Anybody striping McDonald's on a regular schedule?

When we need to do one while it's open, I ask the owner to put on an extra person to take drive thru orders in person while we paint the area around the menu board, then run orders out to the cars when we paint around the pickup window. That's the only way I know to paint the drive thru without closing it down.

That is a good idea Robert.. I did about the same thing some years ago. In writing we( me and owners) agreed to close drive Thur down for two hours for painting. They did it the way you described and when we got paid for the job the owners took out, right at $100.00 for the order takers that they put out to take orders. Same company two or three stores later.. We (me and owners) to do one at night. IT was made clear by me that the air was going to be cut off. Well they left air wide open draining across entire 30 or so lines (didn't start draining until finished with that side (latex over sealcoating) and on the other side two kids Thur out buckets of mop water so quick that they didn't even hear me yell. Next day owners wanted me to fix the mess his employees made at my expense. That was about 1995...last Mcdummys we did...

as soon as I arrive I cone off all open spaces and paint them. as cars leave, we open up the painted spaces and cone off the unpainted ones For the drive thru, I wait till there are no cars in line - easy to do in mid-afternoon I paint the lane line first, and put a few cones on it. It will dry fast in the hot afternoon sun. if any cars come up, they can still drive thru. Go do some parking stalls for 10 minutes while the lane line dries. after the lane line sets up, I cone off the individual drive thru stencils the cars can drive around the cones and still use the drive thru Just do a piece at a time until you're done. no problem.

Did 4 of them in my area 2 years ago. NEVER again ! the time spent on those places was ridiculous. They should have taken 2-3 hours each instead it was more like 6-8. We dont make money when were standing there waiting for people to finish eating and leave. The drive thru thing is bull#$&%. They want the work done but dont want to close the drive thru for 15 minutes while we paint a cross walk and stop bar. Then after all the aggravations the manager insisted we do an arrow here a stop bar at the other store one more stall over there or he wont pay for anything. Like I said NEVER again

We do many McD's every year. They are all owned by the same family. We as a family oper. business try to cater to other family businesses. They have some that are 24hr and others close at midnight. I can't imagine presenting myself as a professional and asking the business owner to close down their livelyhood just to make it easier for me to do mine! If I have to, I'll do them all after midnight or the 9am-11am or 2-4pm while they are slow, whatever it takes to satisfy the customer. As far as the many layers of paint and misaligned stencils, buy or rent a scarifier, clean up the paint then put down your lines. Most often when I get a new customer I do the 4x4 blue square then my stencil for the handicap, this covers up their mess and gives a neat look. I also bought a scarifier to eliminate lines. A small investment($2200 from SASE expo 03) to make me better prepared for any lot. Blaine

we do 16(i think) corporate stores in our area. several years ago we sat done with the area supervisor and talked about the best way to do the stores . (his concerns and ours. we give them a couple of days notice and tell them what store we will be doing on what days and they make arrangements to have people outside of there windows and we tell them we will get the work done as fast as we can so they can get back to normal operations, we also like to do the work doing their slow time between 2-4. we also have been able to do their sealing work during the day by doing them in sections. they usually stripe them all, seal 4-6 a year. along with patching we probably do about $25,000 a year for them.they just have to know that they are getting there moneys worth and you are trying to give them that.

The worst spots are the "THANK YOU" and the "DRIVE THRU". I think that would be a lot of work that they might not want to pay for. for the large areas like this what would you charge to clean up with the scarifier? I do not know how to use a scarifier but can you adjust it to only remove the paint only? I have seen some bad gouges in concrete where people have used scarifiers and either the machine was not set up right or the people did not know what they were doing. If you can only remove paint then that would be a good investment. What brand, model of machine do you have? Thanks.

Hi Blaine, the McDonald's are open 24 hrs down here the drive Thur has to be closed at some point to paint and if you went by the paint companies specs as I am sure we all do it would take hours to paint one drive Thur especially now that they have the big yellow upside down V's in drive Thur. I notice they close when they pave the parking lot why not to stripe also. We tried to bid one time using a scarifier on one, the one we bid on there was over sixty bad painted places to get up. owners just laughed at us.. Glad you having better luck. Just last week I passed one in this area and saw a man painting with a bucket and a roller without any cones and he was painting with oil over sealcoating so the paint would not freeze before it dried.