Fast Food Workers Are Not Worth Top Wages: When I eliminated four line positions by myself
A few years ago I had to work a second job because of a tax bill that came in the mail from the IRS. The reason the IRS is such a terrifying organization is that if you get in the cross-hairs of them it will cost either in defense or compliance. In my case it was compliance. I had worked hard the previous year and some of the work wasn’t easily calculated and the IRS disputed that I owed them more. Defending my amount would have cost more to take to court so I had to pay, and they knew that was my only real option. So I elected to work a second job to pay my bill rather than rob the money from our family’s normal income. Every morning at 4 AM I got up and rode a bicycle from Mason to Lebanon to report for work at 5 AM at my primary employer. At 3 PM I got off that job and rushed up the road to the Kings Island exit to work at a popular fast food establishment there by 4 PM. My job was to work as the grill cook, and within a few short months I became known as the fastest grill man from Michigan to Florida and my exploits drew the attention of corporate headquarters. Fast food executives paid personal visits to me to figure out how I was able to work so fast. I worked every night the dinner rush and left at 8 PM to ride my bicycle home arriving around 9 PM. Finally after a long hard day I’d go to bed to begin the day again the next morning. In addition to that schedule I worked at the fast-food restaurant on Saturday nights as well covering the lunch and dinner rush from 10 AM to 7 PM as Kings Island provided a lot of business.
It took me two years to pay off my tax debt in this fashion but I eventually did without it sucking the money from our primary income. My wife did not work and I did not want her to. She was homeschooling our children for a bit of time during this period and she needed to be free to care for them. Even when they did attend Mason public schools, my wife drove them every day so that they wouldn’t have to ride the school bus with all the vile filth that goes on during bus rides. So my wife working simply wasn’t an option. During the day she also was a teacher’s assistant in my daughters classrooms until the relationship with the school went south when we would not allow our 4th grade children to attend a sex education class that consisted of teaching them how to put condoms on a fake penis. We declined and from that point the administrators put an “X” on my wife’s back, so we pulled our children out of the school for their own protection, and proper instruction. Meanwhile, I rode my bike to my jobs and kept the money coming in. My exploits during this period of time were described in my novel, The Symposium of Justice.
I was so good as a grill cook that the restaurant management agreed to some of my unusual working mandates. I did not participate in any customer interaction; I did not take orders from the front register or talk to anybody on the drive thru. I could make such demands because I was the best at my job that there was. Nobody came close to my speed. (REVIEW MY BULLWHIP FAST DRAW). I personally eliminated four line positions at this restaurant. Normally there would be a grill worker for the front grill, a grill worker for the drive thru grill, a fry person and a chicken runner for the deep fryer in the back. The restaurant I worked at was busier than most because of the Kings Island traffic, so corporate was very perplexed as to how I managed to be so quick and efficient all by myself. I of course saved this restaurant a lot of money in labor hours.
I explained to them that I could read what a person would order by way of food by the look on their faces when they stepped into the dining room. I had their food already cooking before they stepped up to place their order. And on the drive thru I would watch the cars pull into the lot headed for the speaker and determine what they were going to order based on the way the driver looked, how many people were in the car, the condition of the car, and various other factors. By the time the sandwich maker called the order I had the meat prepared and perfectly cooked ready to hit their prep. The ability was physical of course. I have always been very fast at everything I do. But in this case it was more psychological than physical. This left the corporate executives baffled as to how they could train other stores to have grill cooks who did the same thing.
They offered me a .50 cent raise for my efforts which I gladly accepted bring my total to $7.50 in 1997 money. It wasn’t much then and it isn’t much now, but it was I thought a fair wage for the work I was doing. My rule against the customers was that I knew that some government workers came to Kings Island often and I didn’t want to speak to them. They had put me in the position of having to work a second job and be away from my family, so I didn’t want to be nice to them, or even acknowledge their existence. I could always tell those types upon site, so I worked it out so that all I’d have to do was prepare the food, I would not have to give the people who put me in that situation the privilege of serving them directly.
I of course became the restaurant psychologist and the young people often confided in me their problems seeking my help, which I gave them. The managers often had wrecked lives due to all the crazy hours they worked so I helped them too; by solving many of their personal problems. But my rule about dealing with the customers was firm. On one such occasion a pretentious Mason school teacher who weighed in at least three hundred pounds came to the front register while the 16-year-old girl manning that station was using the restroom. The teacher demanded service and I was the closest one to her. I instructed her to sit tight until someone came to take her order but she ignored me and continued anyway. Needless to say her order fell on deaf ears. I continued doing my work ignoring her. When the girl came back, the Mason teacher was standing their refusing to repeat herself expecting me to tell the girl what the order was, which of course I didn’t provide. Rather than repeat her order to the cashier the teacher complained about me to corporate headquarters thinking she would get me fired for disrespecting her. She called from the dining room making a huge fuss in front of the other customers and demanding our own management to remove me from the line. The lead manager told her that we were in the middle of lunch rush and that they couldn’t afford to remove me from the line. The teacher proclaimed that nobody was “irreplaceable!” Corporate took my side on the issue and the frustrated teacher took her business elsewhere. She was back a week later, but this time didn’t look at me. She simply placed her order and I had her meat ready for her. I knew exactly what she was going to order, and it was a lot of food.
With all that said, the recent union attempt to inject themselves into the fast food restaurant business is a vile attempt at communism. Fast food workers are not worth $15 an hour. I was the best of my kind, and I wouldn’t have thought of asking such a fee for a job that was worth more to me for its flexibility than the wage I earned. I enjoyed being able to come in and dominate a position so that I could dictate my terms based purely on performance. While it’s true I could have made more money quicker if I were willing to “compromise” the fact was that I wasn’t, and fast food gave me the opportunity to work such a job, get the government off my back, while not having to lower myself to people like that 300 pound Mason teacher. People who knew me then felt sorry for me, because I rode my bicycle to work every day, worked long hard hours, and had to wear a fast food uniform well into adulthood even though I was making good money and showing great talent at my regular job. My wife and I could have just used the public school like a baby sitting service like everyone else did, she could have worked, we could have had two cars and life could have been easier if we just played along. But we chose to do only what we had to in order to appease our government obligations. Making a lot of extra money would have just been consumed in further taxes and was not a smart strategic choice. Fast food gave me the perfect opportunity to dig out of that tax liability without making it worse, and without lowering myself to making plea deals with the IRS, or using expensive lawyers to just feed the monster even more. And it also allowed me to take care of the problem so that my wife was always around my little girls, shielding them from the evils of the world that were being placed upon them by a statist government gone mad wanting to teach them to put on a condom in the fourth grade. Little girls who had both parents working late staying in an empty house from the time they get home from school till their parents arrive between 5 and 6 PM have lots of opportunities to get into trouble with boys in their neighborhoods, but since my wife was always home, my girls didn’t have that problem. They didn’t need to learn how to put on a condom when that was furthest thing on their minds than anything at the time.
The protests from restaurant workers demanding a “living wage” for their work in fast food are not worth more than $7 to $8 dollars an hour, I don’t care who they are. Fast food work is entry-level work designed to fill the social needs for cheap food on the go. Nobody should work in fast food as a career choice unless they want to go into management. There is no such thing as a “living wage.” But there is such a thing as “value,” and restaurant workers are only worth so much. The fast food restaurants of America have one obligation, to provide a good quality product cheaply. If I could have taught corporate headquarters my skills at working a grill, I would have. Unfortunately for them, I cannot be duplicated, and no machine can do what I could do—not even the perverted imbeciles who work at the NSA and supposedly have supercomputers that cross-reference everything we do in our lives. They can’t calculate human behavior as well as I can. Even so, the work I did was not worth more than $8 dollars an hour and I would never have considered asking for more. I used the job to clear my tax debt and a little bit more, and then saved up money to move out of Mason and back to my childhood home of Liberty Twp. I stayed on at the fast-food restaurant working to make extra money for some time after so to get out in front of our financial condition. $8 dollars an hour becomes quite a lot of money when you don’t drive a car and your wife is at home teaching your children. The household expenses go down rapidly when you are not part of the system. And a good bit of savings can be generated while working fast food.
A “living wage” as the communist labor unions advocate is attempting to do the same thing they’ve done to the teaching profession and virtually every endeavor that they are a part of. They set artificially high values for their labor that is built purely on monopoly power. In fast-food, they know they cannot obtain that monopoly unless they get all the workers in that industry to buy in to their scheme. Fortunately for America, that plan will fail. If twenty fast food workers decide to strike from a local McDonald’s, there are always people like me who will step in and take the money that is left in the void, and can do four jobs all by myself. It would make me happy to do it just to keep prices low on the hamburgers we buy. There is no shame in it, but only advantage, for what I’m talking about are the benefits of capitalism—a concept that labor unions do not understand, and despise with every cell in their bodies.
Rich Hoffman
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