One More Pickle!

As i stepped into McDonald's i immediately observed that the cashier counter only had three cashier registers. the three lines of customers extended to the eating tables. it took a good ten minutes before i was finally called by maria and was quickly greeted with "hi,can i take your order?" i stressed to her that my small hamburger must have four pickles and exactly four pickles on it while my small order of fries must have not even an ounce of salt. As she placed the order, i noticed she didn't really pay attention to detail to my request. She kept punching buttons on the register, but i brushed it off, because i already pointed out to her exactly what i wanted. Once maria charged me for my order she turned around and said something to the person making the burgers, and then went on to tell the manager to hold the salt she was about to put on the fresh batch of fries.She turned and asked why, and maria told her it was because her customer wanted no salt on his fries. the manager glanced toward Maria's register and saw me there, and gave me what looked like "the rocks eyebrow lift". I guess i held her up because she seemed like she was taking lots of customers in a hurry. i couldn't help but laugh a little thinking about the project and all my other classmates that might be going through the same situation.
she told me to hold on to my fries and wait just a bit longer for the burger. I waited there for about 3 more minutes on top of the 2 minutes i was with her on the register. while she finishes with the client after me and calling the next one, here comes my burger."done with this part of the extra credit," i say to myself. She goes ahead and stuffs my burger in the bag, and says have a nice day.
Now i know i could have just left, taken my receipt that says "1 pickle", and the professor would have understood i went through with the project, but i was curious. I moved to the side and opened my burger, and i found 3 pickles on it. I called maria while she was getting some barbecue sauce for somebody, and told her there was a pickle missing on my burger. While i showed her the burger with 3 pickles on it she said,"you said you wanted extra pickles right?" i nodded and told her i wanted exactly four pickles. She took the burger nicely from my hand, but i noticed she squeezed the hell out of it while she was bringing it back to the burger maker.
The little burger goes back, and it adds 1 more minute to the process.
I finally get the burger back and look at it once more,and it has exactly four pickles on it. The bun looks like it hasn't been pierced, but when i opened the burger, i noticed that the squeeze she put on the burger pierced the beef. Real bad service, but i didn't want to stir things up again with the line being so long. I thanked maria for her service, and she gave me the "get out of here look". It took about 4 people in total to complete the order.
The manufacturing process to which my order went through was not great. Although she was helpful at first, it was not enough to rescue the rest of the processing method. I observed that her registers operating system was not well equipped to register the four pickle order as maria had to physically walk over to the back to instruct the hamburger preparer to place extra pickles on my order. McDonald's salts all fries in the expectancy that all customers are in need of it. It might be fair to add that Maria's, as well as her crews delay in processing my order was heavily influenced by the large traffic of customers during the time frame in which my order was placed. As far as the operational skills of the McDonald's crew i would rate them to be effective but not efficient.
In order to work out the kinks that brought down the overall service performance, as a consultant i would advise McDonald's to begin with acquiring an operational system suitable for today's versatile customer. As more and more people discover the meaning of the phrase " the customer is always right", scenarios like these might be more prevalent and the ratio of disgruntled customers to below par performances will became higher. In addition, McDonald's would be better suited to offer a higher rate of customer service if they train their employees to understand how to effectively and efficiently communicate with not only the ordering system but also with one another. Communication is key to excellent customer service, especially in high-traffic environment like McDonald's where one slip could stop the whole flow of operations