I'd just like to add to this little subthread that short-order cooking had a lot to do with this - it's the intermediate step we went through between family restaurants and fast food. When I think of a single person standing at his station making 100 customized meals for people over the space of a couple of hours, that's my idea of "socialism" working.

Incredibly hard to find real documentation on how short-order cooks work, but the best resource I've found (though brief) is Fast Foods and Short Order Cooking, by Pepper, Pratt and Winnick (1984). I've been dreaming about writing a manual for years, but I'd have to find some shifu to teach me. I was a grill cook (as a young person), but never had to handle the entire thing.

Certainly not as precise nor as thorough as proper documentation, but you may be interested in this 2005 New Yorker piece: "The Egg Men: How breakfast gets served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/05/the-egg-men

My cousin owned a dinner years ago. Finding a good short order cook was the hardest thing for her to do.

He son eventually took over and developed that skill quite well.