Like many high schoolers, I began working at fast food restaurant, earning the minimum wage, so I could have some money to do things with friends, buy clothes, and even start saving. It wasn’t too bad at first, I only had to work a few nights a week after school and usually an eight hour shift on Saturdays and Sundays. I was shocked when I initially started working there and found out that I was one of three employees who were under the age of twenty. Many of my co-workers were in their late twenties or early thirties. Ben, one of my managers, was forty-five and had been there almost ten years. No one, other than the managers, worked over thirty hours because the franchise owners did not want to pay their employees over-time. Despite this, most of the staff worked six days a week. As you can imagine, whenever the franchise owners weren’t present, employees were constantly complaining about how they weren’t getting time that they had requested weeks in advance off, they weren’t getting paid enough for what they were dealing with, and so forth. Once again, I wasn’t bothered too much by the work or the treatment until about six months into the job. Eventually I hit a wall. And here’s why:
- Customers are rude. They know nothing about you, but man if you’re saying, “Would you like fries with that?” there is an assumption that you must’ve screwed up royally to be working at this job. This logic allows customers to treat you as if you are not a fellow human being. I have been told to shut up because I was trying to inform a customer of what was in the bag I was handing to them as they were on the phone. I was then later asked by that customer what was in said bag. I was called a ‘b**ch’ for charging a lady for two Mountain Dews that had not been rung up because she hadn’t ordered them at the intercom, and I could not hand them out for free.
- It’s a difficult job. You constantly have people getting upset with you, whether it be your co-workers, your manager, or the customers. You’re never fast enough and you never have everything that needs to be done finished due to the fact that you only have two hands and can only be in one place at particular time. You do the best you can but it’s never good enough for anyone involved.
- From @CloydRivers on Twitter: “Fast food workers think they deserve to be paid $15 an hour, but still can't get my $3 order right. Merica.” Yes, because it is hectic and I repeat, we are trying our best. If we make a mistake, we correct it. But it’s a mistake, I’m sure even those who make more than minimum wage still manage to make mistakes.
These were my frustrations as a 17 year old girl who was just trying to earn some cash. I’m sure for my co-workers who were trying to make ends meet, raise their families, working more frequently than myself, and had been there for at least a year, these were more than just frustrations. These were daily problems for them on top of the poor treatment from the franchise owners. This treatment is why fast food workers deserve better treatment and a living wage. For those of us who haven't worked in an environment described as above, it's hard to understand why someone deserves a living wage working at a fast food chain but I promise you they do.
