Voices
of a pretty terrible job, one that
involves grueling physical labor, rock-bottom pay, miserable
working conditions and the feeling like you will never, ever get
the smell and feel of grease out of
your hair, face or clothing.
Of course, I don’t condone
giving a customer a receipt that
calls them a bitch ass hoe, or
says “fuck you,” like another infamous Burger King receipt did
recently. Burger King had every
right to fire those employees.
But I can kind of understand
how it happened.
In my time working at a Hardee’s in West Columbia, S.C., I
personally never dealt much with
the customers. I stayed in the
back, flipping burgers and frying
fries (and chicken patties, and
fish filets, and apple pies, all of
which went into the same vat of
scalding brown grease).
But we could all hear the customers loud and clear. Drivethrough orders were broadcast
over speakers throughout the
store. Jerks at the register were
also typically loud enough to be
heard all the way back in the
kitchen. We could hear when
people berated the women who
ran the registers. (They were
MARK
GONGLOFF
almost always women, unless
they wore a manager’s tie.) Being
rude, cursing at them, belittling
them, accusing them of getting
orders wrong when we could all
hear they hadn’t.
The people who worked the
registers were on the front line of
a daily trench war that ended only
when the store closed late at night
and started over again at the crack
of dawn the next day. We were in
that war with them, and we partied with them and sometimes
dated or married them. When
customers were rude to them, everybody took it personally. You
might think employees can fight
back in these situations, but too
often your tip or your manager’s
good graces depend on just putting your head down and dealing
with whatever cruel thing the customer throws at you.
I’m not saying that all fastfood customers behaved badly.
Most didn’t. Most people who eat
at fast-food or other restaurants
treat their servers with something between indifference and
grudging politeness. That’s fine.
That’s the social compact.
Then there are the rare customers who treat their servers
like actual human beings, not
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14