I worked at 5 branches of a giant fast food chain famous for selling fried chickens and uses its founder’s face as symbol and the founder was given a title similar to a military rank by his native state in the US.

All 5 restaurants belonged to the same franchisee and the franchisee claims to be the biggest franchisee of the parent company of the restaurant and also runs their other brands which sell pizza and mexican food.

Following is what I saw in ALL 5 restaurants and is common throughout the restaurants, atleast which are run by the same franchisee:

1. The don’t care for expiry dates of raw chicken and still fried them and sold them days past their used by dates.
2. Store managers regularly bought cheap chicken drumsticks from local supermarket and sold them along with company provided chicken, coated in the same breading and fried together. All the extra sale went into the pocket of the manager as a lot of the sale is not recorded on registers. Most people don’t ask for receipts.
3. Say they have a stock of 100 pieces of raw chicken. They would sell 120 pieces (20 extra from the supermarket) but only record 90 on the register and show 10 as wastage. The money from the extra 30 goes to the manager. They would occasionally their “profits” with workers who will take orders without recording them on the registers.
4. The profits which the manager made this way are to be shared with the area manager. This is a organised racket and happens with all stores. So if there are 10 stores under 1 area manager, they would weekly collect their share from the managers of all 10 stores.
5. The managers make a killing this way. They all spend it on luxury cars, down payment on houses and other expensive stuff. Two of the managers collected so much cash that they opened their own fast food restaurants.
6. The parent company has a thing called “mystery shopper” where they send someone to pretends to be a regular shopper and reports on everything from service to food quality etc. This is a way of quality control by the company. If a store get 100% score, the company (franchisee, not the parent company) gives a cash reward to the store manager. There is another racket here. Store manager know which company conducts the mystery shopping. They have made their friends and friends of other workers in the store to register with that company and try to bag the assignment of their particular stores. Then they give them a score of 100%. The manager then shares that cash reward with the “mystery-shopper”. Company thinks that the store is functioning rally well.
7. The oil used for frying is not cleaned regularly and changed infrequently, against the regulations of the parent company. The day oil is changed, the taste is totally different. As the oil gets dirtier, there is a marked difference in the taste, color and quality of the food. Most people don’t notice that as the condiments, side dishes, soda, fries etc mask the taste.

So basically, the food is not always what is advertised, can be spoiled, bought from the local supermarket, dirty. And store managers and area managers make a killing amount of illegal cash. And the parent company has no clue what’s going on. (Maybe they do and are also accomplice, and money also goes further up the chain, but I didn’t notice that)