For fry cooks, it’s all about speed and stamina. In an industry that serves one in four Americans daily, fast food cooks flip, fry, and assemble meals at dizzying rates and volumes. To make this process possible, and to create dishes that are uniform in taste from store to store and state to state, most foods are prepped elsewhere in large factories so they can be made at local shops with the push of a button.
Training is minimal. So is pay. The mean hourly wage for a fast food cook in America is reported as $8.91 an hour. To supersize that, head to Massachusetts, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists as one of the top-paying states for fry cooks.