I feel bad for the business. From the article it appears they are losing money which makes sense. I’m not going to eat fast food somewhere I can’t get a seat at. I think if they seniors had left when the lunch rush kicked in, we wouldn’t have this issue.
I wonder how serious this boycott can be. Will this hurt the franchisee? If the business is losing money, I can see it closing in which case the horde of senior will descend on some other fast food place and hog all the tables.
Take a picture of each of their faces every 20 mins with a camera with a REALLY bright flash.
Mop under the tables they’re sitting at with really strong disinfectant - every 30 mins they are there. And don’t rinse it away.
Close the bathrooms ‘for cleaning’ 30 mins after they’ve had their coffee.
Why are a bunch of pervy old guys hanging around at the McDonalds? Two words - hot chicks. Get your coffee at the senior center from a social worker, or from a perky young teenage girl at the McDonalds?
The equipment may not work all that well anymore, but it still rules every decision of their lives.
Jack Bert is the name of the franchise owner and by the name, I’m guessing he’s not Korean-American. I wonder if the same problem would exist if he was Korean. It might, but at least the racism claim might be more suspect.
A bunch of people who spend their days there not really buying anything but are inconveniencing other people who want to buy stuff… are threatening not to come back? :dubious:
Or if they were spending more than $1.39. There’s a group of about twenty or thirty people that I work with who descend every Friday at five onto the same restaurant, move tables around to suit us, and sit there for four or five hours, being loud and driving the waitstaff nuts by asking for separate checks for every last one of us. And they love us, and reserve our tables, and give us great service, because we’re spending money. If these Korean seniors were buying more than a quarter’s worth of fries per day each, they’d be valued regulars.
Go ahead with the “their assholes, screw em” approach. You’ll end up with a standoff, bad press, and apparently a boycott. Try to understand what is going on and work with that, and you might be able to solve the problem.
sven, are you fucking kidding? You want a single McDonald’s franchise to fix some longstanding problem in the psyches of local Korean seniors? You don’t think they’ve tried politely asking them to leave?
They are asking all Korean-Americans to boycott all McDonald’s restaurants.
No. As mentioned earlier, I think this is the role of the city. The seniors are not using existing facilities, and there is a reason for that. The seniors are facing new resistance from a place they have been frequenting for half a decade. There is a reason for that. Figure out the answer to those two mysteries, and you’ll have a roadmap for solving the problem with minimal pain.
But sometimes people value being “right” over their own interests.
They may not even be paying that much. When I worked at McDonalds in high school, we had a senior coffee discount. It was something like 50 cents (not that they didn’t bitch about how expensive it was, anyway). Lord help you if you forgot and didn’t charge them their special rate. I got chewed out by one of our charming “guests” on my first day shift for this reason. Or if you prioritized the $30 drive thru order that’s getting cold over getting them their fouth free refill, filling up the bucket of creamers, or listening to them complain about their doctor. One of the reasons I started working nights, in fact – they cleared out by lunch.
Given my experience with “that group” of seniors, I’m not unsympathetic to the business. Some people are just takers, no matter their age, and if they weren’t costing the business money then the business would want them to stay. When people post about a group of teenagers loitering at a restaurant after buying 2 sodas (with 10 free refills) for a table of 8 in 4 hours while strewing straw wrappers everywhere and being loud, nobody goes “Well, what if the teen recreational facility doesn’t have a lot of natural light? Let’s sort out all the social issues before this business can kick them out.” We’d say don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, kiddo, scramola.
As opposed to having seniors take up all the available seats driving away paying clients, and going out of business anyhow? How is a McDonald’s franchise supposed to fix this whatever weird issue motivates the seniors to hang out. Is the solution to open up an Ikea so they can all hang out there?
I’m curious to see how big the boycott is really going to be. So far it sounds like a few disgruntled types who aren’t really customers anyhow. I can’t think of any business that would let you hang out all day taking up a table when you spend one or two dollars, especially if paying clients aren’t going in because they can’t find a spot to sit.
One McDonalds near me has their TV permanently set to Fox News. Considering that the majority of the clientele are not the Fox News viewing demographic, I think they do it so people don’t linger.