McDonald's Ghost Store, San Louis Obispo
It could have been exactly as I remembered it. How would that have made me feel? Would I have felt like the years didn’t matter, that some things never change? I fully expected to find the McDonald’s on Foothill Boulevard operating and serving happy meals exactly like it did back in 1989. McDonald’s stores are community institutions. They are profit machines. Their golden arches are fast-food tattoos on any community, representing day, night and late evening efficient, affordable, and entry level food.
There is something else a McDonald’s represents, entry level employment. Something I needed back in 1989 when I moved to San Louis Obispo for my first attempt to go to college away from home.
It was a failed attempt, but it represented the first time I struck out on my own. I found myself facing the most obvious challenge of life, needing money, needing a job, and needing it in a place where I knew no one and felt scared.
At eighteen years old I did not have many of the faculties and resources that one really needs to be independent, and I certainly didn’t have the self-confidence enough to try and find a job that might have brought more dignity, more income, and a better connection to the community. If I had, my life might have gone very differently. But I needed a job, and I needed it quickly as I faced the economic reality of needing to pay rent, food, and transportation and so on. And within a few blocks distance of the tiny studio apartment I shared with my high-school friend I applied for a job in the fast-food industry. I can’t even remember other places I might have tried. I was so nervous even going in for an interview at Mac and Don’s, a name I used as a teenager to cleverly put McDonald’s in its place. Now the situation was different. I was the one being handed an ill-fitting uniform taken from a cardboard box full of uniforms deep in the bowels of the basement level of the store. Straight cotton pants that were too long, a burgundy crew shirt that had a plastic polyester feel, and a crew hat, baseball style with the word McDonald’s on the front. One uniform, to be kept clean between shifts.
My first day on the job I was in the back learning how to make burgers the industrial McDonald’s way. Grill. My mates in the back grill area were all Hispanic, all hard-working and efficient at their jobs, and all of them juggling this job and at least one or two others to pay for their families here and in Mexico.
They were all nice to me. The work was sweaty, fast, mindless, and non-stop. After six hours of working over a grill, the store closed and there were two hours of cleaning and scrubbing the kitchen area and store. But now there was music. A boom-box came out and mix tapes were played.
It was a soul-killing job. My mind would try to think while I was laying down frozen patties and hitting the computer timer that marked out every beat of how the meat was to be cooked. Thinking didn’t help. All of the thoughts were the same. How did I get here? How do I get out of here? Is this the sum total of my life? What am I doing here? What if this is it?
I remember there being a few weeks when the store had a sale on “Big Macs”. Each Big Mac required two patties of what they called ten to-one-meat; ten patties to a pound. Big Macs were suddenly cheap and people were ordering them in multiples. The grill was full of the searing sound of small patties being factory cooked to meet the high demand. But I was the factory worker, turning the meat, searing it, and then carefully moving the meat, two patties at a time on a spatula, to the prepared buns. It was high-speed, smoke and steam, robotic, and eternal. I began to hallucinate that the Big Mac sale would never end. The Big Macs would never end. I would stare at the meat cooking, going from a frozen pink to a bubbling char and try to imaging making my last Big Mac. Surely there would be a day, someday in the future, a future I could barely imagine or even believe in where I would make my last Big Mac. Would that day ever come? Even as I thought about the concept of making my last Big Mac I lost all faith that it would ever happen. I would be making Big Macs for the rest of my life. Beep, beep, beep, turn the meat. Beep, beep, beep salt and pepper the meat. Beep Beep Beep, on the turn of the meat lay down two more rows of ten-to-one. I reach into a frozen cardboard box and grab a row of ten patties frozen together. My fingers can grab ten by feel without counting. “Crack!” goes the frozen meat as I clang them on the grill to separate them, then I cut the stack in half then using both hands deal them to the grill in two even rows of five, and then hit the timer on the hood of the grill and watch the tiny red display start the countdown to the first step. A few seconds later the tiny display would beep and I would use a heavy round metal tool to sear the meet. The meat would hiss and pop and I pressed half frozen meat into the metal grill. Now it is time to remove the first fully cooked patties, scrape the grill and continue the cycle. Over and over. Hoping not to drop the meat or a tray of buns. Multiplies of ten. The production caller would keep ordering more and more Big Macs with regular hamburgers and cheeseburgers thrown in just to break things up a bit.
Each night my uniform was a mess, and I would wash the worst spots off in my bathroom sink when I got home and hope it would be dry before the next day. I hemmed the bottom of my pants with a hand-stitch. After a few weeks I had earned a second uniform, once they were reassured that I was coming in each day to work my shift.
Breaks were also timed to the second with ominous and vague penalties for being even a second late.
And the whole time I was thinking the same repetitive thoughts. When does this end? How does this end? How can this end? This was a hole I had put myself in, and I truly did not see any path for making the situation better. I was far too exhausted and lacking any self-esteem to try and find a better job, and being in a completely new place I didn’t even know where to start. I also had an overwhelming feeling of futility. Trying to imagine a job interview immediately made me jump to the conclusion that there would be no point because no one would hire me.
It was a college town with tons of intelligent and diligent kids occupying every nook of the service industry ladder that was at or slightly above minimum wage ($4.25 an hour). And here I was learning to work a McDonald’s grill area with work orders coming at me in Spanish. “Necesito diez hamburguesas con queso en el tirón de la regulares”
There was a dignity in working hard and earning a paycheck. But it was a dignity that also came with a lot of humiliation, a humiliation that did not end when I finally was able to quit my career track at McDonald’s.
Years later I was earning a living as a resident performer at a theater and some very wealthy and influential VIPs came to visit the theater. They saw the show I was in and there was a reception afterwards. One of my fellow performers was ambitious, competitive and eager to make a career impression on the VIPs. I had played one of the main characters in the show and I suppose my colleague feared that my performance might get recognition so they pointedly, loudly, and with no cue bolted out with, “So Ron, weren’t you working at a McDonald’s before you came here?” Then they sipped their wine glass not bothering to hear an answer.
I was mortified. The humiliation, as it was intended, worked. I have no actual evidence that the VIPs cared or overheard the loud comment, but it did what it was meant to do, shame me, and put me in my place so that I wouldn’t dare approach the VIPs and talk about the show or hear any feedback about my performance. This cleared the way for my “colleague” to successfully schmooze and erase any notion that the quality of the show was a team success. It worked.
My grandmother, who lived through the stress and pain of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, always said that there was no shame in making an honest living. As much as I admire her and loved her, she was wrong. There is shame.
I’m not ashamed of how hard I worked at McDonald’s. I’m not ashamed of the people I met and worked with. I’m ashamed that I was only there because I didn’t have the faith in myself to try and do better.
Where’s the Drive-thru?
The oddity about this particular McDonald’s store was that it did not have a “Drive-thru”. A city ordinance prohibited drive-thrus which is where more than half of a fast-food restaurants business is conducted. This single fact finally doomed the store and in 2009 failing to change the ordinance the McDonald’s store owners made their last Big Mac and closed the store.
Oddly the building has sat, empty, a ghostly monument to 20th century drive-thruless fast food for over ten years, until I finally saw it last night.
Not the vibrant and never-ending distributor of Big Macs, but a small, uninteresting rectangular box, sealed up, and forgotten.
There were times when I worked there that I would be taking the trash out to the back where there was a small square cinder-block structure built to lock the food trash into the metal bin. McDonald’s throws a lot of food away and it can’t be donated or given to the homeless for reasons legal and logic-defying.
On the walk back from the trash bin I would take a moment, feeling the outside air, the warmth of the Central California, and I would look up at the hill and maybe see some stars or the moon and again, wonder and worry about my future.
I did the same thing last night. I stood in that parking lot and looked up. Thirty-two years later. I’ve outlived this store; this store that gave employment to hundreds if not thousands of low wage workers, college students, Hispanics, local teenagers and people like me. I wonder about Ananias, Hernandes, Laurie, Trav, the guy that taught me to mop in figure-eights, Pat the manager and so on.
Then I thought about all of the things I have done, and places I have lived and worked in the years that followed my moments dependently working at this McDonald’s. I could never have believed or dreamed that I would do all of the things I’ve done since.
I would never have believed that I would one day live and work in New York, or spend three years of my life in Iceland, or witnessing an event like 9-11, doing aid-work in East Africa and South East Asia, or simply make a living doing art and performing in theater, TV and Film. I’m glad I know how to mop. I’m glad I know how to wash a spot out in a bathroom sink. I’m glad I know I can work hard with a team of people, even doing monotonous work. I’m glad I can live up to my Grandma’s expectation and take pride in honest work.
And despite the shame that others need me to feel for needing to make a living, I’m grateful that I had those experiences, and I still worry about my future and look up to wonder. Part of me will always be a teenager making Big Macs in some memory of a place that is now itself only a memory.
But I pray I will never have to make a Big Mac again.
