Restaurant workers’ lives are ruined by to-go orders

There has been a boom in to-go orders across the restaurant industry since the COVID-19 pandemic hit – but the restaurant workers are finding it difficult to cope. There is a common complaint among workers that mobile to-go orders overload their kitchens, leading to overworked, burned out employees and angry customers. According to Starbucks, for example, mobile orders drove the coffee chain’s recovery and exploded to an all-time high in 2021, making up over 25% of all orders. This comes at a cost to workers, however. Nat El-Hai, a former barista, told Insider’s Grace Dean previously that the mobile order system is really bad. Insider spoke with dozens of workers who reported that mobile orders lead to delays and long queues, angering customers.

At busy times, a New York barista reports that her store receives as many as seven mobile orders per minute. Despite being ‘chronically understaffed’, some Starbucks workers complain that they cannot turn off mobile ordering, while others told Insider, that managers sometimes turn it off and say that the system was down. According to an employee in Texas, the combination of drive-through, in-store and mobile orders made it ‘impossible’ to meet corporate standards.

Starbucks is not the only company flooded with digital orders. Workers at Chipotle, which has increased its digital orders to nearly half of all sales, report many of the same issues. An employee at Chipotle in Ohio said the app enables orders to come in at a much faster rate than they can realistically be filled, which leads to a constant backlog. In the chain’s Halloween ‘Boorito’ promotion, for instance, the store ‘instantly’ got 20 orders at 5 pm scheduled for pickup just 10 minutes later, and that pace continued throughout the night.

According to an employee at Chipotle in California, digital orders can just keep piling up, causing prep lines to fall behind by 30 minutes to an hour. Workers also spend more time on digital orders when they get behind. A second Ohio employee reported being allowed to leave at 1:30 a.m., three hours after closing. As a result of customers choosing to leave rather than wait for their food, some orders are left behind and food is wasted. For workers at full-service restaurants, the rise of to-go orders has changed much of their jobs. This year, Cheesecake Factory’s to-go sales doubled, averaging $3 million per restaurant.

In California Cheesecake Factory, bakery worker Sophia Um told The Wall Street Journal, ‘the sheer volume of what you are expected to turn out is unsustainable’. Workers told WSJ that they struggle to maintain quality standards while serving dining room customers and keeping up with an unprecedented number of to-go orders, though Cheesecake Factory managers now have the ability to temporarily close digital orders if necessary.

Read more: Top secrets on US aviation companies leaked, accused held

Through tips, to-go orders can harm full-service restaurant employees as well. Restaurant workers surveyed by Lightspeed say 60% of guests are ordering more food, but tipping the same or less than before the pandemic. Losing tips especially impacts workers at full-service restaurants, who can earn as little as $2.13 per hour before tips. Workers lose out on tips as takeout orders grow at those businesses. Growth in to-go orders is having disastrous effects across the industry, resulting in constant understaffing and historically high quit rates.