Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,32
of statistics. Anything less nicks at the veneer of what America means and what promise its frontier-settling secular religion of optimistic self-reliance truly holds. Part of what makes Aslam Khan so enthralling is that he is a little different from others in his position, less inflamed and aggrieved by criticisms of fast-food work, less bothered by the rumors of cheetahs in the jungle. His triumphant odyssey from provincial Pashtun to transcontinental striver to American Dream incarnate has made his faith to be optimism.
And so, if one were bold enough to suggest that the American Dream Khan achieved—dishwasher to millionaire in thirteen years—would be improbable, if not impossible, today, he or she would be treated to the copestone of Khan’s bootstraps sermon. “Absolutely not,” he started with a wave of the hand. “Most people are denying their ability. Here’s what’s happening: The capabilities are built, they cannot be bought. If the work ethics are not there, the desires are not there, you can’t be anything. I’ve built my capabilities to be CEO today of five hundred restaurants. Thirty years ago, I didn’t know how to run one. I used to think manager was a big cheese. Then I thought, ‘Oh, man, can you imagine I’ve become district manager?’ There’s a capability built in. You have to be real, you have to know absolutely yourself. What your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, you have to do that discovery.… Don’t let others tell you, unless you are very ignorant about yourself.
“It can be done, and I’m going to write a book one day called Yes, It Can Be Done. I honestly believe there’s a great possibility that Americans are becoming complacent. They’re looking outward. Why don’t you look inward at a country that provided everybody like me and everybody else? There is no country on earth, I promise you—I’m a very well-read man—like the United States. You can be anything you want to be. I don’t care about China becoming a superpower, I don’t care about Russia or how big they can get, there is no system such as the United States. Everything is here. We’re taking it for granted.”
Four months later, after decades of stagnant wage growth, the middle class slipped out of the economic majority in the United States for the first time in forty years. And in 2017, Khan would be named the CEO of TGI Fridays.
9 DRIVE-THRU AMERICA
The American street is a piece of highway … a straight line that gives itself away immediately. It contains no mystery.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The cup of coffee that upended the entire cultural equilibrium of the 1990s was purchased by a woman named Stella Liebeck on a Thursday morning in February of 1992. Its meager price of forty-nine cents and eight-ounce serving size were less important than its temperature, a scorching hot 180 degrees. This meant that when the paper cup tumped over into the seventy-nine-year-old widow’s lap, she ended up in an Albuquerque hospital for over a week. The lawsuit that would eventually follow in 1994, Liebeck v. McDonald’s, would result in an epoch-making award, including $2.7 million in punitive damages.
Not surprisingly, news of the seven-figure conclusion to the trial quickly became an item in national and international papers. With each retelling, the facts of the ordeal grew more distorted. Rather than sitting in the passenger seat of her grandson’s car, which had been parked in the McDonald’s lot at the time of the spill, it was reported that Liebeck had been carelessly driving on the open road while trying to drink scalding coffee. Contrary to some claims, she had also truly suffered—burns covered 16 percent of her body, including 6 percent of the third degree—and her injuries required multiple skin grafts. Though she had only sought to get her medical expenses covered, Stella Liebeck was caricatured as greedy, craven, reckless, and even unpatriotic. When those efforts had failed, a jury had unanimously come up with the colossal award for punitive damages, the rough equivalent of two days of coffee sales for McDonald’s.*
Liebeck fast became cannon fodder for hits by late-night television hosts, an easy punch line in monologues and on Top 10 lists. “Now she claims she broke her nose on the sneeze guard at the Sizzler bending over looking at the chickpeas,” Jay Leno yukked on the Tonight show. Her ordeal would be alluded to in episodes of Seinfeld and Futurama; Weird Al Yankovic and Toby Keith would refer to it in songs.
The verdict in what came to be known as