The Food May Be Fast, but These Customers Won’t Be Rushed. Even the ambulance takes its time. Only the hearse watches the clock.

NY Times recently wrote that  The Food May Be Fast, but These Customers Won’t Be Rushed. Why should they? It’s their last stop, says Marquel, TPV Times’ correspondent who always orders a cup. To be on the safe side.

McDonald’s recently kicked out a bunch of senior layabouts who stayed all day and bought nothing. It made the news, but what didn’t was that two of the customers left by ambulance, one never to return. Marquel decided to investigate the number and rate of senior last exiters in McDonald’s. The data however was unavailable for that chain alone. Instead McDonald’s has made sure the data can’t be unpacked so all we can find are those numbers applying to all kinds of franchises.

Nationally, 1 in 200 patrons leaves in an ambulance. Of those, 1 in 10 is DOA. That makes 1 in 2000 have their last meal there. Fries, burger, and a shake? Hardly. One third had but one cup of coffee. The remaining two thirds have nothing. They come there not to dine but to die.

At an outlet in Queens where twenty or thirty senior Caribbean islanders meet each day, the routine is a bit different. A doctor practices next door. “We used to call an ambulance. The first few times they arrived soon. But after they realized that almost all the calls were for corpses, it started taking hours,” said the manager. “Do you know how many people don’t want to eat next to a corpse? We lost two hours of business. That’s several thousand dollars profit. It was worth to pay the doc fifty bucks to sign a death certificate. In fact we Xeroxed the certificates and now he does it for twenty bucks. And the hearse arrives in literally three minutes. Five minutes after we see a patron’s body drop to the floor, he’s out of here.”

Drop to the floor?

“Of course. They’re dead. We prop them up, put a steaming cup of coffee next to them, and open up a book so it looks like they’re reading. Get the form, call the hearse, problem solved.”

Is it always so easy? It sounds … well … excruciatingly morbid.

“Well dead people ARE morbid by definition.”

Marquel raised his eyebrows at this fast food intellectual.

He went on. “Whoever picks him up and sets him up gets an extra five in his paycheck. The first person who screams ‘body!’ gets the job. Smoothly? Once we had a crowd after a school football game and one of these woman who’d been with her group since 10 am had fallen at noon. At six pm somebody screamed ‘body’ but when I came to look with the paperwork, she had one hand raised to the sky and both her feet were on the table. Rigor mortis. People don’t read in that position, you know, but my employees are minimum wage. The crowd cleared out. But the hearse was there before half had left. Good bye dead lady I said.”

Marquel couldn’t resist asking what they usually read.

“I used to open the Times to the obituaries. My workers thought it funny. Got to keep up morale. But somebody recently left a copy of Death in Venice in the bathroom so now I use that. It seems so much more poetic”

Nationally, 1 in 20,000 customers!