The fast (food) and the furious

By By Robert St. John / food columnist
Dec. 10, 2003
It ain't easy being a restaurateur. The restaurant business has the highest mortality rate of any business. It's a tough life. Restaurants open and close at a staggering rate, the hours are long, the labor pool is constantly changing, government regulations are ever mounting, the stress level is high and, unlike most other businesses, there are more ways to lose money than there are ways to make money while operating a restaurant.
There are also constant customer challenges. However, no customer challenge is as tough as when a customer tries to run you over with their car.
Last week a Houston woman received 10 years in jail for trying to run over and kill a manager at McDonald's restaurant. All because she was having a hard time getting mayonnaise added to her cheeseburger.
The Houston Chronicle reported that the incident began when an employee working at the drive-through window told a woman that mayonnaise was "not an option" on McDonald's cheeseburgers. When the customer became belligerent, she was asked to pull her car around to the window so she could speak to the manager.
Seems like standard operating procedure, right? The manager offered the customer a "special-order cheeseburger with mayonnaise" (special orders don't upset us).
Witnesses later testified that the fuming customer, after receiving her cheeseburger WITH mayonnaise, then complained that her french fries had grown cold. After receiving more fries, the woman demanded a new drink (her cold soft drink had also turned cold).
And you thought you had customer challenges in your business.
Next, this irate customer with major mayonnaise "issues" began lobbing a slew of obscenities along with her mayonnaise-laden cheeseburger into the drive-through window. You've heard of road rage; welcome to the world of condiment rage.
While reading this story, I knew that, by this point, the customer's judgment had flown out of the window along with her cheeseburger. Why get into a food fight when all you have for ammo is one cheeseburger, an order of cold fries and a rapidly warming soft drink. The manager, on the other hand, was armed with an endless supply of Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets, Quarter Pounders and Filet-O- Fish sandwiches, not to mention a battalion of support troops and reinforcements.
I believe that there are certain once-in-a-lifetime situations that call for extraordinary circumstances. Just once, in a predicament like this one, I would like to see the manager go beyond the common sense, textbook, franchise-manual response and give the customer a little taste of her own medicine. Gather up the troops, load your arms with whatever food you can remove from under the heat lamps and fire away!
Sorry, just daydreaming for a moment, back to the story.
Unable to appease the belligerent customer, the panicked manager wiped the cheeseburger off of her face and called the police (a practice usually reserved for bar owners). The police department asked her to get the customer's license plate number. Where's Mayor McCheese when you need him?
Later in the courtroom, the customer testified that she inched her car forward to put ketchup on her burger a new burger, not the one she threw at the manager. The new burger, by the way, also had mayonnaise on it. While inching her car onward, the customer said she heard a car horn and "gunned" her car forward hitting the manager, dragging her across the parking lot, and breaking her pelvis while single-handedly adding another category to the restaurant mortality-rate statistics.
After running over the manager, witnesses said, the maniacal mayo matron sped from the parking lot and drove into oncoming traffic on a one-way road. This might be the first-ever recorded case of a McHit-and-run.
The mayonnaise lady said that she thought she had rolled over "a bump" when she ran over the manager. Once again, proving my point that it ain't easy being a restaurateur. As we shake out in the hierarchy of the nation's business landscape, my fellow restaurateurs and I have been reduced to being mere speed bumps on the highway of life.
So if you are ever driving down the street and spot an angry mob of hair-netted fast-food employees circling a car in the drive-through line, pelting the driver with burgers and milk shakes, you will know that it's the dawn of a new era, the rise of the machines, a coup d'e'fry. The tide has finally turned and our day has come.
Robert St. John is executive chef/owner of the Purple Parrot Caf and Crescent City Grill in
Hattiesburg and Meridian www.robertstjohn.com. He can be reached at robert@nsrg.com.