Working as a cashier and cook at A&W at the Mall of America changed the way I view fast food restaurants, the workers, and increase my support for the fight for 15 movement. While being a cashier I learned 2 things. 1) I learned to always respect fast food workers and be understanding of them 2) Don't mess with people's root beer. In my opinion root beer is the nastiest, grossest, diabetic causing drink ever, but for others, the dark brown beverage coursing through their veins caused their dopamine levels to skyrocket. At my job, we had to make root beer in the actual store. This consisted of about 8 gallons of water, 1 liter of root beer corn syrup, and 4 big bags of sugar like the ones your mom probably has in one of her cupboards. Despite the amount of sugar that was put into the root beer, sometimes customers had the audacity to take a sip, smack their lips, and say "it could use a little sugar," to which inside my head I wanted to pull the customer over the counter, drag them to the back, and show them how it was made so they could stop drinking it and stop them from giving it to their kids. These were the regular customers who might've added a small critique to the root beer. It's like, you really know some food is prevalent as heck when literally everyone offers their opinion on it like a professional connoisseur. This is similar to my culture. If the salsa isn't spicy enough, you won't hear the end of it even by the people who are guests in your home and that you've never met before.
The other part that I learned about American food culture is..... Do NOT mess with the BACON.....
Among all the heavily processed meats that are out in the market in the US, other than beef, bacon will always be on top. I have learned that that stuff is put on everything or with everything. There are bacon cheeseburgers, coney cheese dogs with bacon bits, eggs with bacon, bacon wrapped shrimp, and the list goes on and on. Real talk though, I can't speak too much on this issue because as a Mexican, our culture's form of the bacon is what is known as the Tortilla. Yes, that is eaten with everything and anything as well. Back to the story. The double cheeseburgers we served only had 2 pieces of bacon. It cost $1 to add extra bacon and I could not stress how many times I had to add extra bacon to the burger to the point the top bun would just topple over. This raises another issue.... Customers would ask for a bowl, forks, and knives because they knew the extra ingredients they added to their food wouldn't fit inside the buns, defeating the whole purpose of what a burger meant. I was astonished by the exaggerated amounts of food that was wasted too -- and the food was not cheap. For anyone who has gone to A&W, you know a meal of burger, fries, and a drink costs about $10-11. The crazy thing was that McDonald's was just a couple feet away from us and we still had a line of people paying an average of $20-30 per transaction. It made me wonder if root beer and bacon was really worth about 2-3 hours of minimum wage work.
The reality is that despite food being insanely overpriced you feel as if you're not part of the culture for not buying the food. This raises issues in consumerism but also in a sense of identity that I noticed as well. You weren't American enough unless you lined up in front of the restaurant that basically screamed A&W All AMERICAN Food in your face. Talking from experience, when asked about where I worked by people in my community I was often faced with a raised eyebrow after my answer. Yes Latinos have heard of Burger King, Arby's, Wendy's, etc, but when you said A&W they responded with "Que es eso?" (What's that?). I will not exaggerate, but if you were to ask 100 Latinos about A&W, about 8 would probably know what you're talking about.
Food is definitely a big part of our culture, however, our capitalist society encourages food that everyone eats and can be very unhealthy for many individuals of that particular group while also overly exaggerating the price.
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