I remember being a kid and going into any random hardees or Mcdonalds and the staff was nice and food was warm. Just like a chic fil a.
Also i remember always seeing like 10 people working at a place as opposed to 3 or 4 overworked employees.
Was that actually true or just how i saw it as an overly positive kid?
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Sounds like partly you’re only remembering the best experiences, and partly you’re noticing the effects of market pressures requiring doing more with less staff.
Nostalgia.
As we grow older, we tend to forget the bad things and focus on what was good. And even if there was no good, we mentally lie to ourselves that their was.
I think it’s nostalgia. Anecdotally, I worked in fast food back then and most people there were pretty miserable and couldn’t care less. In n out and chic fil a are the exception to this.
Everyone is telling you nostaglia but I think you’re a little right
sure no fast food was similar to chick fil a. but I do think there was more effort into fast food. and you got what you paid for. even if it wasn’t good because it was cheap.
now you pay $10 to get a shitty meal and horrible service. it’s a lot easier to feel unsatisfied. and workers don’t even care at all
I definitely feel that employees of most fast food joints care a lot less than they used to. I don’t blame them, because I know the companies treat them like shit and pay them shit, but it makes me not want to go to these places. Service is shitty, the food is shitty, everything is over priced, it’s not even fast anymore. Fast food needs to die out, I don’t know why so many people put up with it.
Wait, are you going to other fast food restaurants and accepting cold food that should be hot?
I think it’s because more adults are working in fast food than what I remember. I remember most employees were perky teenagers, and you don’t see that at too many places nowadays.
I think we can all appreciate that despite costing twice as much as it used to, these companies have really gone the extra mile to also reduce both the qualitative and quantity of their product in recent years.
Its that way across the board for basically… everything. Shrinkflation. Stagflation. Whatever new fun media friendly buzzword for it, companies are basically reducing every metric of quality of their products while charging more. They all basically figured out that if they all do it nobody has any choice and the consumer just wearily accepts it.
I had done my stint in fast food more than 25 years ago and even though the job sucked it wasn’t like it is today. I barely ever had to work with a skeleton crew like today but when we were short staffed the managers pitched in. It was a source of pride for them to have good service even if the food was meh. They stayed late and came in early. I think too it was the workers. I job hopped from one fast food place to another for my high school years and all the places were basically the same. If the staff had been disrespectful of the customers, we would get fired and replaced with the next person. There was no shortage of workers *willing to work.* I saw in another sub that employers were paying bonuses to employees who would come to work on time. We would have just been fired for that if it was not a one off. That’s part of it- no one is afraid to just ghost their employers as there is no respect for others these days. I get it that the economy sucks but if everyone is getting their goods from anywhere from smash and grabs to just living off someone else then why would they do anything to inconvenience themselves or do anything uncomfortable like keeping up with what time it is so you can go serve other people? Or even so you can make something? Fast food jobs aren’t forever and I see all kinds of place’s everywhere with sign on bonuses and pay fairly well for the low skill jobs they are (sadly I know higher skilled workers not paying much more to employees who have been there 10 years and worked their way up to those same pays), but no one is willing to get those jobs. I also think the young folks today who have grown up with safe spaces and never being told no would have a difficult time working somewhere where you had to do something well to a *standard* that isn’t “participation trophy good enough” but has to be specific and no one is going to do anything but pay you for the time you spend doing that rather than showering you with accolades for doing your actual job. I dread to think of how things will be when there’s a whole swath of people who have not worked a day in their lives and their money supply dries up. They may come out to protest or something but once they have to pay their own bills and feed themselves, *hopefully* they will get jobs and work rather than go be unemployed because of some principle that they shouldn’t have to work to eat. I don’t think people know how things work- food doesn’t just grow wild and put itself on your plate. There’s work involved in the whole process.
To paraphrase the great Samuel L. Jackson, “Shit may taste like pumpkin pie. But I’ll never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfuckers.”
Most seem the same to me. Hell, my local McDonalds after the “moderization” has the exact same layout and service quality.
Your privilege is showing.
No. It was shit some places and decent others.
Although there has been a change very recently where some places close to me that used to be OK are now understaffed or have shorter hours. This is due to Covid and inflation.
I’m still mostly getting my food hot and fast, you didn’t imagine that.
It is an exception in my area for there to be bad service or cold food.
I don’t remember getting outstanding service like you can often get at Chick-fil-A back then. So it’s probably part nostalgia.
I do think that restaurants focus more on drive-thru and mobile ordering these days. So the in-restaurant ordering experience has gotten worse, especially after covid. And it does seem like awful service has gotten more common.
Hardcore nostalgia unless you just happened to have a particularly nice local McDonalds.
It was definitely better service than it is today! Being a connoisseur of fast food dining in my day, I used to love finding the “grandmother” McDonalds or Burger Kings where the older women would work, probably mostly to have something to do during the day. Now that was service! Those grammas would make a Whopper like you never saw! And there were ALWAYS napkins in the bags!
It wasn’t *that* good but I think service used to be generally better even 10-15 years ago. Going to a fast food where the service was horrific seemed to be an exception and not the norm. Fast food has gone way down in general in the past few years. I’ve pretty much stopped going to them altogether because of how expensive they’ve gotten, how bad the quality of the actual product has gotten, and because of the pretty consistent bad service (other than Chick-fil-A those guys are still killing it)
I think the poor service can be attributed, in part, to restaurants having a hard time finding employees to work. It’s not fair to bash on the people working there who showed up.
1. It’s Chick-fil-A, not “chic-fil-a.”
2. Putting aside the reprehensible political choices of the company and its management, I have never found the experience of eating at a Chick-fil-A to be particularly noteworthy. The food is ok. The requirement that workers say “please,” “thank you,” and “my pleasure” offers a veneer of a good customer experience, but it’s not legitimate. I expect more to see a place as offering exemplary customer experience.
3. I see superior customer experience from other fast food chains, but it depends on the particular team. Last week, my wife and I went to a Wendy’s (not our favorite chain by any means) that we’d never before visited, and the experience was top-notch, from the drive-through interaction being efficient and pleasant to the window payment interaction being friendly and cheerful to the food orders being separately bagged to the food being freshly made, hot, and tasty.
4. I am Gen X, so I was an adult 25 years ago and probably can offer a more objective perspective on any changes between fast food experiences then versus now. I see no difference, with the exception of the rise of “no problem” being used in place of “you’re welcome.” That bugs some people. Whatever. I haven’t otherwise seen a general decline in service, not that it was stellar to begin with.
Nostalgia, I think. It was right around 25 or 30 years ago I reached the conclusion that if I went to a fast food place and got approximately the right amount of food for what I paid, I should consider that good enough.
I think you may be remembering fast food commercials rather than fast food experiences
I worked fast food about 30 years ago. I don’t see a difference between then and now
Smaller town ones still seem fine, at least around here. Shit in cities is always dirtier and less friendly. Why do ya all like living in them again?
Time to rewatch Forest Gump