Something I hear a lot in the arguments against raising minimum wage is that “anyone can do this job” and “they’ll just replace the crew with robots.” Well, eventually it pissed me off enough that here I am.
My name’s Nina and I work at Taco Bell as a shift lead. I know stating that outright will worry the media department, so rest assured: I just didn’t feel like trying to disguise items in some of these stories. I’ve worked at Arby’s, Chipotle, a family-owned pizza place, and what I’m about to say holds true for ALL of those places. If we get any McDonald’s or Burger King employees down in the comments, I’m sure they’ll say the same thing about their companies. Fast food is a lot more than flipping burgers, and we all have a lot in common.
So here you have it: TEN REASONS YOU CAN’T TAKE MY JOB.
10) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SPEED.
Every franchise and company will have slightly different time requirements, but ALL of us have them, and they’re brutal. In my particular franchise, from the moment you pull up and we say hi, we have three minutes and thirty seconds to take your order, make your order, cash you out, give you all your component parts including sauces and utensils, and get you gone. So yes—all those people who are “just looking” for five minutes, ordering more stuff at the window, sitting there for ages counting out exact change, they’re killing our time. Lose it on a few orders, okay--but if it goes on and on and on, we lose the time for the day. If that happens often enough bonuses get lost, hours get cut, it’s a bad deal for team morale, it just sucks all around. And if you think that sounds bad, my previous franchise (now defunct) was under 1:15 at the menu and another 1:15 from pull-forward to pulloff. Raising Cane’s has some great chicken, but harsh metrics: two and a half minutes from taking your money to handing over your food. Same for Five Guys: eight minutes, which sounds like a lot by comparison until you remember they have to grill your burger fresh. I guarantee you can’t keep up.
9) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT.
I live in Phoenix, so you might think this is worse for me because my store is in the middle of a few-hundred-mile-square oven. But other than a few days in the middle of summer where not a single Phoenix air conditioner can keep up and we all just pray for death or global cooling, NO. I’ll come back to that.
Most stores regardless of franchise or company have a pretty good HVAC system, but once you get into the kitchen, it might as well almost not exist. Taco Bell grills are set to almost-400 and slightly-over-500 degrees, and that heats a space up MIGHTY quick. Then add the fryers, the rethermalizers (it’s a piece of equipment for heating up food quickly so it doesn’t get all gross and hazardous), the heating cabinets (which keep that food safe and not gross), the hot line, and the body heat of half a dozen quickly-moving people, and the HVAC may say 68 but measuring the actual ambient temperature will bring you right around a nice humid 76–maybe higher, in summer. It’s not unusual for me to sweat completely through my undershirt within an hour of starting my shift during the summer months, and to not need a coat in drivethru in winter. Have you ever wondered why fast food lobbies seem so cold? Odds are, you’re in a store that has only a single thermostat for the whole place. My current store has one for back of house and one for front of house, but many smaller or older places will only have the one, and they have to keep working conditions safe for employees.
Also, when I said Taco Bell in Phoenix isn’t the worst? The worst was the pizza place, IN PENNSYLVANIA. It had a galley kitchen into which were crammed a pair of pasta boilers, three fryers, two pizza ovens, and a hot lamp table. My dad was the manager and once measured our kitchen at 85 degrees . . . in March. He used to send kitchen crew into the freezer a few times per shift to take off our shirts and just cool off so nobody fainted. Unless you like the sauna, you’re going to be so uncomfortable.
8) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE TIME.
Long shifts are par for the course in fast food. Teenagers don’t usually get scheduled for very long shifts because labor laws and school hours and all that jazz, but I do ten hours a day. On Saturdays, it’s eleven. These are typical managerial shifts—I’m not sure if it’s a franchise requirement or a Taco Bell one, but my supervisor and my boss are both required to put in ten hours on the days they work.
This isn’t at all unusual—the longest shift I’ve personally ever worked was a 14-hour double while covering someone who had a medical emergency, and the longest shift I’ve ever heard of and can verify is true was a store manager with no coverage who worked an open-to-close: twenty hours. (Supposedly, one of my friends knew a Pizza Hut cook in the mid-2000s who put in a 26-hour shift, but that sounds a bit like an urban legend to me.)
A marathon shift like that is VANISHINGLY rare, but they do happen, and all you can do is keep on trucking. (I’m lucky—although I live in a right-to-work state, my franchise does this thing where their stores in all the states they work in follow the strictest labor laws from within that area, instead of going state-by-state. So I do actually get breaks.) Sometimes that’s just how it is. And you don’t develop the ability to do it overnight—when I first started doing full manager shifts, I went home every night feeling like someone had doused me in kerosene from the waist down and lit a match. It may look like we’re just standing around (we’re not, we work in a very small space and you can do A LOT without ever taking a single step), but it requires its own kind of endurance and body training. It does come with some pretty sweet trade offs—I get three days off per week!—but it is NOT for wusses. Pretty much guaranteed: if you worked one of my shifts, you’d be crying by the end.
7) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE ATTITUDE.
We do get to kick out abusive customers in my franchise. (Not all employees are so lucky. I’ve heard some horror stories from the local McDonald’s, and I have a couple from my time at Arby’s.) But the threshold for “abusive” is high compared to what most people not doing my job would accept. People can be so rude they’ll drive a trainee to tears, but I’d be hard-pressed to find a defensible reason to send them elsewhere because it’s all about tone of voice and being passive-aggressive. I’ve had people figure out EXACTLY where the line is that they can skirt on sexual harassment and then exploit it. And for my employees of color, it’s even worse—I’ve kicked a dude out for calling one of my cashiers the N-word, but if someone says “it’s good to see one of you working instead of joining a gang,” guess what? Cashier has to smile and say thank you and get by on knowing I’d rip that person a new asshole if only I wasn’t in uniform because technically, they haven’t said anything aggressive, and me calling them out on it would be escalation. And yes, the smile and thank you are necessary—people call us rude over the most ridiculous things, and you don’t want to get yourself or your store in trouble by giving the answer that’s actually richly deserved. (I’ve been called rude because a guy couldn’t tell whether or not I was smiling under my face mask. I’m not joking.)
Here’s the sad truth: if we demanded our customers be as polite to us as we are to them, and kicked out everyone who couldn’t meet that standard, we’d lose A LOT of business. And interestingly, when you bring this up online, everyone has an excuse for being rude to the cashier: they didn’t hear the greeting, they thought it was a robot (I’d rather be polite to a robot than risk being rude to a person, I’m . . . just saying), the speaker was bad, they were tired, they had a bad day, political correctness has gone wild. Nobody ever admits that choosing to stay silent when somebody’s spoken to you is rude. There’s a question-and-answer website I hang out on sometimes where you get questions like “cashiers: what was the most ridiculous complaint you ever had?” and I’ll reply (my reply is constantly changing, but the current winner for top place is “the lady who got mad because my trainee said “thanks” instead of “thank you very much”), and the number of people who reply with “I could never have been that calm!” or “I don’t know how you didn’t punch her!” suggests: statistically, you couldn’t do it either.
6) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE REQUIRED HYGIENE.
I know the stereotype in media is the cashier who wipes their snotty nose on their sleeve right before taking your order, but here’s the thing: my mom was a medical assistant with a specialization in phlebotomy before she retired. I jokingly told her once that I thought I washed my hands at work more than she did, and she—completely seriously—said “you do.”
My hands are a different color than my arms because they’ve basically been bleached by super-hot dishwater, cleaning supplies, and washing my hands upward of 20 or 30 times in ten hours—I’ve essentially washed away my tan. My nails have to be kept super-short because the ends of them peel in strips, which WebMD and Mayo Clinic Online both tell me is most commonly caused by over-washing of hands, and too much time spent in water—like a dish sink or a pair of sweaty nitrile gloves. In winter, the skin around my nails splits and cracks of its own volition; I’m never far from a jar of salve and people make jokes about me carrying two bottles of hand lotion at a time.
Now I will grant you, as of December first I’ll have been doing this for six years. (None of my teenage cashiers have hands like mine, although with all the stepped-up COVID handwashing and glove requirements a couple have told me they understand now why I always have that bottle of lotion.) This is something that builds up over years, but while it’s building you’re still sticking your hands in gloves and heat and soap and chemicals, so even a short stint isn’t doing your skin any favors. At my first store, my trainer had been with the company for ten years, and between the cleaning chemicals, the constant hand-washing, and that 500-degree grill, she had entire patches of her fingerprints missing. Every job will leave its marks on you (just ask Sherlock Holmes), but ours can be pretty dramatic, and they’re sure not a sign of “just flipping burgers” or “kids’ work.”
If you think the washing recommendations for COVID are bad . . . don’t ever work in food service.
5) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE PAIN.
I’m sure you’ve heard the horror stories that occasionally make the progressive news sites. Third-degree burn and you’re forced by your superiors to just keep going, someone fired for leaving for a hospital, that stuff. I’m here to tell you 90% of those things are down to a shitty management team. The only third-degree burn I’ve ever seen anyone work through was the same store manager who did the 20-hour shift, and the entire crew was trying to get her to go to the hospital. Eventually I called my mom in to take a look at it two days later when she still hadn’t gone, and my mom’s response to it was “.....what the hell do you realize if this develops an infection you will lose your arm?” I’m a little convinced her kids have driven her clinically insane, because who does that. This was, however, her decision, not Taco Bell’s, and actually if I’d called her supervisor and been like “my boss is crazy” she might have been ordered to go. We don’t mess with medical emergencies. I have a coworker who got a call a couple months ago, near midnight, that Mayo had a donor kidney for her (she’s well-healed, healthy, and back at work now), and I straight-up looked at her and said “do you need to leave now? You can leave now. [other crewmember] and I will close. Don’t let this pass you by.” I’ve never heard one of those horror stories about a kitchen without knowing that if you scratch the surface, there’s poor management behind it.
But every job has its dangers, and every kitchen—no matter how well-managed—has its injuries. I’ve seen some very interestingly-shaped bruises from various bumps and scrapes. My arms are covered in tiny burn scars; you work with 350-degree oil and high-temperature metal surfaces in a very small area day in and day out, and it’s not a question of “if” these injuries will happen, but “when.” They don’t get reported because if we filled out the (detailed, voluminous) paperwork for every tiny burn and cut, nothing else would ever get done, in much the same way I assume a carpenter doesn’t stop for splinters. We reserve the paperwork for things that a reasonable person would go to the doctor for.
Which doesn’t mean I’ve never filled it out, mind you. My first ever safety paperwork was after I fractured a bone in my foot . . .
. . . and as soon as my doctor would give me clearance, I was back at work. Roughly two weeks before he wanted me to be, but I had bills to pay and a crew who needed me, so I stumped in on my surgical boot and said I could run a cash register with only one foot on the floor. Nor is this limited to in-store injuries. At my current store one of my coworkers was hit by a drunk driver on her day off and came back to work with her whole torso looking like a gay pride parade and seat belt burns still on her chest, and if memory serves she was only out for two days. This is absolutely an industry—whether you’re working for Arby’s or Alton Brown—where you suck it up, buttercup. (And I do mean no matter where you work in this industry. There’s more than one episode of Hell’s Kitchen where Gordon Ramsay has to force someone out of the kitchen to go to the hospital.) And that’s the other 10%—those of us who are just too damned stubborn to stay away. We’ll work through near-paralyzing pain or other symptoms, often with a smile, because that’s just how we do. You will note that I said reasonable people would go to the doctor for this stuff. We long-timers aren’t always reasonable.
For that matter, doing this job changes the way you think about pain and injury. That picture right there? I got that burn this week. I bumped into the the quesadilla grill while reaching for a bag. I didn’t even stop what I was doing. I said “son of a bitch” out of reflex (sorry, HR) and when the rush died down I went and put some burn cream and a bandage on it . . . and then I forgot all about it. I accidentally scrubbed it open at home in the bath the next day, and that was definitely a swearworthy moment, but overall? The itching while it was still scabbed over was infinitely worse than the initial burn. Six years ago, I would have never said there was any way I could just forget about a second-degree burn. But here we are, with me saying “eh, it’s only an inch long, I’ve had worse. Have I told you about the time I dropped an industrial fire extinguisher on my foot?” I wouldn’t even have considered this worth taking a picture of except that I felt the kind of burns I was talking about in this bullet point might need illustration for some folks. I get two or three of these a year, because of that whole “running around a very tiny kitchen full of super-hot metal” thing. I like to show my scars to trainees who think they’re going to horse around in the kitchen. They tend to stop pretty quickly after that.
So yes: sometimes the job does indeed demand that you slap tomatoes on a burn and keep going. Or that you work on a broken foot for an hour while your replacement drives in, because you COULD sit down and nobody would get pissed over it but you’re not willing to be what we call “an office manager.” (It’s not a nice term. Office managers are the ones who clock in and “do paperwork” for ten hours while the crew busts ass.) Can’t take it? Get out of the kitchen.
4) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE STUPIDITY.
If HR gets mad at me for anything on this list, it’ll probably be this one. So let’s be clear: you can hop on any clickbait site on the Internet and find stories about dumb crap people have said. Ex-romantic partners, employees, customers, defendants in a court of law. This is not limited to fast food, or to Taco Bell. Stupid people in real life are like dead people in The Sixth Sense: they’re everywhere, and they don’t know they’re stupid.
The difference here is, the ex-lover can call their former SO an idiot. I can’t say anything.
I’m not talking a single slip of the tongue here, either. We could be here all night with stories of tired people saying they want a crunchy burrito—WAIT—taco. It happens to all of us, and if you say a goof like that has never happened to you, you’re lying. (If I said a goof like that had never happened to me, I would also be lying. I once picked up the headset before I had coffee, and said “Welcome to Jack—Del—Wend—AUGH” and when the customer, thankfully, started laughing, I just ruefully said “and the sad thing is I’ve never worked any of those places.”) No, I’m talking about stuff like this. This is a real conversation that actually happened. It was a couple years ago, but a small part of me has been dead inside ever since.
“Do you have a pack of twelve tacos?”
“Yep, the Taco Twelve-Pack!”
“How many tacos are in that?”
“The Taco Twelve-Pack comes with twelve tacos.”
“Oh no, that’s too much. I don’t want that. You have anything smaller?”
“We have the Grande Meal. It’s ten items, your choice of crunchy tacos, soft tacos, and bean burritos, in any combination as long as it adds up to ten.”
“I’ll do that.”
. . . and then she asked for six soft and six crunchy tacos.
And then got mad when I rang in a twelve-pack.
It’s a little alarming how many people come through here who literally do not know how to count to ten. Ringing out the ten-item pack is like that one scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail sometimes. Nor is it just the ten-item pack—I recently had a woman get angry with me because she’d ordered one bean burrito and one Burrito Supreme and there were two burritos in her bag. I had to explain to a grown woman that one burrito plus one burrito equals two burritos. I know what you’re probably thinking, and no: she was not drunk. Or high. Nor did she appear to have actual medical issues like Down syndrome that would have made this exchange understandable.
COVID has brought a whole new “how, literally, do you survive living life” concern to my attention. Our debit card machines no longer involve giving the card to the cashier—they’re customer-run now. I assume you know how to use your debit card, if you are an adult. I’ve been using one since I was six, when my mom would send me to the corner store for milk and bread. It’s simple, right? Put your card in the little slot and follow the onscreen directions. The machine literally tells you what to do.
A full third of my customers do not understand how to do this, and I am not joking. They’ll put swipe-only cards in the chip reader and get mad at me when it doesn’t work, or they’ll say “it’s swipe” and hold it out with this blank, clueless stare like they’ve never used it before. They’ll repeatedly swipe the card while holding onto the magnetic strip, totally ignoring me while I ask them to flip the card in the other direction. Some people jam their card into the chip reader so hard that I can’t hold the machine in place, and it errors out. One guy actually jammed his card in so hard it bent. I’ve seen two people try to swipe their cards vertically. A few will jam their card repeatedly in and out of the slot like they think a debit card works like a sex toy. Sometimes I’ll hand out drinks while the card runs because our readers are kind of slow (it’s considered best practice for drive-thru orders anyway), and people will stare at the drink like they can’t figure out if they’re supposed to take it, even though I’m leaning halfway out the window to give it to them. In one case I held out the machine, said “chip or swipe when you’re ready,” and this dude literally stared at the machine, turned back to his conversation with his wife, and when she said “so are you going to pay?” he said “oh, I thought she was just showing me something.” It’s like the lid scene in Spongebob, except that Spongebob has way more patience than I have and also isn’t on a timer.
And you can’t tell these people they’re being dumb. You have to be patient and polite and not ask how they can be in their sixties and not understand that sales tax exists, or how they can be driving but then say they can’t read the menu board because they left their glasses at home.
None of this touches on the drunks and druggies, incidentally. (And let’s not pretend that’s not a thing. Jack in the Box has a late-night option called “the Munchies Meal,” for Pete’s sake.) That’s a whole other kind of stupid. It usually hits in force around ten at night and it’s like if the earlier stupid people were a beginners’ yoga class, the under-the-influence crowd is the “and if you’re more advanced, try THIS!” part. You have to keep them on topic, keep their attention because there’s usually more than one person in the car, figure out what they’re talking about, and prevent them from changing the whole order at the window because they literally forgot they already ordered.
If you can’t do that for ten hours . . . you’ll never survive.
3) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SKILL SET.
There’s no such thing as “unskilled labor,” only undervalued skills. With that said, you have to be pretty damn good at math to do my job. There’s a pre-employment assessment full of questions about fractions, percentages, and so on, and it’s timed—at least in part so they can tell if you’re cheating with a calculator. (Actually, disclaimer for my franchise: I don’t know if they have the same test. I was automatically onboarded when my old franchise was sold.) This wasn’t true when I worked at the pizza place or Arby’s in the 2000s, but it was true at Chipotle, and when I was still trying to get a job I filled out similar assessments for Pizza Hut and Wendy’s.
Likewise, there’s on-paper versus real life. Taco Bell doesn’t require you to be bilingual on paper. But in practice? You’d best know Spanish. It’s not that there’s some hidden unspoken rule about not hiring monolingual people (there’s not). It’s that literally not one day goes by without me taking at least one order in Spanish, and usually more. It’s a skill you need, and it’s increasingly being taken for granted; when I worked at a gas station nine years ago, my Latino customers were surprised that I—very much a gringa—spoke Spanish. Today, Spanish-speakers will launch right into their order without even asking if I’m bilingual. It’s just assumed.
You don’t have to have a diploma to work here, although it’s encouraged. (And we have a pretty sweet program for crew who want to get their GEDs.) But you do have to have, I’d say . . . at least a tenth grade education. AT LEAST. You need the math skills, the ability to read and write and follow written communications and directions, and preferably the language skills.
And your multitasking skills? They have to be on point. My mom came to visit one day when I was in drivethru and told me that watching me made her dizzy, and she had no idea how I could do it. This was several years ago and I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I can tell you exactly what she was watching: three simultaneous conversations (at the menu, at the window, with my crew), organizing condiments and fixings for orders, getting drinks, and putting all of this in the order required by my order screen, at the same time. I told her it was easy and she just kind of stared at me.
You also need to have medical knowledge, and I don’t mean “how do you put a bandaid on a cut.” I mean I have to know the five most common foodborne illnesses and how to recognize them, the eight most common food allergies and how to prevent triggering them, signs and symptoms of things like norovirus and hepatitis A that would require me to send a crewmember home, and proper safety procedures in case of a food recall so I don’t accidentally give someone listeria. (Disclaimer again for the media department, the only recall I know about us ever having is “our product shouldn’t be contaminated but we’re going to pull it anyway out of an abundance of caution, just in case.” But it’s a matter of public media record that people-actually-got-sick recalls have hit Chipotle a couple times, so there’s good reason to learn all that stuff.) And it’s not just because I’m a shift lead, either. It’s been a lot of years since I first sat down to do the “welcome to your new job” orientation videos and I couldn’t tell you anymore what’s in them and what I learned as I went, but I popped in on a trainee the other day to see how she was doing, and that’s literally the video she was on—signs and symptoms of hepatitis.
Also, you’ve got to be able to lift five gallons of heavy, sugary syrup to chest level and carry it that way.
If you can’t do that . . . . fuhgeddaboutit!
2) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE ABUSE.
First, I’m going to repeat what I said earlier: I’m allowed to kick out abusive customers. And, indeed, I have done so. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. The three top reasons, in no particular order, are 1) using drugs in the store 2) swearing at staff or customers (as in “listen here, bitch,” not as in “whoo! It’s hotter than hell out there”) 3) becoming physically abusive. This last one is the reason this is a whole different bullet point than just “bad attitude,” because there is a huge difference between people who want you to have a bad day and people who actively, maliciously mean you harm.
The problem is this, and it’s unfortunately one you can’t really do anything about without inventing telepathy: by the time you know somebody needs tossed out on their can, they’ve already become abusive. Sort of like you don’t know if someone will commit a bank robbery until they’re running away with the cash.
Sometimes, this is someone just being a jerk. If you call me a fucking cunt because you don’t like that it’s 50 cents for a side of jalapeños, that’s your problem, not mine, and it’s gonna be even more your problem when you realize the only other restaurant open is McD’s and they charge for extra ketchup. I’ll probably laugh at you in the back, to be quite honest. But it’s a different matter when the customer gets physically abusive, and it can be dangerous. My first few months in this job, I had a lady complain her pinto beans were cold. I could see steam coming off them, but whatever. I offered to put them in the steamer, and she demanded new ones. I said “I can do that, ma’am, but I have to tell you they come out of the same pan, the temperature will be the same.”
So, of course, completely logically, she threw her beans on me.
I got quite lucky. I was scalded, but not burned. (Her “cold beans” were about 180 degrees.) One of my friends who used to work retail? NOT so lucky. She had to tell a woman the shoes she wanted were out of stock in the woman’s size. This was back when those huge, chunky platform shoes with the wooden heels were in fashion. The woman said “what did you say to me?” and clocked my friend in the face with one of said shoes. The woman got a citywide ban from the chain. My friend got a broken jaw and had to quit because of PTSD.
Then there’s the more subtle abuse, where there’s nothing you can do about it. My second year at this job, I had a woman come in and I misheard her name. Hers is pretty distinctive, so let’s say her name was Erin and I misheard it as Arwen. This is close enough to the degree of separation between her real name and the fictitious one. So I call her order and she starts laughing and tells me her name is Erin. I apologize and tell her I’m hard of hearing, but I watched the movie recently and it must have been on my mind.
So far, so good. Cute story, even. I’m perfectly willing to admit my hearing can do some extremely goofy things, including me registering a comment in English as being in a completely different language, and sometimes the results are extremely funny. Except that every time she came in after that she insisted on telling every customer around her how “silly” I was for mishearing her and thinking someone would really be named Arwen (it could’ve been a nickname, but I’ve had both a real-life Bruce Wayne and an Aslan, so . . .), how she couldn’t believe I called it out loud, and so on. If no other customers were present she’d lean over the counter to very loudly share this with drive-thru, laughing all the while.
The day came that I found out my Grampa, who did quite a lot of my raising, had cancer. And she came in that night. And started her usual crap until one of her sons said “Mom, stop. She’s crying.” And so I was—not freely, but there were tears in my eyes. I couldn’t help it. A man I loved more than anything was dying and this woman was bullying me for being disabled. Her response: “I’m not being mean! It was just so silly!”
I didn’t have it in me to be nice so I just looked at her son and said “it’s okay, kiddo, I’m used to people laughing at me because I’m different.”
Her kids insisted on sitting at a different table from her and kept shooting her these venomous looks while she told me I needed to learn to laugh at myself and how important it is, how she was laughing with me not at me, you know, all the usual excuses. So finally I just told her I was raised not to laugh at people for being disabled.
And that’s all I could do. Technically, I might even have been considered out of line. My boss didn’t say anything because she knew this lady had been giving me a hard time and also knew exactly what was going on in my life, but could she have? Yeah, absolutely.
And then you have a group I just completely can’t understand. This group is best personified by the elderly woman who came in one day when I was eating lunch, marched up to my table, and demanded I take her order. I swallowed my bite of nachos and said “I’m sorry, I’m on break, but if you go to the register someone can help you!”
And she—in this angry tone like I’d just insulted her and her entire family—said “and who said you deserve one?”
(Stuff like this is why Baby Boomers get such a bad rap.)
I didn’t even know how to reply to that. My immediate thought was absolutely not at all work appropriate, but you can’t say that stuff. This was like four years ago and I don’t remember my actual reply, but based on how these conversations usually go I’m pretty sure I told her it was illegal for me to work off the clock and she’d have to go to the register. (These people HATE when you know workers’ rights, by the way. Which is an excellent reason to know them.)
Instead, she huffed and stormed out. Either I was going to take her order, or nobody was, I guess. And no—I couldn’t “take just one order.” I only get thirty minutes for my break and I’m not working through it.
Can’t handle the insult and injury that’s far beyond rudeness? This is not the job for you.
And finally:
1) YOU CAN’T TAKE THE CONDESCENSION . . . FROM MALICIOUS AND WELL-MEANING PEOPLE ALIKE.
I’m about to make a whole lot of enemies on DailyKOS.
I mean the people who say it’s “just flipping burgers” . . . and I mean you, too.
Confession’s good for the soul. At some point in reading this, did you think I “deserved better than this job”? That “my talents are wasted”? Maybe that I should get a “better” job, and leave this one for people who “can’t do” “better” jobs?
I know at least some of you did. Because every time I write about my job, someone tells me I’m “too articulate” to do it.
Congratulations! If you are one of those people, you’ve fallen victim to the classism and ableism that drive our society and that make it possible for my job to be treated as unimportant and not worthwhile.
My grandmother was an assembly line worker who made those little tin soldiers your parents might’ve played with as kids. She was married twice. Her first husband worked in a paper making plant and her second husband was a tool and die maker. She was on good terms with both (and it says a lot about the character of my grandparents, I think, that her first and second husbands actually became friends). She and her second husband did a decent chunk of my raising, so much of who I am as a worker comes down to them.
Did she “deserve a better job”? Did they? Or do you think of their manufacturing jobs with a nostalgia that they were The Backbone Of America, raising this country to have—for awhile, anyway—one of the best standards of living in the world? She was a master seamstress who made my aunt’s (incredible, looked-celebrity-tailored) wedding dress. Were her talents “wasted” because she learned them as a way to clothe her children through poverty, and then continued them as a hobby, rather than opening her own dress shop?
In spite of the struggles I face at my job, I actually like it most of the time. It’s hard work, and it can be stressful (especially right now—I could use a two-week vacation to just sleep and not think about COVID, which, you know, I’m probably speaking for half of America right there), but it’s an honest job where I get to meet a lot of different people. I also get a lot of fun, or at least entertaining, stories, and when you’re a storyteller that is the absolute best thing in the world. And it’s usually not boring, which is a lot more than you can say for office work.
Do we deserve better pay and better workers’ rights? I mean, yeah. I’m an extremely firm believer in what FDR said: “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country . . . and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.” I’m also a firm believer that runaway CEO wages and “investors” who do nothing to add value to companies are a far bigger issue here than anything else. (Seriously, our economy should not be tied to stocks. It just shouldn’t. There is so much wrong with that whole thing.)
But we also deserve your respect. Not your pity, not your condescension, not your excuses. We work an honest job. Actual respect for the hard work we do, not devaluing our work and our employees by saying we’re “too good” for the job, is the first step toward us getting an honest wage. “I work at Taco Bell” should be a statement as neutral as “looks like it might rain.” It should not be a statement I have to weigh in order to determine whether or not I’ll be dismissed as incompetent or irrelevant by whoever I’m speaking to. Manufacturing has mostly gone overseas; like it or not, the service sector is the backbone of America now. My grandparents taught me that an honest job—any honest job, whether you’re the President or scrubbing the President’s toilet—should be a source of pride. Not pity, not embarrassment. My great-grandfather dug ditches for a dollar a day under the Works-Progress Association, and that was very tall tickets back in those days. My Grampa wasn’t ashamed to say his dad was a ditch-digger—he was proud that his dad “did well for himself.” (I got promoted to shift lead before he passed, and he was ecstatic. In his world and his parlance, I was doing very well for myself.) That idea seems to have gone the way of the marginal tax rate, but much like the marginal tax rate, we need to bring it back. Honest work, honest pay, honest respect. Even if we really were “just flipping burgers,” you're paying for us to do it, aren’t you? Perhaps save your disdain for those who get paid to do absolutely nothing, like half of Congress.
Yes, by all means say we need a living wage. (I agree. This country was doing a lot better economically when the minimum wage was a living wage.) But consider, instead of “we should pay fast food workers more because they take so much abuse,” try “we should pay fast food workers more, and we should treat them like human beings and be vocal about our disapproval when they’re abused in front of us.” Instead of “these jobs are unskilled labor,” try “these jobs utilize undervalued skills, and we should value them more.” Instead of “It’s an entry-level job,” try “it’s hard work, and young people who are able to balance both school and a job should be commended because school is a full-time job all by itself.” Instead of “it’s for teens,” consider “while some of these positions can be done by teenagers, others require a high level of skill and specialized training.” (Also consider: teenagers are not stupid. We allow them to get inside a 1500-pound machine capable of reaching 100+ miles per hour and then move it around. They can take a lot more responsibility than many people credit them with.)
And instead of “anyone can do this job,” consider:
You can’t take my job.