fast food chains

fast food chains CAST STUDY  solution

CASE STUDY – 2

Bob‘s is one of the largest fast food chains in Latin America. Headquartered in Rio De Janerio, more than half of this
McDonald‘s clone‘s 225 outlets are located in Brazil. What‘s it like to work at Bob‘s? A day at an outlet in a mall in Sao Paulo provides some insights.

The most notable characteristic of this fast food restaurant is the youth of the 12 employees. Silvana, who supervises the training of new hires, has had two promotions in her four years on the job. Yet she‘s only 21 years old. Levy, the short order cook, is 20 and has been doing his job for a year. Elisangela is 21 and a Bob‘s employee for two years. The restaurant‘s manager, who has seven years at Bob‘s, is 23. Simone is one of the oldest employees at 25.

Bob‘s employees have another commonality besides their youth. They‘re all from a humble social background. Middle-class kids in Brazil want to avoid working in fast-food places.

The jobs at Bob‘s have a highly structured routine. For instance, if you‘re working the grill, you need to know that a Big Bob gets two slices of beef, 11 grams of lettuce and seven grams of sliced onions on a sesame seed bun; a Bob‘s Burger is also two slices of beef with special sauce but only a slice of tomato n a plain bun; and a Franburgao gets a chicken breast, tomato, and curry sauce on a sesame seed bun. If you‘re working the French fryer, you need to check the temperature of the oil, make sure it‘s 345 degrees Fahrenheit, put one package of fries into the bin, push it down slowly into the oil until you hear the click, wait for the machine to bring it back up, shake the bin three times and pour the fries into the steel container.
Employees seem generally content with their jobs. In spite of having to wear a silly red tie, a blue and red baseball cap and an apron that says Bob‘s, these people are glad to have a job in a country where as many as one in five is unemployed. Standard employees at Bob‘s earn 500 reais (less than $ 300 U.S. a month). The manager‘s salary is around 1300 reais a month.

Question 1: Describe an entry-level job at Bob‘s in JCM terms.

Question 2: What type of person do you think would fit well into jobs at Bob‘s?

Question 3: Could jobs at Bob‘s be enriched or reengineered to make employees more productive?

Question 4: How might technology change fast-food jobs over the next 10 years? Could flextime work at Bob‘s? Explain.