Not Lovin’ It
An elderly couple, octogenarians, are sitting, as they have for several years sat, at their local McDonald’s, having a mid-afternoon snack, talking, planning, remembering, enjoying, he says, a “sweet time of fellowship,” a communion of husband and wife that has underwritten their more than six-decade-long marriage. An employee begins cleaning in the area around their booth. The restaurant is mostly vacant—a few customers occupying a couple of distant tables, a few off to the side using the free WiFi. Nonetheless, the employee begins sweeping under and around the elderly couple’s table.
The couple undoubtedly find the bustle intrusive. Dust kicked up by the sweeping is settling on their food. Other, customerless, areas could easily be cleaned first. The wife complains, archly, perhaps, but not humorlessly. The employee tells the manager. The manager tells the couple that they have overstayed their welcome, that they have exceeded the half-hour eating-time limit and have to leave. There is no sign on any wall that announces a 30 minute eating-time limit. The WiFiers were in place and plying the Internet when the elderly couple entered the restaurant. So were the customers scattered at the other tables. Yet, the elderly couple must leave. The franchise has disenfranchised them.
They are determined, at first, to dismiss the incident, to laugh it off as one of those sometimes strange, sometimes embarrassing things that just happen, one of those periodically encountered rasps of living. But the husband, concerned that future customers not be so belittled, writes a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. The letter is not indignant, is not rancorous, does not chafe or accuse, expresses no outrage. No, it simply explains what transpired, and articulates the intimate significance he and his wife attach to their mid-afternoon being together.
The letter goes viral. The manager apologizes, the franchise owner reinstitutes an employee training program, and McDonald’s corporate, by way of apologizing to the beleaguered couple, sends them two coupons for a free small coffee. The couple sends the coupons back. They continue to enjoy their mid-afternoon snack, but at another McDonald’s.
* * *
So, beyond the heart-leap and hurrah of an elderly pair of Davids one-upping a fast-food Goliath, what does their story point to? For what deeper issues does it stand as an emblem? For one, this: the McDonald’s manager is a bully. Perhaps he was having a bad day. Perhaps he was simply following his training, cleaving to a cleaning schedule that, like the food preparation process itself, like the flow and placement of bun and burger and sauce and condiment, is thoroughly rationalized, certain areas spic-and spanned at certain times, no exception, the whole thing regimented, all graphed and charted, all factor-scored and tabulated. Perhaps he was struggling to find in what he does some intrinsic value, something true. Perhaps he was feeling a sting of bitterness, remembering that, at one time, his aspirations soared higher than managing a fast-food restaurant, farther than being a small man in a small job doing small things by rote and rule, none of which catalyze his intellect, none of which quicken his imagination, all of which palsy his self-respect.
And to poultice that self-respect, to leave his littleness behind, he turns to cruelty. He intimidates. He becomes a bully. He devises an ad hoc rule, perhaps the only creative act the rule-governed can conjure, to move the couple out, get them out of the way to ease his day and keep the cleaning on schedule. The couple is old, after all, and he is young and can use his youth and whatever managerial authority he has to impose his rule and coerce their departure. Cruelty, as George Eliot says, requires only opportunity, and he seizes it.
And then there is the stupefyingly flat-souled and diligently dismissive gesture of apology by McDonald’s corporate. We’re sorry, and, to show our thoroughgoing distaste for the indignity you suffered, to show how sincerely we value every one of our patrons, here are coupons for two small coffees. How is this anything more than a glancing drive-by of a mea culpa? How is this not just a departure from concern, but a severing of all ties with it? What novocained sensibility could possibly think that coupons for two small coffees would be within five time zones of appropriate? How is this anything more than an apology erased by its staggering triviality? How does this indifference do anything more than invalidate the elderly couple, humiliate them, discard and disregard them, treat them as unsecond-thoughted?
Perhaps nothing more can be expected from a corporate culture. Its perspective is narrow despite the massiveness of the enterprises it directs. Perhaps a failure of imagination is built in when its primary value is market-share expansion and its connection to customers is remote and sluiced through datafying analytics. There is no way, no need, really, to lift the lid on customers’ lives; no way to understand the world they experience, its felt texture, its palpability, its heart-stings and heart-joys. No way to be human, despite being a legal person. No way to recognize the couple and, thus, no way to feel sympathy, gratitude, indebtedness. No way, no way at all, to know what it was like to be that elderly couple, hoping only to savor another afternoon together.
No way at all to understand how the cynicism of a thoughtlessly reflexive “give them coupons and they’ll be happy” protocol repudiates the couple. And probably no way to understand that, in sending the coupons back, the couple refused to be released from memory and, thereby, repudiated their repudiation.
