Oh, yes, one can have violent reactions to spices. I’ve found that curry rips my guts to shreds, for example, and even tiny amounts of it will make me sick. If Muffin is as sensitive to something in the pickling brine, then the upset stomach that evening is quite believable.
Replacement may not be required, the adult might just apply some OTJ training. It’s not all work ethic, and hustle, working smart counts for a lot. The adult has to be there to see what is happening. While these jobs seem brain dead on the surface, it is easy to work hard and not do them well, because there is a lot of stuff that simple never occurs to a newby worker:
Start filling the drinks while the customer is fumbling with their wallet, or you are waiting on the credit card terminal.
Fill two drinks alternately so the time for the foam to dissipate is not wasted.
If we are busy as all shit, DO say “Will that be all?” but DO NOT specifically ask about fries, drinks, etc. like you do during the slow times.
Do not put the money the customer gave you into the drawer until they have accepted the change. This usually makes it quick and easy to resolve any dispute over the change. (Note: Older registers used to a have a shelf over the cash drawer for exactly this reason, designers of newer registers seem not to know about this wisdom, so this has probably gone the way of the button hook)
When I was in college selling shoes, The manager had to to a fair amount of training of each new employee before they could wait on multiple customers without pissing them off. That manager eventually left, and the new manager had no clue. We old guard always outperformed the new folks, but nobody really had the knack for passing on the knowledge.
I frequently see new waitstaff making a trip to the kitchen for every. single. thing. Rather than checking their other tables “while I’m at it”. I think that any idiot can probably provide good service to a single table of not more than 6 diners. A waiter who can provide good service to 8 tables without breaking a sweat is an impressive thing.
The Walmartian (I liked that!) that hit you and ran was the clerk from the first Mickey D’s.
This brings up a question I have. I absolutely love the pickle chips you get at McD’s or Jerry’s. In fact at Jerry’s I sometimes keep snacking on them while I wait for my sub. Somehow they taste ultra-sour without tasting like dill or being too garlicky. My problem is that I can’t find sour pickles like that anywhere. I can find sweet pickles and I can find dill pickles and I can find what are called sour pickles but they are usually just dill/garlic pickles. Isn’t there any way to purchase this type of pickle except buy buying a McD’s sandwich and throwing everything but the pickle away?
Only if we take in wings and fries at The Bistro on Avenue and Lawrence as well. Them’s good stuff. 
Well:
- I remember my mom telling me stories of complete incompetence from fast-food workers when I was a wee lad.
- People still go to fast-food restaurants.
So I think the answer to your question is a resounding “Yes.” We accept it and then bitch about it on messageboards, but then we keep going back to purchase food there. After all, the prices are cheap, because they’re paying next to nothing in labor costs, because they’re hiring people with no job skills, because those people can’t get jobs elsewhere. In general (not always–in general), folks working at fast food restaurants are among the least competent workers in the country: most of them, were they more competent, would be working at a higher-paying job.
Refusing to accept complete incompetence would mean refusing to patronize such restaurants. If you’re patronizing them, you’re accepting the incompetence, no matter how much you may rail against it afterward.
Daniel
Hey Muffin, can I have your pickle? 
These puns are vlasic!
I’m shdrooling.
“Just put your pickle on everybody’s plate college boy and leave the hard stuff to me.”
- Johnny Castle, Dirty Dancing
Darn! Beat me to it.
Actually, it’s very likely that the food at McDonalds and at every other burger joint is, literally, shitty. Deregulation under the current administration has allowed fecal matter in irradiated food to be considered a “non-contaminant”. This is because the FDA, along with the EPA and other regulatory agencies, have had their staffs gutted and funding cut, which in turn means that inspections at meat processing plants are no longer adequate. Stopping the production line usually means you are fired for doing so. Happy eating.
Muffin has since replied to this thread, but neglected to mention that he has a penis.
Yeah, the McDonald’s slogan was "Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us. (Or, if you’re Opus: “McPenguin burger, hold the lettuce…”)
And I know exactly where *Muffin is coming from. I don’t have any kind of reaction to pickles like he did, but on the rare occasion that I forget to request no pickles, I will do as other people have recommended and pull off the pickles and trash it. You can definitely still taste the pickle-ness on the spot where they were sitting. And, in fact, God smites me when I do this, because quite often there are 3 or 4 pickle slices to pick off. (And this is on a regular cheeseburger, not a Big Mac. I hate Mac sauce, so I never get a Big Mac.)
That was the Burger King jingle.
blinks But why would Burger King have McPenguin burgers? Opus lied to me?
McD’s not even fast. I’ve been in malls where there’s a Mickey and other food court places and the McD lines seem to move the most slowly. I’ve found Subway and A&W to be speedy and efficient almost always. If I’m forced to eat at McD (if there is literally nothing else available including a corner store) then I go for the grilled chicken, plain. They can’t do too much damage to that
As for pickly flavour lingering, I get it completely. For reasons unknown to me, iceberg lettuce decided to hate me at some point after I left my 20s. It makes me crampy and nauseous now so of course I ask to have it left off. It’s not good enough to remove it once it’s been applied because even iceberg lettuce leaves enough iceberg lettuceyness behind to make me queasy.
What does minimum wage have to do with it? At Burger King, if you ask for your burger without pickle, you get your burger without pickle. And I doubt there’s a noticeable pay differential between the two chains.
FWIW, MickeyD’s decided a few years back that they, too, were going to let customers hold the pickle, etc. Or so their ads briefly said. I don’t think it really ‘took’, though.
To be quite honest, Schwartz’s was all we had for good smoked meat well before Ben’s closed. Face it, it was a tourist trap with shitty smoked meat and nothing but the famous people aura going for it.
Considering that all the workers wanted was AC in the summer, heat in the winter, and an eighty-cent raise, I think the reason the managers didn’t negotiate with them at all was because they were just waiting for an excuse to close the place. The death of a thousand cuts wasn’t working fast enough.
No, I do not. I cannot think of a single food that other people enjoy regularly that I can not, will not, must not eat.
Huh? When I worked at McDonald’s in the early 80’s we made special orders (no whatever, light whatever or extra whatever) and even had special printed forms to do it. When I was a little kid eating at McDonald’s in the late 60’s they did too. This is nothing new.