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Fast Food Hell

In winter 2001, Stay Free! asked readers to tell us about any interesting or disturbing fast food experiences they’ve had. Don’t read this on a full stomach . . .

Issue #19

Upon graduating from university, I took a job flipping burgers at a Canadian fast food chain called Lick’s. Working at a burger joint with a diploma in my pocket was bad enough, but this job particularly sucked since all employees had to sing burger-themed songs while working. The straw that broke the camel’s back and led to my quitting just three shifts after I’d started, however, was my nametag. A Lick’s uniform consists of a t-shirt, a hat, and a nametag. They charged me $5 for the t-shirt. Fine. They charged me $2 for my hat. Fine, even though my hat was used and had the name "Michelle" handwritten on the brim. But, for my nametag, which consisted (swear to god) of a safety pin attached to a plain piece of paper, they charged me 75 cents. Completely unacceptable. Totally ludicrous. I simply could not work for a company that charged 75 cents for a safety pin and a piece of paper. The end.

dan rollman

In March 2001, a statue of Ronald McDonald was found hanging from a tree in Billings, Montana. The statue had been stolen from the Ronald McDonald House the previous day.

I used to work doing street outreach to young homeless people in the Mission District of San Francisco. The Burger King on the corner of 16th and Mission was on my outreach route. One night, my outreach partner and I were talking to a sex worker–let’s call her "Sparkle"–who was telling us about having gotten beat up recently. We went to the Burger King to sit down and talk, a relatively common thing on outreach. My outreach partner and I were in line getting drinks, and Sparkle said to meet her "over there" and went ahead and sat down. Once we got our drinks, we went to find her and discovered that there is this little corner in the Burger King, kind of under a staircase, that seems perfectly designed as a shooting gallery (though, actually, people shoot up even in the more open areas of the Burger King, like right in front of the door). We sat down to talk with Sparkle and after about 20 minutes, she got up, said "No one move, and only I’ll get arrested," and before we had a moment to respond, started smoking crack in the corner. Suddenly, my outreach partner and I found ourselves in the position of guarding the passageway to make sure no cops were coming. The smoke was pouring out of the crack pipe like a smokestack, rippling out along the ceiling into the larger BK, and I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled crack smoke in an enclosed space, but it’s a really chemically, sharp, pungent odor. After about five minutes, Sparkle stopped smoking and resumed her story. From then on, we told new outreach workers in the Mission to avoid the BK.

jenn guitart

My best friend once worked at a sub shop in the mall. During training, she was told about the "five-second rule": If something falls on the floor but you pick it up within five seconds, you can still use it in a sandwich. I guess that’s to prevent an employee from finding a tomato slice wedged in the corner behind the garbage and scraping it up.

eden coughlin

My best friend, Kevin, and I worked at Baskin Robbins, circa 1984. The best part was the free ice cream. Kevin and I wouldn’t simply eat; we would pick through the ice cream to get the delicious little treats. It was like getting a box of Cracker Jack that’s all nuts or a bowl of Crunch Berries with only Berries. In fact, the marketplace has successfully tapped this demand – both of those products now exist. But back then, it was like cheating, and it was sweet. Clearly, we were headed for a crash. Both of us fancied Peanut Butter and Chocolate (hold the chocolate). At first we simply dug through the ice cream with scoopers, grabbing the peanut butter and shoving it down our fat faces. Too slow. We took to allowing the ice cream to melt a little, making it easier to grab the peanut buttery chunks. Too dangerous–our boss, Mr. Luna, could easily spy a tub of his inventory turning to slush. Eventually we hit rock bottom. We resorted to sticking our hands directly into the ice cream, using our filthy, booger-laden fingers to comb through the frozen tundra in search of the good stuff. Risking frost bite and unemployment, we kept this up until a customer complained that the PB&C he’d ordered was actually just C.

ken kurson

My first job was at Burger King. Being a human machine cog was mind-numbingly dull, and, like all fast-food operations, every motion was engineered for me–from the application of clockwise spiral squirts of ketchup and mustard to the placement of two pickles and a ring of onions on the meat patty. (To this day I occasionally have maddening dreams where the squirting of said condiments repeats endlessly throughout the night.) The monotony was seldom broken. One day David Jones (the police chief’s kid) wandered into the kitchen from the break room with a stick pin inserted in his earlobe. Pale-faced, he told me he was trying to pierce his ear, but couldn’t get the needle through the cartilaginous lobe. Randy, dumber still and fresh off the Whopper line, jammed it in.

The worst chore was cleaning the fryer hoods. Large filters coated in translucent cheese-like grease had to be removed from over the french fry machines and soaked in a janitor’s trash can filled with acid. Unfortunately, the arm-length rubber gloves weren’t as long as the bucket was deep. Fishing the last filter from the bottom of the bucket inevitably meant that blackened, lard-infused acid would trickle down your arms leaving red, vein-like rashes from armpit to fingertips. It was damn itchy, not to mention horrifying. I’m grateful to the Burger King Corporation for their pivotal role in inspiring me to pursue betterment through academia.

paul schmelzer

Once a few years ago I was attempting to go into a Wendy’s, only to find the door locked. Unusual at 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, but even more unusual to look inside and see all the employees dancing wildly around the restaurant, up on the tables and counters, too.

brian turner

Some Taco Bell locations have automated "talking trash compactors" that thank the user for depositing trash. When they are full, the door locks and a robotic voice cries out, "Please empty this unit." One Friday night, my wife and I stopped at a Taco Bell/KFC in western Massachusetts. The place was a total madhouse–there were little kids running all over screaming and a long line of folks waiting to order. The robot trash cans filled up and started flashing and crying out to be emptied. But the staff behind the counter couldn’t hear them over the noise. And so people just started to pile up their garbage next to the robot trash cans. I couldn’t help but laugh at the insanity around me–-the kids screaming, the robots crying out, the trash overflowing. It was a pretty amazing spectacle.

chris young

When I worked at Burger King we had the "burger droid"–those steel boxes that work the miracle of the flame-broiled Whopper. Cold meat goes in one end, hot meat comes out the other. The problem with the machine was that sometimes a meat patty would get stuck and clog it up. If that happened, time was short, because the system could self-implode, filling the steel cavity with more and more meat until an eventual meltdown. One of my co-workers noticed this and committed the one forbidden act–he stuck his hand in the machine while the gears were still running to dislodge the meat. Well, the pull-down claw caught his finger and before too long he was screaming as the flames engulfed his hand. With some doing, we dislodged him, and it was not pretty. But he had managed to free up the gears. So some of the other guys just started shoving meat patties back in the machine–after all, the show must go on.

chris houser

I came across a curious sign at a McDonald’s not too long ago for the lobster rolls (might only be available here in New England). It read "Now with more 100% real lobster," the word "more" being smaller and unnoticeable at first glance.

dave turner

I was driving and a car ahead of me had just pulled out of a McDonalds parking lot and joined the steady moving traffic. Suddenly, a convertible Miata started weaving in and out of cars, passing aggressively. It swiftly cut off the car that had pulled out of McDonald’s, very narrowly missing a major accident. A few seconds later, all of us came to a red light at an intersection, and the McDonald’s car pulled up alongside the Miata. The driver of the McDonald’s car rightfully had a few words for the Miata driver, who barely deigned it worthy to look in his direction. As the light turned green, a Big Mac flew through the air from the McDonald’s car, smacking the Miata driver right in the side of the head, spilling tomatoes and special sauce all over him and his front seat. The McDonald’s car squealed into a right turn, and the Miata driver drove straight ahead–a little more courteously–silently picking tomatoes from the side of his face.

eric hellweg

In the late 1980s, Burger King’s ad campaign du jour concerned a mysterious, faceless guy named Herb. My brother’s friend Steve stole a giant cardboard cutout of Herb from a local franchise and sent them a ransom note: "Give me 20 cheeseburgers in an unmarked bag or Herb will know what flame broiling is really like." He told them to read the classified section of the local paper for further instructions. Unfortunately, he chickened out of the hostage exchange. Another friend of my brother’s worked at that Burger King, and apparently, the staff was more than willing to give in to his demands.

chris broderick

Years ago, before I knew him, my friend Jon ordered a chicken fillet burger at KFC. A few bites in, he experienced a vile taste in his mouth and threw the burger away. The following night he was rushed into hospital with stomach cramps. To cut a long story short, the chicken had had a cyst, which Jon had bitten into. He has been a vegetarian ever since.

sally crewe

When I worked the McJob, some of the stuff I saw or heard about was fairly nasty:

Pissing in the pickle bucket: I don’t remember what provoked this. One of the employees just felt the need to piss in the pickles. Most of the employees knew that the bucket had urine in with it but continued to serve the customers the "special" pickles. With the level of brine, dill, and salt in the bucket, the urine wasn’t too noticeable.

Cleaning rags: If you’re eating fast food and drop something on the table, I don’t recommend picking it up and eating it. The rags we used for cleaning the bathroom were the same rags that were used for wiping down the tables (and the counters in the back).

Food on the floor: You’re lucky if your food only hits the floor. I’ve seen burgers sneezed on and worse.

Food thrown at customers: After arguing with a customer, the guy at the drive-thru window put about 80 packs of ketchup on a burger and, when the car pulled around, threw it as hard as he could out the drive-up window into the car. I didn’t see this happen, but apparently the guy and the interior of his car was coated with sauce. And the burger thrower was the manager on duty.

General filthiness: I once filled in at a nearby store, which was the dirtiest place I have ever worked. I cleaned the grill because there was so much scum and built-up grease, and was told by the shift manager that "that grill probably hadn’t been cleaned in about a year." There was about a quarter inch of grease all over the floor, with little grease stalagmites and stalactites running from the edge of the grill to the floor. Flies buzzed by occasionally–and flies mean that maggots are around somewhere. The bathrooms were kind of nasty as well, though, for some reason, the parts of the store that the customers saw stayed fairly clean.

dave brenneman

When I was 15, I worked at Orange Julius, a greasy, unsanitary fast food chain specializing in hamburgers and hot dogs with all kinds of glutinous "fixins" plus a sweet drink ("Orange Julius") made of ice, yogurt, fruit, and a secret ingredient. One day I was fixing myself an Orange Julius when I noticed two employees looking at me and giggling. I was about to put in the "secret ingredient," which was basically sugar water, when they warned me not to use it, saying, "It’s for the tourists." That night at closing time the two employees called me into the back and let me in on their little secret. As I rounded the corner, I saw one boy with his pants unzipped, a yellow arc of hot piss streaming into the sugar water.

pierre de gaillande

A few years ago McDonald’s, or at least my local franchise, was indulging in some kind of campaign to improve customer relations because a manager actually came over to my table and, just like at a real restaurant, asked, "How’s everything?" After staring at him blankly for a few seconds I answered, "It’s McDonald’s. Everything is always the same." He seemed satisfied with that.

daniel radosh

During the summer of 1979, we’d all just graduated from high school. One of my four buddies, let’s call him Ben, was working the night shift at the McDonald’s so he’d have some spending money at college. Ben used to come up with all kinds of crazy schemes, mostly of a scientific and/or pharmaceutical nature, but this time he came up with something very different: we’d rob the McDonald’s. It turned out that every Tuesday and Thursday night, the night manager on Ben’s shift would close the restaurant, wait until every employee had gone home, and then carry the entire cash take for the day to the bank across the parking lot and toss it in a night deposit drop box. The night manager was a small, slight woman, and she was walked across the dark, deserted expanse of asphalt alone with that canvas bag full of cash. Ben’s plan was simple: we’d put on ski masks and easily overpower her, grab the bag, and run. We’d wind up with about a thousand bucks each–and they’d never know who it was.

A thousand bucks was a hell of a lot of money, especially back when Jimmy Carter was president. Ben kept the idea alive for weeks, baiting us with grandiose nightly totals. But time was running out–soon, summer would be over and we’d all scatter to our respective palaces of higher learning. We’d never get another chance. Finally, the last balmy week of August rolled around–this was it, do or die. "C’mon, you guys!" Ben implored. "We’ll be rich!" But no one did it. We just couldn’t.

michael azerrad

A little over a year ago I went to the Taco Bell near my work. I noticed a large sign displayed prominently behind the order counter: "At Taco Bell we wash AND sanitize our hands." The word "sanitize" was underlined.

steve voorhees

I worked at Arby’s when I was in high school. My first night, after my shift, my dad came in to pick me up before closing. I went out front, ducked under the counter, and turned to leave. The manager, a girl who went to my high school (but was a senior and I was a freshman), came over to me, shocked: "You NEVER go out front out of your uniform. NEVER EVER! It’s . . . forbidden!" So from then on, I left out the back door.

maria ricapito

On college road trips, when my friends and I would stop for crappy interstate food, we’d get excited about any chain restaurant that wasn’t Arby’s. There’s nothing more boring than a franchise–unless it’s a franchise that doesn’t exist in your region of the country. Whataburger and Burger Time, White Castle and Jack in the Box, Kenny Roger’s Roasters and El PolloLoco, Del Taco and Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’n Waffles: all offered totally new set of silly corporate slogans and mascots.

carol kolb

My sister and I were driving home for break and dropped by Wendy’s to fuel up. I got a chicken sandwich. Once we were back on the highway, I took a few bites, then immediately started feeling sick. I looked at the part of the sandwich where I had taken the bite and it was completely raw. Not pink–red. (Also, once at the Ohio State University dorms, I bit into a processed chicken sandwich and it had part of a plastic bag inside of it.)

john b.