Labor.

It's very difficult to balance the Labor percentage of a McDonald's store. This is true of every business - the goal is to maximize the profit of a store by minimizing the opportunity of wasted payroll hours. This is almost always somewhere in the neighborhood between 19 and 20%. We overshot that by a good amount in my store last month.

I'm learning that it is especially difficult to balance this Labor in a low volume store. There may only need to be 4 people on any given hours of a shift based upon sales in $, but there are also a set number of jobs that can be performed well by a minimum number of people, and in my opinion the minimum number of people to comfortably run just about any given hour of any shift is 5. There are exceptions - the first and last 2-3 hours of the day. These are easy times, for openers you show up and make coffee for hours. For closers, you clean and hump your ass to clean some more. In either situation, there's not many of customers.

However, during what I like to refer to as "Snack Time", the hours between 2 and 4, we may not be having as much sales dollars - that's mostly because we'll have twice as many customers, ordering a third as much food. Still, it's a lot of transactions and when you sell 50 Doubles and Hot N Spicys in an hour, it may not be as much money as 50 Value Meals during the lunch hour but it is the same amount of work, effectively. It takes as much time to make 10 Doubles as it does to make 10 different types of sandwiches, and each order during Snack Time has more individual sandwiches than each order during Lunch Time.

I wish all people could have some love for McDonald's Employees. I do my best to make sure every customer at the very least thinks I do a good job. There are a large amount of customers for whom I just shine, shine, shine! I like to go for the Wow. Stupid is diverse and populous in the world, however, and some people leave hating me, while I hate them.

A woman came through my Drive Thru during Snack Time today, and took a good 3 minutes to place her whole order, which totaled about $6.00 and was changed no less than 4 times. Meanwhile, a line of about 8 cars grew behind her. She came to my window holding out a bag of coins and said "Count this, it's what I'm paying you." She had a big stack of bills sitting on her lap. I said, "Why don't you pay me with a 5?" Her response was to shove the bag of coins toward me and say "I'm paying with this," So I told her, thank you have a nice day, and I'll buy her food for her. I'd rather explain a $6.00 customer satisfaction manager meal than count out 6 bucks in goddamn coins. Screw that! I told her so.

She told me I was rude and she would call McDonald's on me. I told her the number posted on the window in front of me would get her in touch with the Owner/Operator and I told her my name and explained that I was the only guy who looked like me, and the only Michael there, and could she please move to the next fucking window so I could help the people behind her. She told me no, and folded her arms like a 4-year-old. Finally, I said, as close to verbatim as I can get, "Lady, you're only fucking with the people behind you in line, and the people in the front of the store. Our interaction is done, your food is waiting for you, MOVE. ALONG." Finally after a few more seconds of huffiness she moved on.

Seriously, a bag of coins? What kind of a moron do you have to be to get angry that someone wouldn't fulfill that stupid request? Go to a bank. Spend a Saturday afternoon rolling pennies with your kids. Get one of those old people coin purses and spend it penny by glorious penny and nickel by shiny nickel. I can't believe the friend in her car didn't slap her. I would've.

The best part of my day was that this was the worst part of my day. If I'm alive, and the worst part of my day was when a 5 minute interaction set me behind maybe another 5 minutes, then I can honestly say I'm winning.

There were some phenomenal parts of my day, at least 6 different interactions with people where I felt like I had made a human connection. That's what the day is all about. In fact, looking back, that stupid bag-of-coins lady and I made a human connection as well, merely of a more base sort, less positive.

Addendum: I apologize for the swearing. It felt like a swearing day.