The Fast Food Devolution

By Kevin Gibson
August 26, 2007

Fast food restaurants and their prevalence in Western society amaze me. Not only is the food unhealthy, but in a lot of ways the experience of eating in a fast-food restaurant can be as well.

My friend Kirk and I have lunch about once a week, usually at one of three fast-food establishments that are geographically convenient to us both. What is interesting is that when you become a “regular” at these places, they begin to take on their own personalities. Some even seem to become actual entities that defy common logic and understanding.

For instance, we frequent a Louisville DQ restaurant, where we partake of chili dogs, onion rings, etc., and make fun of the terrible music they play (I mean, how many times can ANYONE listen to Air Supply or “Having My Baby”?). But there’s also a young lady who works the lunch shift who seems so disaffected and abrasive that we refer to her as “Miss Sunshine,” or “Miss Personality.” She never changes. Never smiles. Never loses her abrupt demeanor, even for a second.

And there’s a hybrid Taco Bell/KFC we patronize occasionally, even with the knowledge that it is one of the slowest and most disorganized places in the city. When we make this decision, the exchange is usually something like:

“Do you want to risk going to Taco Chicken?”

“I guess; it’s been a while, so maybe it’s gotten better.”

Well, it hasn’t.

We were there a few weeks back and after ordering we discovered there were 17 orders ahead of ours. We noticed a lot of people were waiting around, but 17??? Kirk was ahead of me, and his number was 2542 or something like that, while I was 2543. So once we found a booth we sat and counted down eagerly as the trays exchanged hands and the employees yelled out each number: “2537!” “2538!”

Along the way, one exasperated looking young guy, having heard his number finally be called, yelled back, “Bingo!” It was quite funny.

Finally, they called Kirk’s number. “2542!” He jumped up and said, “Yeah!” I started to get up as well, since my order was next, but I decided I’d wait and savor my moment in the sun. After my long wait, I was about to be rewarded with greasy, fake Mexican food filled with Grade C beef and cheese so flavorless that it might as well be made of wax – and I wanted to cherish it.

“2544!”

What? Oh well, just a glitch.

“2545!”

Wait a …

“2546!”

They got to 2553 before I could get anyone’s attention. I showed a lady my receipt and asked if she could please check on my order. No one had received it on the assembly line, she determined, nor did they know how it got wiped from the system. Problem is, she apparently entered it into the rotation AFTER all the orders that had been placed behind ours, so I had to stand there like an idiot and wait another five or 10 minutes … and with NO receipt to prove I had even ordered. Anything. At any point in my LIFE.

There was a happy ending – I got my food eventually and the order was even correct. But you can understand why we aren’t in a hurry to go back.

So last week we went to lunch at a nearby Arby’s; this place may be the most magical of our regular lunch stops because we always seem to end up laughing like a couple of middle-schoolers who just heard their teacher say the word “shaft.” Something ALWAYS seems to happen that makes us laugh, and then we make it worse by talking about until it takes on its own life.

Well, on this particular day, Kirk ordered a bacon and cheddar roast beef sandwich, except that, when he got to his last bite or two, he realized there was no bacon on the sandwich. What then? He couldn’t really take one bite of a sandwich left and say, “Uh, sir, you forgot to put the bacon on this. I demand a refund.”

“That was 50 cents down the drain,” he said.

So I suggested we both go up to the counter and start chanting, “Ba-con, ba-con, ba-con,” until they handed over two strips of bacon to make things even.

He noted that it would be a fun sociological experiment to do that at, say, a McDonald’s restaurant, even if you hadn’t bought anything.

“Do they have anything with bacon on it?” he said.

“Who cares?” I said. He agreed. So we decided Taco Chicken or even Long John Silver’s would be great places for the Great Bacon Experiment. “There was no bacon in my Bacon and More meal! Just coleslaw and hushpuppies and some kind of goddamn fish!”

Ba-con, ba-con, ba-con ...

Then Kirk said, “Hell, we should try it a bank and see what happens.”

What would a bank teller say if there were two guys standing in the lobby chanting, “Ba-con, ba-con, ba-con …”?

Then Kirk though it would be funny to take it even a step farther, and to walk up to the teller, hand her a check for, say, “$100,” and say, “Is it OK if I make this out to ‘bacon’?”

What would they do? What could they do? And what if the check was for $100.37? Would they give you 37 bacon bits as change with your bacon?

Finally, Kirk said, “What, you mean I can’t make this out to BACON? C’mon, I bank at Stockyards, what’s the problem?”

At that point our conversation went in a decidedly strange direction, but you get the point. And don’t even get me started on the penguin story. Which to me pretty much proves that either Arby’s is a magical place that brings out the idiot in certain people or that fast food is somehow affecting our brain function.

Or that we should really stop drinking at lunch.

E-mail me. Pudding is good too.