r/tacobell

Fuck England im eating taco bell tonight in support of Mexico

Our gm staffs the bare minimum, we've had multiple quit because of the low pay to high stress. I keep this job only for the evening hours. I need odd hour from 5p-11. Like I said weird hours. I adore my good dashers, love my teens I work with but I'm so tired of having 8-9 pages that never stop updating.

I've been working at Taco Bell as a service champion since February, and so far I've felt really comfortable here. I've posted before that I make the condiment table in the lobby really neat and visually appealing, just because I'm really dedicated to what I do, and I want the boss to notice my dedication.

Today I was working the drive-thru, and a woman drove to my window and asked if I was the one that took her order at the speaker. I said I was. She told me that I was the nicest person at that location that took her order. I was pretty flattered by that and thanked her for the compliment. It gave me a lot of confidence.

I know that we have a couple of people who put on a really short, passive-aggressive tone when working service, and I've never really understood that. Even when I come in barely awake, stressed, or overstimulated, I put on a smile and do my best to make sure people have a good experience. I don't ever want to make it obvious to customers that I'm not in a good mood, or take out my frustrations on them. Putting on a smile and having a positive attitude goes a really long way.

Doesn’t hit like the yellow paper taco party packs used to.

See you on the toilet.

I love using Diablo sauce on my eggs in the morning. And fire sauce on cheese pizza.

Also like to add diablo sauce into my beef ramen soups.

I worked at Taco bell in the late 00s. Mexican pizzas were barely ever ordered. Might make 3 a shift. Taco bell discontinued them after I was done there and everyone lost their mind. Stores were running out of stock when they came back. That hype never made sense to me considering it was one of our worst selling items. So I've been curious ...what is demand for Mexican pizzas like today?

I've been working at Taco Bell for quite a few years now so I thought I'd make this post for customers to understand what goes on behind the scenes. A little different from the daily posts complaining about the prices.

Taco Bell, like a lot of other fast food restaurants with drive-thrus, push for speed relentlessly. Drive-thru time metric is directly tied to bonuses. We compete with a cluster of other Taco Bells in the area and whoever has the fastest speed by the end of each day gets a bigger paycheck. So obviously this creates an incentive to have the fastest drive-thru time. The higher-ups logic is probably something like:

>The faster you get each car out the drive-thru, the more volume you can have, thus making more money. Plus the customers will appreciate getting their food fast instead of waiting so long.

Makes sense from this simple perspective. But what actually follows from having created this incentive tied to speed is far more nefarious. This is because there is only so much Taco Bell workers can actually do to affect speed. Sure they can prepare the food faster, get napkins and utensils and sauces out and ready to be packed, but realistically that only saves a few seconds.

Most of what drive-thru times a store can achieve is based on the customer. How long the customer takes to order. How much the customer orders. A customer who order just one bean burrito will obviously have a faster drive-thru time than a customer who orders a party pack of tacos. There are customers who take an entire minute or more to look over the menu to decide what they want. Customers who place multiple separate orders at the drive-thru. Customers who have problems with their mobile app and we have to spend minutes diagnosing the problem at the speaker. Just one of many things that affect slow drive-thru times, all of which are entirely out of the control of the Taco Bell workers.

Your drive thru time is essentially luck-based. But the speed incentive is still there. So what happens? Cheating. A lot of cheating goes on behind the scenes. Now I'll list all the ones that I've seen being used at my store. I'll start with the ones that don't negatively affect the customer directly:

• Turning the monitor off when drive-thru is backed up with big orders and slow - By turning off the monitor and restarting it later, you prevent the very slow orders (4+ minutes) from contributing to your average. You only keep it on when the fast orders are happening.
• Using your own car to drive in circles around the drive-thru when there are no customers - When it gets slow and there are no customers, an employee takes their own car and drives multiple times around the drive-thru, tricking the system into thinking a customer's order was finished in only 20 seconds, and thus lowering the average. Imagine how much gas is collectively wasted across all Taco Bells from this.
• Messing with the timer system entirely - I don't know if this has been nerfed yet but it was used last year. Some creative employees found a way to open the wall-mounted electrical box responsible for the drive-thru timer system and by pressing some button on it, set it to a mode where it would show a car at the speaker for 10 seconds, then it would go away, so it would add an order time of 10 seconds to the average, lowering it dramatically. It would keep doing this over and over. It really helped lower times with minimal effort but was used sparingly so we didn't get caught.

Now these are the ways we cheat where it directly affects the customer, usually in a negative way.

• Asking the customer to park in the front and bringing their food out to them - I'm sure most of you are familiar with this already. By taking the customer out of the drive-thru, the system sees this as a finished order and so it lowers our time without actually having finished the order. Sometimes this is actually used in a positive way, like when a customer at the window has nacho fries that need 3+ minutes to cook, and the orders of the people behind them are already ready, the people behind them can get their food faster without it getting cold and having to wait. But other than those cases, if they ask you to park in front, it's usually because of the time.
• Checking in mobile orders early - Taco Bell employees are not supposed to check in drive-thru mobile orders until the customer arrives at the speaker. However, in order to lower their times, some managers will immediately check in mobile orders so that when the customer eventually arrives, their food will be ready right away. This really irks me because sometimes customers won't show up 30+ minutes after they place their mobile order and I have to guiltily hand their soggy, cold food to them. All because the manager wanted to save a few seconds of time.
• Asking the customer to wait at the speaker - There are two separate timers. Speaker time (how long it takes to take the customer's order) and window time (how long it takes to hand the food out to the customer when they are at the window). If a store needs to lower their window time to meet a metric, they can ask the customer to wait at the speaker, even after they finished ordering, for multiple minutes while the workers prepare their food. Once the workers finish with the food, the order-taker sends the customer forward to the window, where the food is handed to them in seconds, lowering the window time. Also, the timer doesn't start in the first place until the customer reaches the speaker. So by sending only one customer at a time like this, you get faster times than if there are multiple cars backed up in the drive-thru, which all will get their own timer and collectively increase the drive-thru time.
• Asking the customer to pull up a few feet past the sensor and then back again - By pulling up past the sensor, they "complete" the order and thus the time is lowered even without the customer having gotten their food yet.

These are some of the many ways Taco Bell workers cheat, all because of perverse incentives. All these methods are just at my one store, mind you. I'm willing to bet there are a lot more creative, sinister cheating methods other Taco Bell stores have discovered over the years. As a worker, I really think Taco Bell and drive-thru fast food restaurants in general should get rid of bonuses tied to drive-thru times. I always want to make sure every customer's order is correct and I want to check the bag to see if nothing is missing, but because of speed, speed, speed that's drilled into everyone, I always feel very rushed and sometimes I won't check, which leads to missing items. Sometimes I'll forget to give someone their drink because everything is happening too fast. Same thing for the people working on the line making the food. They'll make the food wrong, forget a modification, etc. all because everyone is forced to be as fast as possible.

Then there is labor which is a whole other thing of its own. Taco Bell stores will try not to have to many workers at once so they save on labor costs. So now you have only two people on the line in the entire store at rush hour. And they still have to maintain good speeds even with twice as few hands on deck. But like I said that's another can of worms entirely.