The Empathy Punishment
August 15, 2024 at 05:30PMFrustrated by the wait time for her order and the “disgusting” burrito bowl she eventually received, Rosemary Hayne, a customer at a Chipotle in Cleveland, ended up throwing the bowl at the restaurant’s 25-year-old assistant manager. Sensing that jail time would not be effective for Hayne, the judge on the case decided on an unusual sentence: 90 days in prison, but with a chance to reduce the duration if Hayne spent two months working part time at a fast-food restaurant. For Grub Street, Reeves Wiedeman looks into whether this empathy experiment was successful.
Russell lives in Brunswick, the last southwestern exurb before greater Cleveland gives way to farmland. She had been working in fast food since she was 17, first at a Burger King for four years, and then at Chipotle for four more. She switched to burritos for the reasons most people change jobs: better pay, better benefits, and a promise of better opportunity. All in all, she liked the work. “I don’t know why, but I loved wrapping burritos!” Russell said. “Oh, we need a triple-wrapped burrito? Okay, I got you.” She started at a Chipotle in Brunswick for $13.50 an hour before several promotions and a transfer to Parma. She had to commute 30 minutes rather than five, but the switch put her on the managerial track. “I saw a future there,” Russell said. When she became an assistant manager, she loved the feeling of having crew members who looked up to her.
Hayne wasn’t Russell’s first unruly customer. “At Burger King, I always got stuff thrown at me,” Russell said, though the projectile was usually a drink or a ketchup packet rather than an entire meal. The drive-through could be a particular hazard; the extra distance seemed to make it easier for customers to treat the employee on the other side of the window like something other than a fellow human before speeding off without waiting for a response. (On the plus side, the window was a barrier: “They usually hit the window before they hit me.”) Russell’s impulse in every testy situation was to accommodate. “If someone comes in and they want extra, we usually give them more,” she said. “But we get customers that no matter what we do, they’re not happy.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/15/the-empathy-punishment/
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