enough to know how the other one worked.
3. In the long-run, most people get paid what they are worth.
I always volunteered to do whatever needed to be done, and other employees would sometimes ask me why. "If they only pay me $4.45 an hour, that's all the harder I'm gonna work," they would say. I think just about everyone in the store told me that at some point or other. So I worked hard for $4.25/hr, on up through $5/hr, through $6/hr, and on into $6.50/hr and a position as shift manager. I guess the other employees didn't want to show they could handle shift manager responsibilities until they got paid shift manager wages.
I left once I had enough college engineering classes to get a nice part-time day job doing Autocad work for $9/hr.
It's funny that at the time I didn't feel like I was learning anything working in fast food. Looking back, it taught me quite a lot. I think most situations are like that if you keep your mind open and your eyes out for the learning opportunities.
So wherever you are in life, even if it isn't where you want to be, keep your chin up. Remember that good business lessons sometimes have unlikely sources, and all kinds of experiences can be good for you.
Excellent article. I have responded over at my site, but this particular article has some great wisdom in it for all areas of our life. You’ve obviously already figured it out.
Cheers
Wonderful true principles learned at an early age. You are most fortunate.
Dan
Well-written! Very vivid, for someone like me who never worked fast food. I support raising the minimum wage, though (www.raiseminwage.org for lots of information and opinion). Though you were the exception, it sounds like a better wage meant a lot to the other workers who spoke to you.
Brock
Thanks for this thought-provoking story. Lots of people work in fast food today, but the experience isn’t the same for everyone. So much depends on attitude. People who excel in life tend to have a hard work ethic and a desire to succeed at everything they do. If people only ever work for the money and don’t get any satisfaction from a job well done, they’re unlikely to get far.
You were VERY lucky to get a boss at an early age that realized good workers are hard to find, and wanted to keep them. There are tons of bosses out there that will never pay you what you are worth. These same bosses tend to wonder why their employees make mistakes, have a bad attitude, and then quit after a few months.
In the long-run, most people get paid what they are worth simply because they tend to leave jobs where the boss won’t pay them what they are worth.
I believe that many workers out there don’t try to work harder because they have never had a boss that recognized their efforts.
Excellent article. I think you touch on a really good point: some people don’t work hard enough to get promoted because they don’t earn enough to warrant their effort. And in that, they get stuck in the same position.
My first lesson in dropping in spinnaker in a sailboat race: drop it at the rate that the other crew are gathering in the sail, so that it doesn’t go in the water.
My second lesson: drop it a little too fast, so that it just barely touches the water, and watch how much faster the other crew works to gather it in.
Lesson: don’t let workers get too comfortable during the busy time, but let them have a little congratulatory time (“we did it!”) afterwards.
Good comments.
So much depends on attitude. People who excel in life tend to have a hard work ethic and a desire to succeed at everything they do.Three dealers dealt at a time and one dealer was on break. The table only moved as fast as the slowest and least accurate dealer in the crew.