Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [50]
In recent years: Armed robbers struck nineteen McDonald’s and Burger King restaurants along Interstate 85 in Virginia and North Carolina. A former cook at a Shoney’s in Nashville, Tennessee, became a fast food serial killer, murdering two workers at a Captain D’s, three workers at a McDonald’s, and a pair of Baskin Robbins workers whose bodies were later found in a state park. A dean at Texas Southern University was shot and killed during a carjacking in the drive-through lane of a KFC in Houston. The manager of a Wal-Mart McDonald’s in Durham, North Carolina, was shot during a robbery by two masked assailants. A nine-year-old girl was killed during a shootout between a robber and an off-duty police officer waiting in line at a McDonald’s in Barstow, California. A twenty-year-old manager was killed during an armed robbery at a Sacramento, California, McDonald’s; the manager had recognized one of the armed robbers, a former McDonald’s employee; it was the manager’s first day in the job. A former employee at a McDonald’s in Vallejo, California, shot three women who worked at the restaurant after being rejected for a new job; one of the women was killed, and the murderer left the restaurant laughing. And in Colorado Springs, a jury convicted a former employee of first degree murder for the execution-style slayings of three teenage workers and a female manager at a Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant. The killings took place in Aurora, Colorado, at closing time, and police later arrived to find a macabre scene. The bodies lay in an empty restaurant as burglar alarms rang, game lights flashed, a vacuum cleaner ran, and Chuck E. Cheese mechanical animals continued to perform children’s songs.
making it fun
AT THE THIRTY – EIGHTH Annual Multi-Unit Foodserver Operators Conference held a few years ago in Los Angeles, the theme was “People: The Single Point of Difference.” Most of the fourteen hundred attendees were chain restaurant operators and executives. The ballroom at the Century Plaza Hotel was filled with men and women in expensive suits, a well-to-do group whose members looked as though they hadn’t grilled a burger or mopped a floor in a while. The conference workshops had names like “Dual Branding: Case Studies from the Field” and “Segment Marketing: The Right Message for the Right Market” and “In Line and on Target: The Changing Dimensions of Site Selection.” Awards were given for the best radio and television ads. Restaurants were inducted into the Fine Dining Hall of Fame. Chains competed to be named Operator of the Year. Foodservice companies filled a nearby exhibition space with their latest products: dips, toppings, condiments, high-tech ovens, the latest in pest control. The leading topic of conversation at the scheduled workshops, in the hallways and hotel bars, was how to find inexpensive workers in an American economy where unemployment had fallen to a twenty-four-year low.
James C. Doherty, the publisher of Nation’s Restaurant News at the time, gave a speech urging the restaurant industry to move away from relying on a low-wage workforce with high levels of turnover and to promote instead the kind of labor policies that would create long-term careers in foodservice. How can workers look to this industry for a career, he asked, when it pays them the minimum wage and provides them no health benefits? Doherty’s suggestions received polite applause.
The keynote speech was given by David Novak, the president of Tricon Global Restaurants. His company operates more restaurants than any other company in the world — 30,000 Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, and KFCs. A former advertising executive with a boyish face and the earnest delivery style of a motivational speaker, Novak charmed the crowd. He talked about the sort of recognition his company tried to give its employees, the pep talks, the prizes, the special awards of plastic chili peppers and rubber chickens. He believed the best way to motivate people is to have fun. “Cynics need to be in some