Burgers From Afar

Fast food giant McDonald’s is outsourcing a few of its operations to agents who work in a call center. Their job is to take orders and relay them back to the relevant restaurants through the Internet. The Santa Maria-based Bronco Communications handles calls from 40 restaurants scattered around the country, while Illinois-based Verety has hired home-based agents to do the job. The call centers have been in operation for the past 18 months, and have weathered protests ranging from the idea being “bizarre” to low voice quality which results in agents having to repeat questions or customers having to repeat orders.
While McDonald’s claims this system decreases the time between orders by a few seconds, the agents are paid only the minimum wages, and are subjected to constant scrutiny. Their system flashes the number of minutes they were away on a break, and they have to click on a pop-up that appears every now and then in around 1.75 seconds to show that they are on the job.