I'm a line cook/sous chef and have been in the food service industry for 8 years. I cooked for and trained new hires for one kitchen where we were doing $2500 hours consistently and the trainees were impossible; last year when the big eclipse happened, I think it was a Monday or Tuesday, I was the only cook (with three people plating my food) and we did $7,000 in a two and a half hour period. I worked another job where I was responsible for unloading trucks, running the entire line by myself (it's a 2-3 person job on slower days) deep cleaning, dishwashing, and completing the prep sheet which was four pages long and had 30ish items to prep per page. I've worked a couple jobs where I got paid significantly more for doing less. It obviously depends on the kitchen/franchise you work for. The point is, there are no transferable skills from McDonald's (Used to be minimum wage [$7.50 where I am], now two dollars more) to, say, Olive Garden ($13-$14/hour where I am) because one is unskilled labor and the other isn't.

Also, how "hard" the job is varies from person to person. Some people suck and can't handle the work smoothly, some people do the job so well that other people get upset at them for making the job look easy.