Spin Control: Questioning Harris’s stint at Mickey D’s seems an odd thing to do

Returning home after two weeks abroad – and blissfully away from most election news – I caught up late last week with a controversy that was about as odd as it was short-lived.

Former and perhaps future President Donald Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of lying about saying she had a summer job at McDonald’s decades ago as a teenager.

As someone who also worked at McDonald’s as a teenager – different state, different decade – my first reaction to the Republican nominee’s questioning of his opponent’s work claim was Sean Connery’s line to Kevin Costner in “The Untouchables.”

“Who would claim to be that who wasn’t?”

As a high school junior I worked for about nine months at a McDonald’s on a busy thoroughfare across from the parking lot of a major shopping mall. It was not a glamorous job. It paid minimum wage, which when I started was $1.30 an hour. When minimum wage went up to $1.45 a few months later, everyone on the crew got a 15-cent raise.

There were no teenage girls on the crew. I suspect they made better money babysitting and did not have to tuck their hair under silly paper hats, stand in front of steaming vats of oil, burn their fingers on bun toasters and be yelled at by managers perhaps 10 years older to quit goofing off and hurry up with those burgers, Cokes or shakes. Burger flipping took practice and was done by some of the most experienced members of the crew. Working the register was a preferred spot but required being able to make change – and I was thankful for the good sisters at my parochial grade school for their years of pounding arithmetic into me – but also being able to put up with people who arrived at the counter not knowing what they wanted. We also had to apologize to customers who didn’t get their orders in five minutes, which was the company standard. My coworkers were a mix of high school students and recent dropouts trying to make some money to pay for gasoline, clothes or dates.

None of my friends envied me for my job. A few classmates who did were disabused of that after learning I could not eat all the burgers and fries I wanted for free. For each shift we were allowed to eat 60 cents worth of food – fries were 15 cents, burgers were 19 cents, cheeseburgers 24 cents and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches 34 cents. A Big Mac, which was added to the menu while I was working there, was 45 cents, the same as a double cheeseburger. Soda was free, but we had to drink it in special cups because the way the managers kept track of the number of sodas sold each day was by counting the number of paper cups used.

The Trump campaign has cast aspersions on Harris’s claim of toiling under the Golden Arches, citing reports that it wasn’t included on her resumes when applying for jobs after law school. I listed McDonald’s when filling out forms for high school and college summer jobs at K-Mart, a company that made SweeTarts, a steel galvanizing plant and a lawn tractor assembly factory. But that was only to show I had actually held a job before, and I doubt that any future employer ever called that McDonald’s to check. If they did, the people with whom I worked would have been long gone.

I didn’t list any of those after-school or summer jobs for any newspaper position, but would mention McDonald’s and the others in interviews when asked whether, as a freshly minted college grad with a journalism degree, I could relate to average working folks.

Which seems to be essentially what Harris is doing by mentioning a summer job at McDonald’s. It’s not exactly a humble brag, but way of establishing a connection with workers on the low end of the wage scale compared to Trump, who has spent his life at the other end of that scale. It may also be a new campaign gambit to capture the votes of a previously untapped bloc of the electorate. After all, there are millions of current and former McDonald’s workers out there.

If that’s the case, she’s not going to win them over by filling in a few words on the Big Mac jingle, as she did on a recent interview. Any Gen X person can do that, thanks to the ubiquitous commercials. Instead, she should be asked to describe her least favorite station to work.

In his efforts to debunk Harris’ work claim, Trump said that sometime in the next few weeks he was going to work for a half hour “over the french fries.” That may just be a case of Trump talking out his MAGA hat, but if his campaign really is looking to find a slot on the schedule, they should rethink it.

The french fry station is among the hottest and messiest in the restaurant. Putting the frozen fries into the vat of hot oil takes some training and practice to keep it from splattering on you. The steam rises up to surround you, meaning you smell like french fries for the next 24 hours. It also takes more than a half hour to get the hand-wrist motion down to scoop the fries into the little baggies without spilling some, so you’re likely to wind up with fries all over the floor. Which makes the whole area dangerously slippery.

Ask to run the register; the machines they use now take credit cards and, if the customer uses cash, the screen tells you how much change to give back.