This One Will Zap Your Appetite

My mum told me a story last week about when she was an employee, later a manager, at a big-name fast food restaurant.

At the time, one menu item was a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, but on a burger bun. They would premake a certain number at the start of each day, put them in cold storage, and heat one up each time one was ordered.

Regularly, if registers were busy or something else arose, they would leave the line of half-made burgers lying out, go help out, and then complete the burgers later.

Also regularly, they would get complaints of dead flies in burgers, usually about this specific menu item, rarely anything else.

Turns out, the kitchen had a bug zapper above the prep bench, so when staff would go help out for ten minutes, bugs would get zapped, fall into the half-made burgers, and as the line was made fast, just slapping ham and cheese on multiple burgers in a row, workers wouldn’t notice one dead fly on one random burger on a row of ten or twenty.

I’m happy this chain now makes food to order, and I can actually see my burger being made. And that the restaurant Mum worked at is now closed.