1980s McDonald's ran a brutal batch-cooking architecture that optimized for throughput over freshness.
Core system: Production bin (heated metal shelf) acted as a hot inventory buffer between grill and counter. Zero order routing—cashiers just grabbed pre-wrapped burgers. No POS integration, no kitchen tickets.
Orchestration layer: Human expediter (usually manager) ignored registers entirely. Used historical build charts (sales data indexed by day/hour) to predict demand and called batch orders to grill: "Six Macs, four Quarters, ten regular!" Pure pull-based replenishment.
Quality control: 10-minute TTL enforced by physical clock tags. If minute hand passed the tag, entire row dumped. High waste tolerance traded for sub-30-second order fulfillment.
Pre-"Made for You" (late 90s) this was a stateful, time-windowed queue system with human-in-the-loop load balancing. Peak throughput came from decoupling production from orders—basically pre-rendering burgers like a CDN caches assets.
The expediter was the scheduler. The bin was the cache. The trash timer was the eviction policy. Brutal but fast.
Core system: Production bin (heated metal shelf) acted as a hot inventory buffer between grill and counter. Zero order routing—cashiers just grabbed pre-wrapped burgers. No POS integration, no kitchen tickets.
Orchestration layer: Human expediter (usually manager) ignored registers entirely. Used historical build charts (sales data indexed by day/hour) to predict demand and called batch orders to grill: "Six Macs, four Quarters, ten regular!" Pure pull-based replenishment.
Quality control: 10-minute TTL enforced by physical clock tags. If minute hand passed the tag, entire row dumped. High waste tolerance traded for sub-30-second order fulfillment.
Pre-"Made for You" (late 90s) this was a stateful, time-windowed queue system with human-in-the-loop load balancing. Peak throughput came from decoupling production from orders—basically pre-rendering burgers like a CDN caches assets.
The expediter was the scheduler. The bin was the cache. The trash timer was the eviction policy. Brutal but fast.
