Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/07/burger-king-staff-refused-to-r.html
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I believe the rules they were referring to are the ones requiring terrible service.
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I fully expected this incident to have occurred in the US, where crass, pointless cruelty is practically an art form.
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Sure, though it’s not the first time in English history that a king’s staff behaved terribly!
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A fine point.
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To me this seems a very British flavor of jobsworthy bullshit.
In the American version of this story, the rule actually exists and a Burger King staffer gets fired for reading the menu to the blind woman instead of providing her with the braille one or whatever.
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“I can also confirm that there is no such policy to refrain from reading allergen information to visually-impaired customers.”
Sometimes a spokesperson’s job kind of sucks.
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Give the employee a break, saying they are not allowed to is much more dignified than admitting you never learned how to read.
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Or probably the employee was absolutely afraid of stepping the imposed rules and, while there was probably no explicit rule forbidding them of reading the alergens chart to a blind person, there were rules (written or not) explicitly telling them to minimize interaction with the customers.
There are a lot of chances the employee was a jerk, but also equally he was internally panicking because he was afraid of “doing the right thing” costing his/her job. I don’t know you, but I’ve been fired for “doing the right thing” and is something you remember all your life.
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That’s awfully specific…is there a rule forbidding reading allergen information to non visually-imparied customers?
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That was my thought too …
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It would not surprise me in the slightest if there’s a rule that was worded as applying for all customers, which shouldn’t have applied to visually impaired ones. Something like “you can’t tell the customer the allergens, they have to read the menu themselves; if you miss one that’s our liability, but if we print it and the customer misses it that’s their problem”.
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This is absolutely true. My son has a food allergy, and most food service personnel get extremely nervous and cagey when asked about allergens. Most would prefer you just not eat there, rather than take a chance that you might have a reaction to their food.
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If there is such a rule it cannot override the Equality Act. Burger King are apologetic partly because they are facing a discrimination case that they will probably lose.
Remember, your statutory rights always apply.
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Christ, what assholes.
Now you gotta worry if the staff washes their hands.
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Such high standards from The King Of Burgers.
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Absolutely. And, if there was such a rule, it’s also possible that it did make it clear that it didn’t override the Equality Act and the individual employee screwed up by ignoring that bit. Which doesn’t let Burger King off the hook, because he screwed up while performing his duties as an employee.
(It’s also possible that no such rule exists for blind or sighted customers, and the individual employee screwed up by inventing it as an excuse, in which case the question I was responding to doesn’t really apply.)
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Yep. I have food allergies too. Whenever I tell the server I’m allergic to XYZ, they’re always like “ABC has no XYZ in it, durrrrr!” It’s like they don’t understand anything about cross-contamination.
Then again, when I worked in food service back in the day, there was at least one person who used to haul frozen chicken around in the same plastic tubs we used for the ice for the soft drink machines.
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