Welcome to Dairy Queen

I worked at Dairy Queen all through high school. This experience was good for me in many ways. It gave me more responsibility of having a job, made me earning money, meet people, be more understanding of fast food workers etc. However, this job made me see a whole different side of fast food that also kind of ruined at least DQ ice cream for me. Growing up, going out for ice cream or even out to eat in general was a treat. We didn’t do it very often and when we did it was kind of a big deal because it was something we usually did as a family or with our cousins.

The longer I worked at Dairy Queen, I started to notice things that were just really surprising about the customers that ate there, the ideas of the owner and managers, and (of course) the food and ice cream we served. First of all, there were customers that came in and ate their every single day or close to it. For some it was lunch- the $5 meal deal with a hot dog and ice cream. Some customers were frequent but when they would come in they would order so much ice cream I almost wouldn’t want to give it to them. There was one gentleman that would come in multiple times a week, order two large blizzards, and sit in his car right out front, and eat them both every time. Some people would come in with kids or grand kids and let them buy an extra-large cone that they clearly wouldn’t finish or if they did would have made them sick. These types of purchases weren’t made by all customers but I never stopped being surprised at the amount of people that clearly at DQ so often or so much at a time that it probably could have made them sick.

Now I would say that I support people having the right to choose what they want to eat but that this also becomes difficult depending on the extent to which they have been educated on making healthy decisions, have access to healthy foods/ways of exercising/money/transportation/etc. As someone who enjoys eating unhealthy foods but also feel like I know how to make healthy decisions for my life, I would get annoyed if someone ever said or implied anything close to I should think about what I’m eating. This, however, is what everyone thinks and even if someone acknowledges eating ice cream once or often isn’t the best people still choose to do it. This usually came in the form of a customer jokingly saying, “I know I really can’t stay away from this place.” The managers, owner, and employees who had worked their longer than me never seemed surprised by how much certain customers would buy or how often they would come in.

Regardless of body image or medical issues of customers that employees wouldn’t even know about, I sort of felt bad serving ice cream and subpar greasy food to people who had the ability to buy however much they wanted. I think that this experience makes me feel like the responsibility of healthy eating should be on people serving the food or people and companies who influence the availability of food in different communities.

I learned many things from this job. Sometimes a crappy job can be fun. Sometimes you have to appreciate the job you have. Sometimes you have to think about the impact that your work has on others. DQ ice cream has kind of been ruined for me and I definitely feel differently about how fast food companies market food to different populations of people.