Putting Whip to Fast-Food Crews

If, like most people, your enduring lament is that there just isn’t enough time in the day, here’s some good news. Fast food just got faster in Southern California, where great minds refuse to stop dreaming.

If you don’t get your order within 30 seconds of paying for it at the drive-through window, McDonald’s will hand you a coupon for a free Big Mac on your next visit.

“Our 30-second drive-through guarantee is a way for customers to save time, so they can do other things,” says Scott Frisbie, president of the McDonald’s Operators Assn. of Southern California, whose 550 franchises in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties are participating in the promotion.

You may want to talk it over with loved ones before deciding which “other things” you do with all this extra time on your hands.

Let’s say you save 40 seconds per visit, and on average, you eat at McDonald’s three times a week. That’s two minutes a week total, which isn’t enough time to paint the house. But it could be just enough time to get your cholesterol checked, or to read the recent lawsuit by American Hindus over McDonald’s admission that there’s beef flavoring in the French fries.

A NASCAR driver helped kick off the 30-second promotion, and some McDonald’s restaurants had black-and-white checkered flags posted along the drive-through lanes.

“Customers love it, but the employees just have to work harder,” one sweaty McDonald’s grunt told me.

Exactly. And that’s the genius of it.

The customer makes out, the owner makes out, and the acne-faced hod carrier double-times it through the salt mines at minimum scratch, moving too fast to know he’s been had.

Good God, where’s Jimmy Hoffa?

Area managers reported “tremendous success” in the first weekend of the promotion, says Neal Ruby, who owns seven McDonald’s franchises in Orange and Los Angeles counties. Sales were up, he said, and “we’re faster” for the experience.

Ruby was skeptical his crews could bag orders in 30 seconds, but said he decided to “put a positive spin on it.” Having a race against the clock could make work “more fun,” he told employees. It’ll be “like a contest.”

Contestants, in this case, are not just high school students. We’re talking about seniors supplementing fixed incomes. We’re talking about the 35-year-old mother of two, with two jobs, who was wiped out Sunday night after three days of hustling to make sure customers didn’t wait longer than half a minute for their sack of grease.

They ran her nonstop, said the weary woman. She must have missed the meeting about all the fun she’d be having when the red-numbered digital clock was installed at the pickup window, like something out of a Third World sneaker factory.

I’d give you her store and her name, but she’d probably get sacked.

“Encouraging people to use the drive-through uses the most profitable part of the business and at the same time makes workers work faster without any additional compensation. It makes total sense,” says Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.” The book trashes the multibillion-dollar fast food industry for its influence on national health, culture and labor.

One thing McDonald’s doesn’t tell you about the 30-second promotion is that it might take 10 minutes to get to the order station and another 10 to get to the pay window. Only after that does the clock start.

So I find myself waiting at the McDonald’s on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, trying to remember the last time I ate under the Golden Arches. Probably during the “You deserve a break today” campaign.

Now we’ve got drive-through banks and dry cleaners, and I once did a story on a drive-through strip joint in Pittsburgh. Waiting for my food, I wonder if there’ll be a time when you never have to leave your car in America, and as vehicles idle behind me at 2 bucks a gallon, the exhaust mingling with the smell of frying McNuggets, I wonder about the chance of finding a drive-through gym.

I check my watch at the pay window.

Ten seconds, and I start to wonder. Twenty now--Do I need this kind of tension? Thirty seconds come and go, What are those laggards doing in there? Finally, at 0:45, somebody cracks the whip, and I get my lunch.

Sure, they gave me a coupon for a free Big Mac. But I had big plans for those 15 seconds.

*

Steve Lopez’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at his e-mail address: steve.lopez@latimes.com.