McDonald’s, or, What You Can Learn from Work as a Teenager

 

I went to high school in Marquette, Michigan, a town of 22,000 in the Upper Peninsula. It is the largest city in the UP and is supported by a decent tourism industry in addition to mining and timber. The high school had about 1,200 students when I was there in the 1970s. Late in my sophomore year, a friend started working for the McDonald’s in town. I decided to apply and was given a minimum wage job.

I started work in the grill area, dressing burgers. The training was good, and I liked getting some money. I kind of just slid along, getting four-eight hours a week in two shifts on the weekend. Then an interesting thing happened. The general manager, not a particularly nice guy, asked me to clean the bathrooms. I went through the motions – mop, ice in the urinal, wipe things down, and came back to my post in the grill.

The GM came to me and asked me if I was done with the bathrooms. I said “yes,” and he replied “No, you’re not. Come with me.” We went to the men’s room and he showed me ketchup on the walls. And a spill behind the toilet. He made it clear that cleaning the bathrooms meant, you know cleaning them.

A light went off in my brain. It struck me what a job was. It was to understand the goal of an assignment and do it to the best of my ability. My whole attitude changed and so did my work habits. Soon I was getting full shifts on the weekends and some weeknight hours. I got a raise. One Saturday, I ran buns single-handedly on a $500 hour (that was a big hour in 1976). After a year, I was promoted to crew chief and got a cool yellow band around the base of my hat. The GM had given me a wonderful gift that has stayed with me my entire life.

The GM gave me another gift after I graduated. He called me into his office and asked me if I wanted to be an assistant manager. Fairly decent pay for a high school graduate. I told him that I had been admitted to UCLA and was planning to go to college. He said, “Absolutely, go to college, offer withdrawn.” He wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

Published in Group Writing
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  1. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    In my youth, I was pretty casual about work times.  One day, one of my bosses jerked me up short and said that I wasn’t doing what I was being paid to do.  I decided that it was just as easy to be five minutes early as it was to be five minutes late.

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