David Kanter | Sucking it up

A few weeks back, Wharton sophomore Keith Williams and some friends entered the McDonald's on 40th and Walnut streets during the hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning. As you probably already know, Williams and his friends were called "stupid school kids" and deliberately given bad service, despite treating the staff respectfully.

Williams responded by making a Facebook group called "Boycott McDonald's" and filing a formal complaint. A few days later, he was informed that the offending employees were fired. "I don't regret it," he told me. "There's no reason to be rude and obnoxious."

For future reference, here's the best way to respond the next time a service professional is unnecessarily rude or otherwise treats you badly: Suck it up. Let me tell you why.

I headed down to McDonald's late last Saturday night to get a firsthand look. The place teems with students obscenely shouting at each other and into cell phones, spilling food all over the floor and impatiently griping about the slow service. Last Friday's news article on the incident seems to confirm the scene that I observed. Employees in that article said that students often engage in "rough play," are occasionally kicked out by the security guard and sometimes even sexually harass employees.

Imagine now that you're an employee at this McDonald's. From about 10 until two in the morning on Friday and Saturday nights you have to cater to this crowd. In the midst of all this, a nice, courteous student comes up to the counter and places his order. Having reached your breaking point, you unnecessarily jump down his throat. You lose patience and call him a name even though he wasn't the one who mistreated you. Now you find yourself out of a job.

The point is we've all been there before. We've all been treated badly and taken out our pent-up anger on someone else who didn't deserve it.

The only difference between our situation and the situation of the fired workers is that their rashness might prevent them from paying rent at the end of the month.

That doesn't sit well with me and it shouldn't with you.

The fact that the customer is paying and the employee is getting paid - regardless of what the McDonald's corporate handbook will tell you - is of no consequence. The employees have no recourse when a patron - whether a student or not - treats them badly. They just have to grin and bear it.

So if an employee treats you badly, put up with it. We don't punish every single customer for being rude, so it's unfair to harshly punish employees for similar behavior. Both the customer and the server are human beings, so the same expectation of decency holds for both. There shouldn't be a double standard here.

And what exactly does getting someone fired accomplish? All it does is leave some guy without an income who really needs it, while failing to address any of the underlying issues that create the rudeness in the first place.

As College senior Julian Urrutia put it, Williams is "within his rights to get [the employees] fired, but the negative impact on those people's lives versus the negative impact on his life" just don't seem to match up.

So if you want to live your life knowing that you got people fired for being rude to you, I guess I can't stop you.

But you're best off just turning the other cheek.

David Kanter is a College sophomore from East Falmouth, Mass. His e-mail is kanter@dailypennsylvanian.com. David vs. Goliath appears on Wednesdays.

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