I’ve never had to work in the food service industry. I have had to clean up shit that was on the floor. And it wasn’t mine. It was human excrement. The summer of 1998 I got a job bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly in my hometown of Calhoun, Ga. Now, this town produced some of the worst people who ever handled the public EVER.
I literally refused to eat at Burger King or Wendy’s in the town I grew up in because the food was so terrible. The bun they gave me one time at Wendy’s was stale. My grandmother went to a nearby Hardee’s to get a chicken sandwich. Her buns were stale too. My father commented they’ve always had bad food. The other Hardee’s which was closer to the downtown section had good burgers once. But the last time I had one there, the cheese wasn’t even melted.
I don’t know why the people kept eating at these places. There’s a pizza place where the owner/proprietor is very, very rude to everyone for absolutely no reason. He makes the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld looks like Jesus Christ. People still go back maybe because they don’t have the guts to stay away. Of course, the Chick-fil-A gets all the praise because all the Jesus freaks would eat there even if they literally sold turd sandwiches because of the whole Christian thing.
And don’t even get me started on Pizza Hut. If you ever got what you ordered, it meant someone else ordered the exact same thing you did. Hopefully, they got your order. Remember those Book It promotions you’d get a free small personal pizza? The last time I ever got one of those and I remember it fondly, it took them at least an one hour to make it. My mom had gone to town to run some errands and was going to pick it up for me.
When she got home, she was mad as she tossed it on the counter. I thought something had happened like she had been in a wreck. She had this look and feel that made me realize she was never doing this again. Never! When Papa John’s came to town, I thought it was a Godsend. Just don’t ever do delivery! I had a good friend do delivery and he told me some thing. There was a huge problem there with most of those people.
I mean, no one knew where we lived. You had to stand out in the road to flag the drivers down because they’d drive up and down the road for 30 minutes looking for us. I’d go in to the place to get my orders because I didn’t want to wait three hours. As I was coming in, a woman carrying pizzas was taking them out for delivery. I held the door open for her. Then all of a sudden, her inner Karen came out. She let out a growl and scream, “NOOOOO!!” Apparently, she had gotten an address she didn’t want to deliver to, so she turns around and starts arguing with the manager in front of everyone.
Another time, I ran into a problem. I still had a checking account through Wachovia which had a branch in Calhoun but I had changed my address to my college apartment residence. The cashier argued with me because it was an out of town check and they couldn’t take it. I think another manager came over and approved it.
But I’ve been amazed at the quality of food service in other towns and communities. People are actually working. They’re nice to you or at least they put on the appearance of being nice. I went to get some biscuits at the Hardee’s my grandmother went to and as I was placing an order a big huge semi truck pulled into the parking lot near me as they had truck parking. The loud roar of the engine lasted no more than five seconds. Yet the person on the box screamed at me to turn my engine off.
I didn’t place an order. I just drove away. Fuck ’em! The last time I went there, there was a loud obnoxious woman on the drive-through box and you could hear her speak all the way in Alabama. For the entire restaurant to hear during the Sunday mid-morning rush, she bellowed in a north Georgia drawl, “My speaker stopped working!” To which, someone replied, “I’m pretty sure they can hear you outside.”
Yes, there are good people who work in the food service industry and there are bad people. Last Monday, I went to Domino’s in Tahlequah to take advantage of a promotion. When I got there, they were having an incident where they had to call the police and first responders. Someone was in the men’s room and they were unresponsive. I didn’t get the whole story. But the look on the shift manager’s face was that of someone who had never prepared for this. She actually looked worried and concerned for whomever was in the men’s room.
So, I had to wait. And the pizza and bread bites were cold. And they didn’t make it New York style nor add the garlic and parmesan. I knew they had a very bad day and needed a moment. But they couldn’t take that moment. I know people who watched the Challenger explode live on TV and then they were told 30 seconds later they needed to focus on multiplication. Someone joked years later if we ever did have a school shooter, the teachers would poke their heads out telling them to keep it down.
We’re not perfect. And some people who work in the food service industry have also worked in the retail industry. If you deal with the public in any way, you have to deal with the dregs of society. You know, morons! There’s something about being a customer that just makes some people go nuts. They ask questions that make no sense. They insist that’s the way it was done when they were here last time, even though this is their first time or the last time was when Barack Obama was President, during his first term. They think just because they found a coupon which was printed before some of you reading this were born, it should still be honored.
Patience is a virtue these workers have. Yet, working at McDonald’s, Burger King or Wal-Mart is considered the lowest of the low. Why? It’s work. The conservatives years ago trashed Geoffrey Owens, famous for his recurring role as Elvin Tibideaux on The Cosby Show, for having to work at Trader Joe’s in between acting gigs. The happiest person I ever saw worked as a school janitor.
Whenever I’m out driving and I see construction, I’ve thought “You think they actually like what they’re doing?” And I’m almost certain many do. At least there isn’t some Todd or Karen mad at them for no reason. Although I’m sure they have gotten ugly looks for having to block traffic or slow it down. But that’s the way it goes sometimes.
We all must have a role to play. I’ve bagged groceries, stock shelves, mopped floors, took out trash and yes, clean up shit. What happened there was someone had an accident in the women’s restroom at the Piggly Wiggly. We don’t know who it was. Things got busy and the shift manager got turned around and just thought there was a clean-up needed. Later, she apologized and realized more biohazard precautions should’ve been taken.
I seriously doubt Donald Trump would ever clean up shit off the floor of a bathroom, even if it’s own. And especially if it’s own, which is the reason he stays at Mar-a-Lago. I also doubt he’d ever really make it one day really working at a McDonald’s. He only “worked” half an hour, totally violating health food regulations for working in a fast food restaurant, for a publicity stunt. The location in Bucks County, Penn. was closed for a few hours on Sunday, Oct. 20. This meant that only the drive-through was open and people were pre-screened.
I know what they’re going to say, they had to consider the safety of the President, but this was just the worst. His campaign failed on every level. Trump spent more time talking about the size of Arnold Palmer’s nine iron than he did actually working. He didn’t have to contend with angry customers upset he got their orders wrong even though he didn’t. He didn’t have to deal with a rush or a school bus that shows up with three dozen teens running around. He didn’t have to stand on his feet for six or seven hours because he couldn’t take a break. He wasn’t coerced into working a double because someone called in sick at the last minute. He didn’t have people throw food at him.
In 1988, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was the Democrat nominee for President, appeared in a tank still wearing his shirt and tie but with a helmet on for a photo. It backfired in the worst way. People took it as a sign that Dukakis couldn’t lead us as commander-in-chief. It took a lot of heat away from George H.W. Bush and his “role” in the Iran-Contra Affair that news footage shown in American Made shows him laughing and backing away like a kid denying the smokes in his gym bag were his.
Why did Trump do this? Easy. He’s upset because in her youth Vice-President Kamala Harris says she worked at McDonald’s 41 years ago. Trump claims this is a lie without providing any information why. Newsweek has reported it’s highly unlikely McDonald’s will confirm or deny this because they state out of politics. Even though they were okay with the publicity stunt. But another reason is that in 1983, I highly doubt many McDonald’s franchises kept detail records on an electronic database. All paper information has probably been trashed, burned, shredded or withered away.
It’s hilarious because people are chastising Harris for “lying” about a job she did when she was a teenager yet they claimed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shouldn’t have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives because she worked as a bartender. It’s a strange Catch-22 where you’re supposed to represent the public but never have any jobs the general public have. I mean, go back to 2016 when Trump said he was going to get the coal mines back open and with a stupid hard hat on made like he was shoveling. I guess he thinks that’s all working in a coal mine involves is shoveling coal. I mean, he actually things people use their hands to get the fries out of the boiling hot cooking oil. In reality, I’m sure if he worked in a mine he’d forget to bleed the lines of methane and they’d be an explosion and cave in.
That’s why I don’t understand why so many blue-collar people support him, even though he has little knowledge of how their jobs work. He says that people need identification to buy groceries, which isn’t true. Unless his idea of groceries are tobacco and alcohol products, then I’ve never had to present an ID. Has he confused real ID with reward cards you get to your favorite supermarkets so you can accumulate points? If so, then he doesn’t need to be the fucking President? He needs to be playing shuffleboard at a retirement home.
The only thing I can think of is that blue-collar people are only supporting him because they’re still thinking it’s cool to “own the libs” and they’re protesting anyone who goes to college or works in an office. But they’re only hurting themselves with this same stupid bravado. We need blue-collar workers. But they can be just as pretentious and self-aggrandizing as people on the left. I mean, if you stand out in traffic and hold a sign that reads SLOW on one side and STOP on the other, you’re not really working construction. You’re like the old joke of the man who cleans up elephant feces at the circus. When someone asks why he doesn’t get a new job, he responds “And give up show business?”
Trump has shown time and time again that he doesn’t really care for the hard workers out there. He has been accused of not paying them drawing out the cases in civil court. When his businesses went under, the workers lost their jobs while he used a legal loophole to declare bankruptcy and actually get more money. I mean doesn’t that really bother some of you hard workers out there how this business people of these big companies tank their company and then get a nice severance pay? Jt bothers me very much. It pisses me off, really.
I had just moved into my hours back in the winter of 2006. Then I hear the local school board has fired the superintendent after just two years. They still had to pay the third year on his contract. So, he works two years and does a bad job and gets paid for another year to do nothing. What happened was the school district didn’t have the money to pay the faculty/staff. They filed a friendly suit which is the legal equivalent of when your sibling takes something that’s yours that your parents know they took it so they tell them to give it back. There’s no arguing. They just need a person in authority to say give the people rightfully what’s theirs.
In a right-to-work state, you can be let go at the drop of a hat, even if you’ve been an exemplary employee. And you don’t get anything. Yet, business people can fuck up a company and not even be let go but asked to come back. And you know good and well, these people don’t do near the amount of work. Yeah, they handle a few phone calls. But they have other people write memorandums and reports for them. Other people assemble their presentations that they get sole credit for.
Just hearing how Trump will only hire people loyal to him and kiss his ass should make you upset as it only shows that hard work doesn’t amount to anything, except more hard work. And Project 2025 means also firing qualified people for sycophants who can’t do their jobs. So many people are dealing with that now in how they’re overqualified for jobs as employers just want to hire people they know want quit to find a better job. No wonder many red states want to hire teenagers still in high school. Someone who is 15 is easier to push around than someone who is 25 or 35.
As long as they have us fighting each other, they can make a clean break. The other day, I went to Starbucks to get a coffee. I had ordered it ahead of time and it took me a while to get there. But when I walked in, the young woman had it ready for me. But she said she had to remake it. However, they hadn’t put the Splenda in so she started to put it in from the packets. Yet one or two fell in the coffee. Without a beat, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ll make you another one!”
I waited a few more minutes and she brought it to me, apologizing again. I told her it was okay and if that’s the worst thing that happens to her, it’s a good day. There was no need to argue and stomp my feet. They were busy. With online ordering, some restaurants and eateries are getting slammed. So, you can’t always expect a handful of people to make an entire feast to feed an Army in just five minutes. Just because you eat at McDonald’s a lot, doesn’t mean you have the abilities to work there.
I’ve always felt it funny how they told us growing up there was no shame in flipping burgers, yet now they want to shame people for flipping burgers. And I still don’t know why seeing cashiers sitting down at Wal-Mart and Target is going to affect your check-out experience. When the Wal-Mart Supercenter opened in 1996 in Calhoun, people were mad they had to put the items on the conveyor belts themselves. People who work at retail stores are still human beings. You don’t like self-checkout? Let cashiers sit down, then.
Needless to say, so many people I worked with and grew up with back there didn’t know how to do any type of manual labor. With all those rug/carpet textiles and other factories in northwestern Georgia, they’d hire undocumented workers from Mexico, so they could pay them cheaper. They know undocumented workers aren’t going to be a problem and they can pay in cash to avoid paper trails. And then they’d complain about having too many Mexicans in the area. (But that’s an entirely different post.)
Sadly, the publicity stunt not only hurt the McDonald’s location as public attention has brought how poorly it’s been graded for health violations, some workers probably lost the pay they needed. Also, Trump’s behavior mocks these workers by saying, “Hey, anyone can do this, even former Presidents!” However, it’s a very difficult job for people who live paycheck to paycheck.
And to make matters worse, the Center for Disease Control has stated there has been an outbreak of E. Coli to the quarter pounders sold at the locations in the MidWest and Great Plains state including here in Oklahoma. Not even the McRib getting ready to be sold again will get some people back to the restaurant.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 