Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,67

growing labor problem. For employers, filling open positions and eliminating high turnover rates made them more efficient. (Not to mention that older workers are often thought to be more reliable and productive than younger ones.)

For a population with a lengthening life span and fewer careers with fixed pensions, part-time jobs offer different incentives from those of previous generations. Through low-wage gigs older workers in the United States can theoretically earn some income and still receive their Social Security benefits. In an only-expanding catastrophe of more and more Americans squeezed by debt and decades of stagnant wage growth, employment increasingly offers a small measure of protection against falling into poverty. Perhaps most affectingly though, in a time of increasing social isolation, jobs enable retirement-age citizens to plug themselves into their communities and interact. “It’s really interesting,” Dappen said of her work. “You see people that will say devotions before they eat, and then you’ll meet friends that you haven’t seen in a long time, and every once in a while some of your relatives that you haven’t seen in a long time will come through.”

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The trend away from teen employment that started in the 1980s has accelerated in the twenty-first century. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of American teens (ages sixteen to nineteen) with a job dropped from 45 percent to just 30. The vanishing of teens from behind fast-food counters, even just for summer gigs, has had a more pronounced effect on the industry in part because fast food has steadily outgrown the population of younger Americans since the 1990s. In addition to older Americans, this gap has been filled in part by foreign-born workers and immigrants, a new wave of Aslam Khans from all over the world, who have stepped into the breach. Increasingly though, as economic conditions in the United States have worsened and social mobility has been stunted by flat wages and a decline in full-time work, fast food has become a career for American adults. The median age of a fast-food worker, according to the National Employment Law Project and others, has risen in recent years to somewhere near twenty-nine years old.* With this change, the image of fast-food work itself (in many quarters) has devolved from that of an honest job for workforce aspirants to the “McJob” pejorative now formally recognized by some dictionaries—a dead-end career purgatory for laggards or the unlucky.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Still cataloged on the “They’re Just Like Us” corner of the internet are lists of anointed luminaries for whom the fast-food industry represented a small character-building way station toward careers of unfathomable success. Jennifer Hudson and Queen Latifah logged time at Burger Kings in Chicago and Newark, respectively, while Gwen Stefani and Martina McBride pulled shifts and soft serve at Dairy Queen. Eva Longoria threw her own quinceañera with money made from working the counter at Wendy’s in Corpus Christi. Brad Pitt’s first starring role in Hollywood was as a dancing chicken outside an El Pollo Loco. Throw Madonna (Dunkin’ Donuts), Barack Obama (Baskin-Robbins), and Rahm Emanuel (Arby’s)* into the mix and you’re on your way to a pretty impressive minyan.

Given its huge size and reach, McDonald’s has a particularly dizzying roster of distinguished graduates. In 1996, McDonald’s estimated that one of out every eight American workers had worked for the company. Recipients of a theoretical Golden Arches alumni newsletter would include Jay Leno, Rachel McAdams, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Shania Twain, Seal, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Sharon Stone, Macy Gray, Tony Stewart, Pink, and James Franco. Amazon overlord and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos once gloated that he can still crack eggs with one hand from working the Saturday-morning shift at McDonald’s. “Time is very important … you couldn’t let the fries get cold,” said former grillman and top Olympian Carl Lewis, stressing the crucial precision required for the world’s best fries. “If I was ten seconds off, I’d have no gold medal.”†

“I remember thinking that McDonald’s was unique as a great equalizer,” said Andy Card, the former McDonald’s worker and White House chief of staff under George W. Bush. “Wealthy and poor, black and white, all came to McDonald’s and stood in the same lines and sat at the same booths.” Even Joe Kernan, the former Democratic governor of Indiana and a onetime Mickey D’s employee, might have nodded at this line. As a vice-presidential hopeful on the campaign trail in 2012, Paul Ryan punctuated his Randian case for fewer social programs by calling back