Money at McDonalds

Throughout my sophomore and junior year of high school I worked at a McDonalds in Sherwood, OR. I applied in the summer going into my sophomore year when I learned that five of my closest friends were going to apply there. The idea of going to work with my friends sounded super fun and that fact that I was going to get paid for it was great. As I started working at McDonalds I was having a lot of fun, hanging out with my friends, getting free food, and pretty flexible hours. As time went on I increasingly got better at my job, I was able to do virtually every task asked of a regular employee and a manager. Within six months of working at the establishment I was promoted to a MIT or manager in training.

Although that promotion may have seemed great, the increase in pay was minimal while the expectation of my work increased greatly. What started as a job for fun to hang out with friends and make some money on the side became an obligation to show up at certain times and being expected to do certain things that I felt was not worth the time. I believe that the position I was in allowed me to decide what to do with the job. I knew I was highly skilled and did not deserve the same pay as other employees, but I also did not need the job. If I was an older individual who had more financial obligations then maybe I would have seen the situation differently. Expectancy Theory is something that I believed very highly in as a young boy, that if I worked harder and was more productive I should expect higher payment or rewards for doing so, but this was far from the case at McDonalds. For me the benefits to becoming a manager did not outweigh the negatives so I decided to leave the job. I was the last of all my friends to leave the job and felt that I was no longer having fun with it so leaving felt like the right thing to do.