You "tolerate" the mistakes because you don't want to wait. This is the #1 reason why there are so many mistakes. Speed over accuracy. Trust me when I tell you that no food service worker WANTS to make a mistake, because that ends up being more work for them. But mistakes are much more likely to happen when you are rushed and start slapping food together. Special orders are a bit PITA because you have to go off of your auto pilot and actually stop and concentrate on the order. I think you are confusing my explanation why there are so many issues with me defending it. I am saying that it is very, very hard to be as fast as they expect and be accurate, especially with special orders. Any job you do, if you try to rush it to ridiculous levels, there will be things missed and mistakes happen. Have none of you had a boss want something done in a time frame that it is not physically possible to do? That is what fast food workers deal with every single day. And get crap for it. And as you say, the places that are consistently wrong have a management problem. Like the saying goes, if it is 1 or 2 players, then it's the player. If it's the whole team, then it's the coach.
You're kidding right? I don't tolerate the mistakes because I don't want to wait. I'll wait as long as needed if my ordered is correct. It's much more disruptive, time consuming and a waste of gas (if the food is delivered, if we've gotten home without checking, etc) for an order to be wrong. Going back into to get the order correct typically takes more time than having the order right to begin with. I don't want to sacrifice accuracy to get my burger out to me 2 mins quicker. Most people are going to agree with that and because it's more disruptive they just go on home and say forget it I'm not going to hassle with it which only creates that circle.
Tolerating mistakes was because we want our Burger King, we want our McDonald's, Wendy's and more (which I said that already). We don't tolerate mistakes because we actually want mistakes. There's a Burger King by my house, they aren't the best, they often fudge when it comes to inventory like coffee (if it's late enough in the morning they just won't make it despite knowing they can), they'll put sausage instead of bacon on a breakfast sandwich, sometimes they'll miss a fry, and so on and when you look at the receipt no it's isn't us ordering wrong. Their google rating is 3.2 with 402 reviews. But on the other hand management often lets customers keep their coupons to be used at a later date.
People make mistakes of course, and sometimes people make consistent mistakes, sometimes without a discussion that employee will continue to make mistakes either they don't realize it or it's just seen as accepted. I've read in this thread about retail. Some of the places had some stricter policies regarding mistakes. You don't think those people had rushes? Had to do multiple things at once? In fast food you'll often have rushes, but in retail depending on the time of year it could be hours and hours worth of continuous people to help, to ring up. I've worked retail in my past, during Black Friday, during the Christmas rush, during back to school and more. That didn't mean I could just let security/ink tags go unnoticed or that somehow my cash register could be off more and I didn't actually want those things to happen. Ringing people up for over 5 hours straight, yes I know how it feels.
There's shared blame to go around, it's not all the customers, it's not all employees, it's not all management.
You might be happy to, that does not mean that everyone else is. How many of you that are making these statements are actually working in the food industry right now? Ok then.
I gave you the experience of my friend that worked at Taco Bell for years, at multiple locations. So Ok then. My friend would look at you and tell you what you're saying IS part of the problem. She has one of the most sympathetic viewpoints out there, she also has an understanding that customers aren't the scapegoat here, they can be rude, they can be antsy sure. However, she's seen employees who don't consider getting things right the first time to be part of their job, she's seen employees who care very much about getting things right the first time, she's seen how a supportive manager who recognizes mistakes occur but also doesn't want so many mistakes, especially from the same employees (if that is happening), she's also seen managers who are so carefree and when she would be on a shift she would feel awful trying to field the customers who actually came back in for mistakes because she knew the manager wasn't really interested in helping. There's a lot more that can be said but someone can have sympathy for those within a field and yet be able to see cons to it. It's okay to have both
But I think we've hashed this out enough, so let's call a truce and enjoy our day
and get back to those silly irritations instead of more serious conversations!! I know I will
