The Chick-Fil-A Drive-Thru Drama

Retail and fast food employees have very little control over anything in their store, let alone what happens at the corporate level. Yet the public at large has traditionally used these people as emotional punching bags and treats them with contempt.

Customers with a chip on their shoulder or who otherwise are having a bad day will hit the roof over any little thing. They throw stuff at you (including HOT coffee), and they wait for you in the parking lot. They flirt with you, and if you don't give them the response they wanted, they complain to the next person up the chain that you were rude.  They make up things about you to get you in trouble or get you fired. This on top of doing mostly dirty, manual labor that leaves you physically exhausted after shifts of  14+ hours during the holidays.

This is a dreadful time to be working at Chick-Fil-A. Customers on both sides of the gay marriage issue are using the workers as political sound boards and consider them acceptable targets for harassment. However individual Chick-Fil-A workers feel about gay marriage, they don't have any power over what corporate leadership does.

Customers know that Chick-Fil-A  workers have been instructed to smile and tell them to have a nice day. People are going there with the express intent of inciting a riot, and getting employees caught up in the middle of it. With Adam Smith (his parents obviously have a sense of humor), I don't think there is any question that he meant to bully someone he considers beneath him, and to make a viral video that would make him look like some gallant political activist.

That's not what happened. The video shows him for the feckless thug he is, and the woman working the drive-through window absolutely SHINES. Of course, if she hadn't kept her composure she wouldn't have kept her job.

At one point Smith tells the worker: "I don't know how you live with yourself and work here. I don't understand it. This is a horrible corporation with horrible values. You deserve better." Of course they deserve better than to have drive-by activists trying to bait them into a pointless spat. If he really felt that way, why didn't he use his business connections to help these people who "deserve better" to get better jobs?

The answer is that wouldn't have made a sensational You Tube video and gotten him his fifteen minutes of fame. He did make sure that she and the world knew that he was heterosexual, though. It seemed like he was hitting on her to me. I don't know of any woman who would have him after he was such a jerk in such a public way, though.

Smith was CFO of Vante, a medical supply company. He was also adjunct lecturer at the University of Arizona. I use past tense because he was promptly fired from both positions. He went to the lowest person on the totem pole where he would have a captive participant for his little stunt.  It makes me wonder how much more of a weasel he is in person. He was in a position where he could have taken on Dan Cathy personally, but he only chooses to gobble up opponents when they are at a severe disadvantage.

I wonder about the medical equipment he sold for Vante. How does he live with himself knowing that he was charging poor people for medical supplies they needed to live? If I were living with him, I'd be getting a new apartment, but Smith doesn't have that luxury-- especially since he got himself fired from both his jobs for his exercise in drive-through intimidation.

If you are against gay marriage, by all means go to Chick-Fil-A and buy yourself some sandwiches. If you support gay marriage, feel free to eat somewhere else. Whatever you do, please leave these workers out of it. They are only trying to make a living in an economy that has been plowed into oblivion-- both the gay Chick-Fil-A workers, and the straight. Placing them in these awkward positions only makes the American people at large look bad.

I don't remember this kind of a ruckus being raised when Starbucks announced that it would allow customers with gun permits to enter their stores with their weapons. It seems to me the left only chooses to do battle when there is less likelihood of being shot.

I don't know what else I expected from a bunch of weasels.