Selfish Mom

Weight Loss Tuesday. No, really.

Aug 19, 2009 Weight Loss

Just like I call my videos “Amy in the Morning” no matter when I end up getting to them, I’m going to call this one “Weight Loss Tuesday.”  I forgot what day it was yesterday, and totally forgot to post about weight loss.  So, while I’m not convinced that fast food keeps me from losing weight, a fast food post did help keep me from posting about weight loss.

I wasn’t online much yesterday, but when I was I was spending a lot of that time reading the bat-shit crazy interesting and informative comments over on Consumerist.com and on my own Burger King post.  The comments on yesterday’s video tended to be more thoughtful, and had me thinking a lot about fast food in general.

I’ll say right away that I don’t think that fast food is evil, any more than I think pot or porn are evil.  It’s all about how often you partake.  Admittedly, I ate more fast food last week for breakfast than I had in the six previous months combined, but that was a very unusual week.  So let’s just keep two things in mind: 1) Most weeks I have McDonald’s or Burger King once a week or less, and 2) When I eat from a fast food restaurant, it’s usually a breakfast sandwich or an order of fries.  One item.  An egg and cheese croissan’wich is 310 calories.  I have more than that for breakfast at home sometimes, with one big difference: the fatty, greasy fast food keeps me full way longer than food that won’t kill me as fast.  So I usually end up waiting a lot longer to eat again.

Anyway…I don’t want to talk about the obese kids eating fast food every day, or the overweight guys who used to stop in to Bob Evans each and every morning and have me serve them a gigantic plate of eggs, potatoes, meat, pancakes, and toast – not fast food, but no healthier either.  No, I want to talk about moderation.  Something I suck at.  If I could eat anything I wanted and be healthy, I would probably move next door to a McDonald’s.  But since that’s not the case, I limit it.  But I don’t totally deny myself.

I don’t think that banning fast food – either from my life, or from the world, as my perfect-for-San-Fancisco-in-every-way sister suggests – is the answer.  But I do think that taxing the shit out of it might be a step in the right direction.  The same way cigarettes and gasoline are taxed, I would totally support a fast food tax.  I haven’t even thought about the details – what would qualify, if it would be restaurant-wide or on certain foods only – but fast food is too cheap.  Just the other day on TV a woman with an obese teen-aged daughter was telling Oprah that they couldn’t always afford to make good food choices.  Perhaps making the unhealthy stuff more expensive would help make those choices easier.

The thing is, the often-repeated excuse that eating well is too expensive is bull shit.  It’s not that healthier food is more expensive than unhealthy food, it’s that quick unhealthy food is way cheaper than healthy prepared food.  And chances are good that if you’re short on money and have a family, you’re also short on time.  If you’re working two jobs and trying to feed your family, of course it’s easier to grab something quick.  Not a week goes by that I don’t look at the dishes in the sink and my to-do list and say “Hey guys, wanna go through the drive-thru?” or “Hey guys, let’s order a pizza!”  When I want to grab a quick snack, I can get a snack pack with veggies and cheeses and healthy dips from Fresh Direct for $2.99, or a bag of salt and vinegar chips at the bodega for fifty cents!

But if you look, good food can be had cheaper than fast food.  There are scads of websites devoted to cheap and healthy family meals.  Many Community Supported Agriculture groups (CSAs) accept food stamps.  Farmer’s Markets are popping up in all sorts of neighborhoods these days.  But, yes, you still have to find the time to cook the food.  And when the fast food place on the way home will have it ready for you in two minutes for cheap, it’s just too tempting for some families.

But I digress.  My intention was to write about how banning or denying something never works.  If fast food were ever banned you would find me in a dark alley, lined up for black market street fries.  But as long as I get fries every week or a breakfast sandwich now and then, I’m happy enough.  I haven’t given up a single thing that I like in order to lose weight.  I just messed with the frequency and the portions.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom.  All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted.  Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Burger King, fast food, McDonald's, Oprah

Hold on a minute…

Aug 19, 2009 Amy in the Morning

Desk before:

Desk after:

Originally posted on Selfish Mom.  All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted.  Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Burger King, Consumerist

Hey Burger King, you’re getting timed for a reason!

Aug 14, 2009 How To Piss Me Off

Last night on the way home from camp the kids and I went through the Burger King Drive-Through.  When we were next in line for the window I noticed that the guy in front of me had his reverse lights on, so I stayed back about 10 feet – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people back up for something, forget they’re in reverse, then hit the gas.  When it was my turn at the window, the BK cashier asked me to pull forward and then back up.  I was so surprised and busy processing what she was saying and trying not to back up into the window with my mirror and asking for salt and checking the orders that I didn’t get a chance to ask her why.  But I guessed that she had asked the guy in front of me to do the same thing.  As I was leaving I looked in the review mirror I saw that the guy behind me was doing the same thing as well.  WTF?

It bothered me all night that I couldn’t figure out what the purpose was.  I went back in my mind to my McDonald’s and Arby’s days, but at both places I made the food, I didn’t work the Drive-Through.  Then, finally, it hit me: I’ve seen big timers in some restaurants, timing how long each Drive-Through order was taking.  There must be a sensor somewhere that stops the clock and starts timing the next order!  Was she asking each car to stop the clock on their order so that the restaurant’s stats would look good?

I went back this morning, in the interest of investigation – not because I was dying for a Croissan’wich.  Once again, when I got to the window, I was asked to pull forward and back up.  I said “Why?  Are you trying to stop the timer?”  She said yes.  I said something to the effect of “But that’s cheating.  How will the process get any faster if they think you’re already really fast?”  I know enough about fast food restaurants to know that they really study this stuff.  There are systems that figure out when you should drop fries based on how many cars are in the Drive-Through lines.  There are McDonald’s that have outsourced their Drive-Through order-taking jobs to call centers.  Corporate sure as hell wants to know for how long people are sitting in the Drive-Through.

The BK worker admitted that yes, it was cheating, but that the restaurant is given time goals each week and they’re not meeting them.  So I said something like, “But how will the times get faster if you don’t acknowledge that there’s a problem?”  She told me I didn’t have to pull forward if I didn’t want to.  I’m not really sure it was necessary for her to tell me that.  Was the alternative for her to hold my food hostage until I pulled forward?

When I go through a Drive-Through, I want the process to be fast.  And more often than not here in Brooklyn, the process is anything but.  So as a customer, it is absolutely not in my best interest to help Burger King trick corporate into thinking that they’re already speedy.  I’m insulted that they’d ask.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom.  All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted.  Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Burger King

No shoes, no service for 6-month-old at BK

Aug 6, 2009 News

I have way too much to do today to be posting about this.  To tell you the truth I have too much to do to even be reading the news online.  But I needed to take a break from catching up on emails and work.  Not so much of a break that I stepped away from the computer though.

According to Momlogic, a mom and her baby were told to leave a St. Louis Burger King recently by a manager because the baby wasn’t wearing shoes.  Baby.  Six months old.  No shoes.  I’m guessing (hoping?) the baby wasn’t even eating anything (although trust me, I’ve seen it happen – I waited until a respectable year or so to feed my kids fast food fries, so anything less is irresponsible).  But the manager insisted they leave.

I’ve worked in two fast food restaurants, a McDonald’s and an Arby’s.  The managers were a mixed bag.  The GM at Arby’s spent most of the time in the bathroom.  We couldn’t tell if he had an intestinal problem or a coke problem, but either way he was MIA most of the time.  It was a really small restaurant so he was pretty much it as far as bosses went.  Working there was fun.  There were practically no customers and I spent a lot of time eating curly fries right out of the bin.  That particular Arby’s doesn’t exist anymore, to nobody’s surprise.

McDonald’s was a lot bigger, and a lot less fun to work at.  They took that “Time to lean, time to clean” saying seriously.  They even had us in once, sans pay, for a cleaning party.  I was 18 or 19 and didn’t know any better.  I felt like I was pitching in.  Yes, pitching in to help the international multi-billion dollar corporation for free for eight hours.  No, I don’t know what I was thinking either.  I was supposed to work there for an entire summer, but only lasted six or seven weeks.  The last straw was when I almost passed out working the grill because it was against corporate policy to let us have drinks in the kitchen.  God, I hope things have changed.

The managers there ranged from the young blond go-getter assistant manager who I’m sure is running McDonald’s University right now, to middle-aged guys who weren’t smart enough after 20 years to have moved past assistant manager, to “Dry Biscuit.”  He was the regional manager, in charge of half a dozen restaurants.  Old people would come in occasionally and ask for a dry biscuit, one that hadn’t been slathered with butter-like topping right out of the oven.  We would have to cook an entire pan of new biscuits in order to serve one dry biscuit.  It was a huge pain in the ass.  Hence, the nickname.

The store’s manager was a really nice guy, who seemed very smart.  But he was too worried about his job to make waves with corporate over silly things like keeping the employees hydrated in the 100-degree kitchen.  He knew it was a stupid rule, but he had a family to feed.   If he had been a little less smart, he could have been the type of rule-following manager to kick out a baby for a health-code violation.  That’s all it takes for dumb shit to happen: combine a person with power (and yes, in the world of fast food, the manager has power) with someone who isn’t smart enough to make judgment calls, combined with someone who’s scared of getting fired, and you’ve got a baby kicked out of a Burger King.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom.  All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted.  Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: baby, Burger King, shoes

This week’s time sucker

Sep 10, 2008 Time Sucker

I’m embarrassed by my choice for this week’s time sucker.  Really.  It is with great pain that I admit to you how much time I’ve spent on this site.  Not all at once, but it’s one of those things I keep going back to, a minute here, a minute there…many many minutes total.

Friends, meet Subservient Chicken.  I’d ask you to shake the chicken’s hand, but when I asked him to “shake hands” he shook something else.

This is by no means a new site, and I’m really not sure how I haven’t come across it until now.  It was created by Burger King to advertise one of their chicken sandwiches.  You can get the chicken to do almost anything you want.  Chicken the way you want it. Get it?

I’ve just kept it running for the past week because I keep thinking of new things to ask it to do.  Sometimes it wags its finger at me (asking him to “flip the bird” will get that for sure).  Sometimes it looks like it’s attacking the screen. He does a pretty good worm, and for a guy in a chicken suit with no partner he does a mean tango.

I don’t know why he’s wearing garters.  But he’ll snap them for you.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom

Tags: Burger King, subservient chicken