Quality vs Quantity: Nobody Wins

Dairy Queen, or simply the “Q” as we called it, was a place of delight and utter horror. It was my second year there, but because I was two years older that most of the employees, I was almost a manager. The two managers that still had their names posted above mine on the schedule were Debbie and Cathy. They were two individuals who had a drastically different view on how things at the “Q” should be run, but both of them agreed that place was the spawn of evil, that all sin could be traced back to the Hamburg Dairy Queen.

Debbie was tall and blonde, but she was by no means aloof. She was down to business and projected herself as someone confident and driven to get things done, and the key word here is “done”. Every morning the usual crew, consisting of two old ladies and a self consumed twenty nine year old who still lived at home, would take more than three hours to open before the first customers would arrive. Debbie could do everything they could, plus mop the floors, by herself in less than an hour. The drive for such a stupendous act was not as noble as one may think. Only one thing was on her mind: getting done as fast as possible. Usually I would come in at around t-minus one hour to opening time, and what a breath of fresh air it was to see Debbie. “Hello Richard!” She would always greet me, with a smile and a wave. We would always stand in the back room and talk about the weekend’s events, this or that party, or what “evil spells” the DQ had cast upon us. We both dreaded the moment that the first customer would come, for it was then that our minds shut off, and our bodies no longer were in our control.

With the arrival of a customer, Debbie would wait until the last possible moment to get up from leaning, not sitting, on the counter (if one foot was still on the groung it was technically leaning, due to the Ross Wisser one foot rule). Her hands were viper quick as she returned the change, made ice-cream, handed it to the little girl or boy, and returned to her post on the counter. Later in the day, during lunch, the most ignorant of people would inevitably come to the Q, and this was possibly the most amusing spectacle at Dairy Queen. When someone is not sure what to order, or we’re not sure exactly what they have said, (yes, these people have trouble even speaking) Debbie would make something up that has the same number of syllables, or starts with the same letter. This usually worked, especially at the drive through, because anyone who didn’t check what they received simply drove away with the wrong items. Sometimes a person would come back and complain, but this was the minority of cases. Most of the customers had the relative intelligence of bovine. Debbie worked with that to make things as fast as possible.

At Dairy Queen, we sold cakes made of ice-cream, and when Debbie used to make the cakes, they were done so quickly, that the machines which made the ice-cream could not keep up. The cakes would be melted, and so horribly deformed that some of them would have to be thrown out. The new cakes were made by someone else, so Debbie didn’t care. Wherever there was a corner to be cut, Debbie would have us lop it off with an axe, instead of three sinks to wash dishes, we had two, and instead of washing them we had the three D’s of dishes: dip, dip, done. Whenever one of us would get too caught up in doing a thorough cleaning job or started actually cleaning up 100 percent, she would remind us that half way was good enough for the Q. Everything she did was focused toward doing less than the minimum workload. Speed also was a necessity, because the more people we moved through the more time we had to sit.

Cathy on there other hand was the exact opposite of Debbie. She was a large woman, she always wore a mu-mu, and she had matted down black hair that always looked like a rat on her head. Cathy, or “Momma C” as we called her, would move so impossibly slowly, all the time, as if she were struggling for every single step. As a consequence, when she was at the Q we all moved a little slower also. Because she moved slowly, everyone else had to make up for her by doing twice as much. When Momma C would take a customer’s order, she would converse with them about how their day was going, how their relatives in who cares where were doing... anything to keep them from focusing on how frustratingly slow she was. Despite her slow pace, Cathy would apparently do enough work to “overheat” as we called it. During a busy lunch hour, she would sit down for almost an hour in the freezer to cool down. We always wondered if she had frozen to death, but as soon as the lobby cleared, she was back.

Everything we did while Cathy was around wasn’t good enough, the dishes were never cleaned to her specifications, even if it was midnight and we had school the next day. The way that Cathy made the ice-cream cakes was her own style too. Every one was made with such precision that it was as if a machine had done them. This process took an exorbant amount of time; however, while Cathy was occupied, she wasn’t in the hot kitchen making burgers, so she enjoyed making cakes. Cathy did everything to a “T” and liked it that way, as long as she made sure everything was done correctly, no one ever complained that it took a lot of extra time.

Debbie and Cathy were completely opposite outside of their “DQ lives” (if that’s what it can be called). Debbie was a graduate student on her way to becoming a high school teacher, while Cathy’s only source of income was the Q. Debbie lived in an apartment with her boyfriend who has a well paying job, while Cathy lived in a shack of a house with her husband, daughter, and grandson who did not have a father. Debbie probably could have run a marathon today if we called her up and asked her to, but Cathy could scarcely walk twenty meters from her car to the door into DQ without passing out or stopping to catch her breath.

Debbie and Cathy agreed that no one actually liked to be at DQ to work. The only reason that any one of us pretended to care why your daughter wanted sprinkles was the fact that at the end of every two weeks we went out to the mailbox and found a check there. All the actions there were driven by greed, not the idea we were serving people. Debbie’s blinding speed was driven by pure laziness, that once the task was done, it did not matter how well it had been done. Cathy figured that if she went slow enough someone else would pick up the slack.

The thing that mattered least at Dairy Queen was the customer, emphasis was on the almighty dollar. Everything I learned there was extremely helpful in my life, not to spent too much time on any one thing, that it mattered more to finish than to have quality work, that if someone else could do it why should I? These may seem like horribly immoral lessons (which they are) but they are very effective tools of the devil we deployed at the Q.