Assembly-Line Workers of the “McDonald’s Flock”

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Not long ago, someone joked that McDonald’s had turned into a joyless middle-aged establishment — no longer brimming with childlike wonder and youthful vigour, but a dull, lifeless canteen for beasts of burden. In truth, though, McDonald’s has never lacked for beasts of burden. To my own surprise, I realised that we — myself included — had grown so thoroughly familiar with McDonald’s that we had come to see it merely as a black box for churning out fries and burgers at speed. When we stand in the queue, anxiously waiting for our food, we can catch glimpses of blurred figures scurrying inside the open kitchen that McDonald’s deliberately designed for customers to see through. Yet our eyes are always trained on the food, never on the working lives behind it.

◉On 8 October 1990, the first McDonald’s in mainland China opened on Guanghua Road in Shenzhen. At the time, McDonald’s represented a vibrant, modern lifestyle for people across China. Image source: McDonald’s official website
So, this past April, while I was living in Jing’an District, Shanghai, the idea took root: I wanted to investigate the conditions of fast-food labour in this modern metropolis.

I. Shared Lives Cut Apart by the Assembly Line

I spent four or five days cycling around, asking every chain restaurant within a three-kilometre radius whether they were hiring. Many of the responses were far from warm. It wasn’t until I walked into this McDonald’s and met the assistant store manager, Xiao L.W., that things shifted. He poured me a glass of Coke, handed it over, sat down, and spoke with me. While we talked, a Shanghai auntie was shouting at the counter about some trivial complaint. Xiao L.W. glanced over, paid her no mind, and went on speaking to me, earnest and attentive. In all those days, that was the moment I felt most valued. I also drew a Tarot card — the Six of Cups — and so I decided to come work here. I spent 150 yuan on a medical examination to obtain a health certificate, bought a pair of black trousers and black leather shoes out of my own pocket, and clocked in as a part-time worker. Every new employee must do a four-hour trial shift during the busiest period. Xiao L.W. told me that if I couldn’t keep up, I should just let him know. There was no pay during the trial, but we were given 40 yuan in vouchers. Regular pay was 19 yuan an hour, rising to just 21 yuan after 1,000 hours worked — four or five yuan less than in manufacturing.

During my first fortnight, I eagerly sought out work wherever I could find it, hopping to whichever station was swamped. For a while, it felt as though the job was really for the sake of my colleagues — easing their fatigue — and that, at least, gave it meaning and a sense of connection to others.

For instance, when I asked Sister Jing to teach me how to make burgers, she, pleased to keep seeing me turn up, took to calling me her ‘apprentice.’ In the handover between shifts and the rhythm of making products, I could sense the camaraderie among my coworkers through little notes left behind, shared glances and smiles. Shared labour like this could, just like life itself, bring us positive energy and emotion.

But in many fast-food chains, all of that is suppressed. In order to provide customers with fast service and products that are standardised and reliably predictable in taste, the human element must be eliminated. The process of making food is broken down into an assembly line of simple, repeatable steps.

The stations in the store fall into five areas: the burger station, the fried-food and snacks station, the fries and meal-assembly station, the drinks and delivery station, and the McCafé counter. The layout of each station is determined by the placement of the equipment, and cross-station work is rare. In our store, only five or six people are usually working at any one time, and each must hold their fixed post to keep the assembly line running. I was assigned to the drinks and delivery station.

◉Unlike a manufacturing factory, the back kitchen of a McDonald’s, though cramped, is almost entirely made up of automated machines and electronic equipment.

Each individual item is, in fact, simple to make, because the ingredients arrive pre-prepared. Take the Cheeseburger, for example. When Sister Jing sees the order on the screen, she puts the buns into the bun toaster; after about ten seconds, the buns drop out, ready. Then, following the prescribed order, she squeezes on the sauce, adds the pickles, a pre-cooked beef patty and a slice of cheese — and a standard Cheeseburger is done.

◉During peak hours, staff at a McDonald’s are busy making burgers in tense, frantic conditions. Image source: Xiaohongshu user @大黄跟小展还有阿铭
The fried-food and snacks station is run by Old Qin on his own. Every deep-fryer has its own built-in timer, each product has a standard frying time, and each corresponds to a different button on the timer — you simply drop the basket in and wait for the bell. Frying chips is usually handled alongside meal assembly, because the stations are close together. Making drinks and packing delivery orders can be split between two people, and the same goes for the meal-assembly area. I wanted to learn as much as possible about every station, but whenever the shift managers Xiao Hua and Xi Yang Yang saw me darting about, they would tell me to stand still by the drink machine. The moment they saw me idle, they’d send me to collect rubbish or restock supplies. Gradually, I began to be on guard against their commands, unconsciously anticipating their instructions.

The result was that I could focus only on my own task, and that very specialisation erected a thick wall between us. The perfectly identical-tasting burger served at every outlet across the country is, in fact, sustained by slicing apart our shared lives as workers.

Moreover, though these tasks look simple, they are so monotonous and tedious that they drain you all the more. At times, I felt as though my eyes were watching my hands dart from one machine to the next, and my hands were telling my mind to shut up — that any stray thought would jam the machine. From seven o’clock to ten in the morning, that span seemed impossibly long. I felt as though I were crawling on my knees, dragging myself from one stretch of time to the next, with nothing but the clock watching every movement.

After just over two weeks, I had earned barely more than 1,700 yuan. My roster had me working five or six hours a day, five days a week, with occasional time off. If I worked eight hours a day, the full month with no days off, the pay would come to around 4,500 yuan.

II. A Delivery Order Surge Is What You Fear Most on a Rainy Day

The store follows a predictable rhythm: dine-in orders and delivery orders usually sit around 300 each, and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are the quietest days, while Thursday through Sunday are extremely busy. Public holidays bring the highest volumes, yet staffing is thinner than on a normal day. Zhang Di, a colleague who has worked here for a long time and is still underage, once told me that over the Labour Day holiday there were only three of them in the store. On Children’s Day, 450 delivery orders went out. I simply cannot imagine how they managed to get through it. And if a rainy day falls on top of a holiday — that is the most terrifying sight of all. The POS terminal would spew orders like mad, and my drink-making speed couldn’t keep up. It’s not that I was slow — I was already making two or three drinks at a time.

◉Staring at a screen crammed with drink orders, nearly every McDonald’s worker feels the urge to lose it entirely.

Worst of all, the delivery riders would bellow at us, demanding: “Why hasn’t it been ready for half an hour already!” Behind them, the food delivery platforms were cracking their whips. At the delivery lockers, shoulder to shoulder in their raincoats, their faces calm on the surface but already unhinged. The scene inside the store was just as dire — my colleagues were shouting, asking whether stock was available, where the chicken fillet was, how much longer the chips would take.

Customers stood or leaned at the counter, their eyes fixed on us. Even then I was in despair: what if we’ve run out of crushed Oreo? What if we’re out of spill-proof lids for the hot drinks? What if the syrup has splattered all over the counter? I couldn’t spare a single second for any of it.

During an order surge, neither the riders nor we could afford the slightest slip; every movement felt life-or-death. None of us dared imagine what would happen if we couldn’t finish — leave customers without their food? If even one person made an error or fell behind, the entire production line would collapse, and everyone in this system would lose their “lives”: the riders would be penalised by the platform, and our store would lose every shred of its reputation.

Yet the moment the rain stopped, the order volume would plummet. That contrast was what angered me most: for the customers, it was nothing more than spending five yuan to find someone to get soaked in the rain on their behalf. The manager would say, ‘Great day for burger sales,’ and even the laid-back Old Qin would remark on how well the shop was doing. It left me in a daze — what exactly counts as “good”? Is a flood of orders “good”?

◉The POS terminal works like a weather forecast — when it suddenly starts spitting out orders at breakneck speed, you don’t even need to look outside to know it’s almost certainly raining.

III. “Let Them Stir It Themselves!”

Xi Yang Yang, the shift manager, was about to leave. He had been demoted time and again — from hygiene supervisor down to store shift manager. He said only a truly steady mind could stomach it all. His counterpart was Old Qin at the fryer, and the two were diametrically opposite in personality. Old Qin was in his fifties. He took a keen interest in his colleagues’ little gossip and daily dramas, yet he was distracted at every task he did, as if nothing in the world truly mattered to him. On the day Xi Yang Yang announced he was resigning, he even shouted at Old Qin: “Every day I come to work with you, I’m miserable!”

Old Qin was fond of the other shift manager, Hua Hua. Her real name was Xiaohua — surname withheld — and she was in her thirties, married, with children. She had worked in her hometown to put her daughter through school before coming to Shanghai to scratch out a living. She too was about to leave, heading home because her daughter was sitting the Senior High School Entrance Examination. Old Qin said he wanted to see her off — he couldn’t take her all the way back home, but he wanted to get her to the railway station at least.

Xiaohua was slight and wiry, her hair pulled up in a high ponytail. She looked thoroughly no-nonsense, but there was none of the official stiffness about her. Just watching how fast she assembled meals and packed bags, you knew she was the quickest on the floor. Her go-to phrase was “For God’s sake” — customer complaints drove her mad, and so did catching Old Qin failing to restock, or the storeroom running dry. I felt she was really playing the role of the woman running the household. When the rest of the family can’t cope and are left scrambling on all sides, isn’t it exactly the moment the woman at the helm needs to step in?

Making a McFlurry involves stirring crushed Oreo evenly into the soft serve with a wooden spoon. The first time I was at it, she watched for a moment, got exasperated, and said: “Fine, fine, fine — hand it over, and let them stir it themselves!” As though the customers were enemies we were battling together, and we employees were the family. When handling complaints, the hostility towards customers grew even more obvious. “What the hell is the use of all this nagging!” She was the only one who ever talked like that, though even then she had to swallow her pride and answer the complaint calls in a pleasant, patient tone.

By contrast, the assistant store manager — Xiao L.W. — came across as far more relaxed and witty. He was the only person in the store on a fixed salary, one tied to turnover and store performance. So any food I snuck or wasted went on his bill. Colleagues would tease, “Treat us, Xiao L.W.!” Yet he didn’t seem to mind our waste one bit. An ice cream cone I’d over-dispensed by mistake — he’d grab it off me and say: “Well, I’ll grudgingly eat it myself then!” He’d even pick up the bubble machine we sold and roughhouse with Sister Jing. When a big order arrived that simply had to be fulfilled, he’d play the poor victim: “You’re working this man in his thirties like a beast of burden — at least a cow gets to graze on grass, but all I get is hard labour.” And indeed, even the assistant store manager was, while on the floor, just another pair of hands.

IV. Escaping “Crazy Thursday“

Something that truly astonished me was that half the staff here had fled over from KFC. Sister Jing, her daughter Sun Jing, and Xiaohua — all of them had worked at KFC before. There were other staff, too, who moved back and forth between the two giants: full-time at KFC by day, picking up part-time shifts at McDonald’s after clocking off. The moment I mentioned KFC, they would erupt, swearing that KFC “butchered the donkey once the grinding was done,” “didn’t have a single decent soul among them,” “made you feel like you were in prison.” Sun Jing — who had still been underage when she worked there — said KFC capped staff hours with brutal rigour. What she meant by “capping hours” was that the total working hours allocated to a store in a week were fixed, and staff had to fight one another for their share. Because the store had been allotted a limited pool of hours, the manager had to get an enormous workload done with as few people as possible. She said she was often stationed alone at the counter, responsible for everything at once: making drinks, frying chips, preparing dine-in orders, preparing takeaway orders, and preparing delivery orders. I had worked every one of those stations myself, but doing them all simultaneously was a workload I could not fathom.

◉ This KFC in Shanghai is swamped with orders every Thursday — wherever you look, there are crowds of people. Image source: Xiaohongshu
“Crazy Thursday” was terrifying for every KFC employee — each time an order surge, each time understaffed. She said, “The entire screen was crammed with orders, and there were a full four pages of them!” I did the maths: thirty-two orders in total, for her to complete on her own before a fresh flood of new ones poured in. With no pay rise and no extra hands, staff were also press-ganged into selling gift cards and pushing the app. On top of that, KFC would assign someone to sit in front of the CCTV feeds, watching for any employee standing around idle. As for “butchering the donkey once the grinding was done” — that meant once the peak season was over, KFC would immediately cut its staff.

V. My Obsession with Leftovers

Over the course of that month, I kept stealing chicken nuggets. I reflected on this often, and on my fixation with leftover food. Ever since I heard that my friend Xiaoshu used to nick food with her colleagues at her restaurant, I too found myself snacking on nuggets from the warming cabinet — five or six a day, sometimes more. I helped myself to other things as well: chips, chicken strips, cheese slices, fish fillet, Purple Sweet Potato Balls, and so on. I drank no end of soft drinks, until simply swallowing one made my head swim. I began to wonder whether I actually liked eating these things or whether I just enjoyed the stealing. My own analysis is this: I told myself all of it was rightfully mine, because I laboured here — or rather, I felt shortchanged, and I needed to steal a bite to set things right. And yet, even as I ate, my stomach was never at rest. The moment a nugget went down, I felt sick, queasy at the sight of anything greasy, even repelled by sweet drinks.

In fact, every Saturday we were entitled to one staff meal, and that was the happiest moment of my week — not because of the food itself, but because at last there was an open and honest way for what we had made to be returned to us, free of charge. All in all, I came to believe that my stealing food was a way of resisting the severing of our labour from its fruits.

On another level, I pitied the food itself. The moment the store closed, everything left over was thrown away, given to no one — not even the staff. I lost count of how many times the manager would bin a burger that had sat too long. I’d offer to take it, but he’d say it had gone stale, that it was no longer fit to eat.

◉ Chips and burgers regularly tossed into the bins. This policy is said to originate in McDonald’s tradition of anticipating customer demand to boost service efficiency — food is prepared before a customer even places an order. If a burger is unsold after ten minutes, or a serving of chips after seven, it goes in the bin.

I could never accept the logic of throwing food away rather than giving it to employees and their families. Sometimes, after a shift, I’d find a pile of leftover Spicy Chicken Wings and find a way to smuggle a pair home. Once, a batch of fried eggs had gone too long and were declared unusable. I knew they were bound for the bin, so I shoved two straight into my mouth, slipped a third into a bag, and tucked it in my pocket. After I’d finished all three, my stomach revolted again.

Here, food was not produced to fill bellies but to serve efficiency, to realise its exchange value. At any time, in any place, the chicken and burgers we made had to be redeemed at a set price — or else they ended up in the rubbish.

◉ The store had strict rules governing staff meals and the disposal of leftovers.

One time I was clearing tables and came across a man who had eaten alone, leaving behind an entire spread — several of the priciest burgers, a Pineapple Pie, and some chips. A few items had been broken open and examined, and the Pineapple Pie was still sealed, untouched inside its wrapper. I couldn’t begin to understand it, but all I could do was go over and clear the table. When it came time to tip it all into the bin, I felt it was a waste, so I retrieved the bag instead. I hesitated for ages before daring to eat anything, my mind racing — what if it’s poisoned? Even after eating, I was tense, half-convinced I might actually die.

I kept turning it over in my mind: what did this obsession with leftovers actually mean, given who I was in those places — a worker? And I wondered, too: once I left, if I went back to McDonald’s as a customer, would a burger taste any different? And when I saw the blurred, bustling figures of workers I had never met, how would I feel then?

Foodthink Contributor
Qingtai Yinwu (same username on all platforms)
“Above all, every investigation is an investigation of the self.”

 

 

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are provided by the author.

Editor: Yuyang

Published by Foodthink