Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,66
King, and Wendy’s in 2015. At Smashburger, the fast-casual comparison brand, that age range only represented 35 percent of customers in 2015. To eat fast food is to be in the midst of everything and everyone.
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“It’s funny,” said Simon. “We get construction workers and billionaires. And you go from families to people that come in by themselves. People ask, ‘What’s your target market?’ And [I say], ‘Well, probably kid driven, family driven.’ If there’s any target, that would be it. But demographically, everybody seems to come here. The old people like the ice cream and the younger people like the ice cream and everybody in between likes the burgers and fries.”
15 THE LONESOME HOURS
I get an ice cream cone for a dollar. Then I will usually buy a medium french fries. I love the salt and the sweet. And that’s what you get here, too—the salt and sweet of humanity.
—SISTER ELAINE GOODELL
Although she was technically on her shift, it was slow and so Sara Dappen said she didn’t mind spending a few minutes chatting. She explained that she’d grown up on an Iowa farm, not far from the McDonald’s where we were sitting. Dappen had been born in October 1920, a month before Warren Harding won the presidency in the first national election in which women could vote. She had lived through the Depression and the droughts, heat waves, and black blizzards of the Dust Bowl years. During the war years, her husband, Bob, had served as a navigator in the Pacific on the Bethlehem Steel–built USS Leedstown and been awarded seven Bronze Stars. After thinking back, she conceded that she couldn’t quite recall where they had gone on their first date. “It wasn’t the first date, but one of them was to see Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. We saw it when it came out first.”
Seven years earlier, back when Dappen was eighty-seven, she had started working at this McDonald’s in Story City, an hour north of Des Moines. “I wipe off all the tables and sweep up the crumbs, and if there’s a spill of water or food, I’ll clean that up. I’ll greet the customers and visit with different ones and have to check the bathroom every twice in a while.” She pointed over to the counter with a slow hand. “Sometimes you have to go to the counter for some of the customers, and some of ’em can’t find the lids to their pop. It’s right up above it, but they don’t [always] see it, so I help them with that.”
Dappen now works three shifts a week, usually in the afternoons. “It’s the time of day when it’s kind of melancholy. My husband died in ’12, and now more than ever I guess I appreciate it because it’s the time of day when I’m just kind of lonesome. I come in here about three and I work until seven or eight, it fills that void.” Though she hadn’t had a meal outside of home until she was fourteen and hadn’t eaten much McDonald’s prior to working there, Dappen had since grown fond of finishing her shift with a Bacon McDouble. “I watch my diet. I don’t take the fries neither, I just take a sandwich.”
At nearly ninety-four years old in 2015, Dappen was unique because she was thought to be the oldest McDonald’s worker in the world, but she was also part of a trend that encompasses many of her cohorts. By dint of demography, sociology, and financial necessity, the American workforce matured as the twentieth century drew to a close. Between 1977 and 2007, the employment rate of workers sixty-five years and over shot up 101 percent in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Over that same span of time, total employment increased only 59 percent.) Baby boomers and their generational forebears were aging, and if they weren’t controlling the government, they were doing other jobs. By the second quarter of 2017, nearly one-fifth of retirement-age Americans were working, the highest rate since the early 1960s.
Part of this drift has to do with a disappearing segment of the workforce. In the 1980s, as more and more American teenagers started to delay their entrance into the job market to go to college or collect pogs or whatever, a number of lower-wage businesses and retailers, including fast-food companies, focused on recruiting, hiring, and training workers in their postretirement years. It was an easy, calculated, and inexpensive fix for a