Middle Class Staff - a Theory
Fast food vendors are know for high turn over in staffing.
Low wages and high stress are factors often sited.
I will comment on three levels of competence/skills that may or may not be related to individual intelligence.
#1) Excellent (Over Achiever) - Desirable Employee may leave for higher pay or better hours.
#2) Good Enough - Passed drug test - shows up regularly - shows up sober - shows up neat - low error rate.
#3) Not Good Enough - Can't make it - Soon to be CANNED!
I believe many Managers HOPE that they can retain enough "GOOD ENOUGH" employees to keep the system operating at a reasonably good level.
Locally many Fast Food provider have had long standing signs offering employment.
For the last 40 years, fast food has more or less considered anyone who has been there for 3 months to be a "veteran" employee. It's a high turn over field for all the reasons you have stated.
I worked fast food for one of my jobs in 1982 (along with roofing in the summers and cleaning cattle trailers on sale days) while self funding my private pilot license in high a school.
My class mate Stan and I worked in the back (the kitchen) and as students we had evening or weekend shifts. We both worked about 30 hours per week. At 32 hours they had to pay benefits so that never happened.
There were usually 2 back people, 2 front people and a shift supervisor who would close out the registers etc. The back took a lot longer to close out and clean than the front. Once the front was done the front people would come back and help us finish up as would the shift supervisor.
However Stan and I wanted to get home and get more sleep on school nights so we got creative and reduced the time it took to close down and clean the back from an hour and a half with 5 people involved to just 45 minutes for the two of us. That got us done at the same time as the front staff and shift supervisor were finishing up.
Since we didn't always work with each other we both cross trained the other back staff we worked with so that the 45 minute timeline became standard practice.
The net result is that we saved the business 3 hours and 45 minutes of staff wages each and every day. At 1 year we had a performance review, and got the customary $0.05 wage that everyone got if they stayed that long. In my review I pointed out what I saved them - each and every day. They would not increase my raise.
I walked across the parking lot during my break and got hired at Pizza Hut as a waiter. I was as good for business there as a I'd been in my last job, but got paid almost three times as much when tips were considered, was a shift supervisor at 6 months (supervising my high school science teacher who needed a part time gig with the low teacher pay). Due to my manager's sponsorship I was offered a job in their management track after I put in my notice to leave for college. I'd have started as an assistant manager at one of their corporate stores for $45 K and been making $80K as a manager in another corporate store within 2 years. Not bad for 1983. But I'd spent the last year watching my manager work at least 80 hours per week and would have to move where ever they had a vacancy guaranteeing at least 2 moves in 2 years. I declined on quality of life issues. In retrospect that may have been a mistake.
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The point here is that whether a high achiever gets rewarded depends an awful lot on the response from their manager(s) and the business owners. They either have a solid understanding of the long term benefits of paying good staff what they are worth, or they don't.
The fast food business I worked for went out of business a couple years later and bleeding talented staff with initiative and the training costs of unmotivated replacements who stayed only a few weeks or months was a contributing factor. If you are going to churn and burn low paid labor, you need to have a steady supply of replacements, and that doesn't happen in smaller communities.
That low paid, short term labor is expensive not just in terms of having to pay people to train them, but also in lower productivity and higher error rates, higher production costs, reduced customer service and lack of innovation.
