A Satirical Field Trip Through the Worst Restaurant in Human History
I want you to imagine something with me. Just one McDonald’s. One building, one parking lot, one drive-thru, one sad little PlayPlace with a slide that smells like feet.
Now hand the keys to Congress.
Not a metaphor. Not a think-tank white paper. I mean literally take the 535 people currently occupying the United States Capitol and put them in charge of a single quarter-acre burger stand in a strip mall in Ohio. Let them staff it. Let them write the menu. Let them set the pay scale. Let them handle the ketchup.
I have been teaching high school for years. I have watched sophomores run a concession stand at a Friday night football game with more procedural competence than the federal government has displayed since roughly the Eisenhower administration. So this is not a hard thought experiment for me. It is basically a Tuesday.
Let us take the tour. Mind your step. The floor has not been mopped since the last Continuing Resolution.
THE MENU IS NINE HUNDRED PAGES AND NOBODY HAS READ IT
You walk in. There is no menu board. There is a PODIUM.
On the podium sits the Fiscal Year Nutritional Omnibus and Extensions Act, 947 pages, dropped at 2:14 in the morning, voted on at 6:00 that same morning. Nobody read it. The fry cook voted for it anyway. When you ask the fry cook what is in it, he tells you that we have to serve the food to find out what is in the food.
Buried on page 611, in a subsection nobody noticed, is a provision awarding $4.2 million to study whether seagulls in Portugal prefer regular fries or curly fries. This was inserted at 3:00 a.m. by a member whose brother-in-law owns a seagull.
You point at a picture of a Big Mac. The cashier informs you that the Big Mac was authorized but never appropriated.
You ask what that means.
It means the Big Mac exists on paper. It has a line item. It has a budget. It has a dedicated office with fourteen employees and a mission statement. What it does not have is a hamburger.
Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism states that liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You came here to eat. You will be leaving hungry, poorer, and somehow on a mailing list.
ORDERING: PLEASE FILL OUT FORM 1040-BURGER IN TRIPLICATE
The ordering process is straightforward, as long as your definition of “straightforward” is sufficiently flexible.
You fill out Form 1040-BURGER. Three copies. Blue ink only, because black ink orders go to a different processing center and that center has been closed since 2019 but nobody has updated the form.
Then you wait. The estimated processing time is six to eight weeks. You will receive a letter in the mail confirming that your order has been received. Six weeks later you will receive a second letter informing you that Form 1040-BURGER was revised in March and you submitted the old version. Start over.
If you call the customer service line to check on your order, you will be on hold for two hours and seventeen minutes, at which point the system will thank you for your patience and hang up on you. This is not a malfunction. This is the design. There is a manual. Somebody wrote this down on purpose.
Meanwhile, a guy at the Chick-fil-A across the street just got a sandwich in ninety seconds from a seventeen-year-old who said “my pleasure” and meant it.
The McCongress drive-thru does exist, by the way. It has been “under modernization” for eleven years at a cost of $340 million. The contractor was selected through a competitive bidding process in which one company bid. The window still does not open. There is, however, a very nice commemorative plaque.
THE PAY SCALE: EVERYBODY MAKES THE SAME, AND EVERYBODY IS MISERABLE
Here is where it gets beautiful.
Under the McCongress Fair Compensation and Workplace Dignity Framework, every single employee makes the exact same wage. The general manager. The shift supervisor. The grill cook. The kid who has worked here for four days and spends his entire shift in the walk-in freezer watching TikTok.
Identical pay. Down to the penny.
Because merit, you see, is a construct. Performance metrics are inequitable. Measuring output creates hierarchies, and hierarchies create harm.
So what happens?
The good employees leave. Obviously. Why would a person who can actually run a lunch rush stay somewhere that pays him precisely what it pays the guy hiding in the freezer? He goes and works at the Chick-fil-A, where they noticed he was good at his job and made him a shift lead in four months.
The mediocre employees stay forever, because where else are they going to get paid this much to do this little. Nobody can be fired. Termination requires a 54-page administrative process, a union arbitration hearing, three levels of appeal, and roughly eighteen months, during which the employee remains on full pay and is reassigned to a chair in the back office where he cannot touch anything.
Nobody competes. Nobody improves. Nobody hustles. Why would they? The man breaking his back on the fryer and the man asleep in the storage closet cash the same check on Friday. That is not fairness. That is a machine specifically engineered to punish effort.
Quinn’s Twenty-Fourth Law: every time a liberal tries to fix something, somebody somewhere loses their job. In this case it is everybody who was any good at theirs.
And listen, I want to give credit where it is due. It takes real creativity to build a compensation system where the harder you work, the dumber you feel. That is not an accident. That is craftsmanship. If stupidity were a renewable resource, McCongress would solve the energy crisis before closing time.
THE MANAGER’S NEW BENEFITS PACKAGE: FORTY ADDITIONAL BAND-AIDS
The general manager used to have a health insurance plan. A real one. Dental, vision, the works. It was one of the few reasons anybody wanted the job, on account of the job involving a deep fryer, a walk-in freezer, and an eleven-year-old’s birthday party every Saturday.
But then McCongress passed UNIVERSAL FIRST AID COVERAGE, guaranteeing comprehensive wellness access to every single team member.
Here is what that turned out to mean.
The manager’s health plan was eliminated to pay for it. In its place, the restaurant received one tin box, mounted on the wall by the mop sink, containing forty additional adhesive bandages.
That is the benefit. Band-Aids. Forty of them. The generic kind that do not stick.
There was a press release. I am not kidding, there was an actual press release, and it used the phrase “historic expansion of workplace health equity.” A member of the Ketchup Subcommittee stood at a podium in front of a banner and called it “the most significant investment in crew wellbeing in a generation.”
The manager, who has a pre-existing condition and now has no coverage for it, was invited to the ribbon-cutting. He was not invited to speak.
And then, four months later, everyone’s first-aid premium went up, and McCongress announced that the price increase was the fault of the bandage manufacturers, who are greedy, and who must be investigated. Naturally, the same people who eliminated the coverage in the first place are now on television demanding to know who eliminated the coverage.
If you want to know what they are up to, listen to what they accuse everybody else of doing. Quinn’s Second Law. It has never missed.
THE MILKSHAKE FUND, EST. 1935
Every customer who walks through the door pays a mandatory one-dollar Shake Security contribution. Has since 1935.
The deal is simple. Pay in your whole life, and when you turn sixty-seven, you get a free milkshake.
You turn sixty-seven. You walk up to the counter with your card. You have paid into this thing for fifty years.
There is no milkshake.
The shake money was spent. All of it. On a study of drive-thru speaker acoustics in Belgium, on a mural, on a consultant, on a commission that met twice and produced a pamphlet. What remains in the Shake Security Trust Fund is a manila envelope in the walk-in freezer containing a handwritten note from McCongress to itself that reads “IOU one (1) milkshake.”
They will tell you the fund is solvent. They will tell you it is fully funded through 2034, which is a fascinating way of saying that it runs out of money in 2034 and every single person saying this out loud knows it.
And when anybody suggests reforming it, McCongress runs an advertisement showing a grandmother being pushed off a cliff. Every time. It is the same grandmother. She has been thrown off that cliff in every election cycle since 1982. At this point she is less a person than a recurring line item.
THE DINING ROOM: HALF EAT FREE, THE OTHER HALF PAY FOR IT
Roughly forty percent of the dining room eats at no charge.
Some of them genuinely need it. I want to be extremely clear about that, because I teach in a high-need district and I have watched kids eat their only real meal of the day off a cafeteria tray. Those kids exist. Their families exist. The safety net is not the villain here.
But McCongress does not verify eligibility. There is no work requirement, no asset check, no meaningful audit. A man pulled up last Tuesday in a leased BMW, produced a card, and received four Happy Meals. Somebody in the back of the restaurant has been claiming free meals under the name of a customer who died in 2011. An internal review found that a measurable percentage of free meals go to people who do not exist at all, and when an outside auditor offered to come in and identify exactly which meals those were, McCongress discovered an urgent and previously undisclosed passion for privacy rights.
Ask yourself why. Genuinely. Why would anybody fight this hard to prevent somebody from counting the hamburgers? What exactly is it that they are afraid a competent accountant would find?
Quinn’s Twenty-Fifth Law: they are magnificent at giving away other people’s money. Nobody has ever been better at it. It is the one core competency in the building.
THE PRICE INCREASE THAT WILL DEFINITELY LOWER PRICES
The Big Mac now costs twenty-two dollars.
McCongress has an explanation ready. The reason your Big Mac costs twenty-two dollars is that the Big Mac is underfunded. What we need, clearly, is more funding. Their proposal is to raise the price of the Big Mac to thirty-one dollars, which they have named the BURGER AFFORDABILITY AND COST REDUCTION ACT.
Yes. Raising the price is the affordability plan. That is not me editorializing, that is the actual title of the actual bill.
And here is the part that should make your eye twitch. Back during the pandemic, McCongress handed out a temporary emergency shake coupon. Temporary. It said so on the coupon. It had an expiration date printed right on the front in bold type.
The coupon expired. As coupons do. As this coupon was specifically written to do.
And now the very same people who wrote the expiration date are standing in the parking lot with a bullhorn screaming that somebody RAISED YOUR PRICES.
Think about what that argument actually is. Your boss gave you a one-time thousand-dollar Christmas bonus in December. In January, your paycheck goes back to normal. And you march into his office to accuse him of cutting your pay by a thousand dollars and stealing food off your children’s table.
That is the argument. Word for word, that is the argument. And every single person making it voted for the expiration date.
They are muddying the water to make it look deep.
THE SHUTDOWN: CLOSED FOR BUSINESS, FULLY STAFFED FOR NONSENSE
Last fall McCongress could not agree on a budget, so the restaurant closed.
The grill went cold. The lights went off. The crew went home without a paycheck, which is a real thing that happened to real families with real rent due, and I would like everyone to remember that while I describe what stayed open.
The Office of Ketchup Equity remained fully operational. Three hundred employees. Essential personnel, every last one. They continued to draw full pay for eight weeks while the people who actually make the food got nothing.
The drive-thru modernization contractors also kept billing. Of course they did.
And when it finally ended, McCongress reopened with a deal that looked remarkably like the deal that was sitting on the table before any of it started. Nothing was won. Nothing was gained. A whole lot of working people missed a whole lot of paychecks so that a handful of executives could hold a press conference.
Then came the part I genuinely did not see coming. Having spent two months insisting that the shake coupon program was the single most important thing in the building, they pivoted to explaining that the shake program is enormously expensive, badly designed, and unaffordable without permanent emergency subsidies.
Which is, if you think about it for four consecutive seconds, an admission that the program does not work.
They argued themselves into it live on television. Nobody made them do that. What is next, they hold a press conference admitting the whole thing was a mistake from the start… wait, hold on, I am being told they already did that, they just used a different set of words and hoped nobody was listening.
AND NOW THE PART THAT IS NOT A JOKE
Here is the thing that ought to bother you, and I am going to drop the bit for a minute.
The reason this satire works is that the ACTUAL McDonald’s, the real one, the one with the real fryers, works exactly the opposite way.
A real McDonald’s crew position is a STEPPING STONE. It is designed to be. Nobody at corporate headquarters believes that a sixteen-year-old taking orders should be supporting a family of four on that wage, and neither does the sixteen-year-old. That job teaches you to show up on time, take direction, handle a rush, count a drawer, and speak to a stranger without staring at your shoes. Those are not small things. I teach kids who desperately need those things.
And the manager job? That is a CAREER. Real money, real benefits, real advancement. A large share of McDonald’s restaurant managers started behind the counter. Same story at Walmart, where a store manager pulls down a compensation package north of six figures, more than plenty of people with a master’s degree and $90,000 in student loans are making, and they got there without paying a single semester of tuition.
That ladder exists because of voluntary agreement. A person agrees to work for a wage. The business agrees to pay it. If nobody will take the wage, the business raises it or the business dies. That is not exploitation, that is market dynamics, and it is the single most reliable wealth-creation machine in human history.
That owner you love to demonize? He put his own money in. He signed the lease. He bought the fryers. He carries the risk. If the restaurant fails, the crew goes and gets hired down the street by Friday and the owner loses his house. He is not extracting value from the workers. He is the reason there is a building to work in.
And every “help the workers” policy that removes the first rung of that ladder does not help the workers. It removes the rung. The seventeen-year-old with no diploma and no experience does not get a raise. He gets nothing, because now the math does not work on hiring him, so he never builds a resume, never builds a skill, never gets the second job that pays more than the first.
Which leaves him exactly where? On a program. Dependent. Voting for whoever promises the biggest check.
That is not a bug in the system. The antebellum South needed a permanent underclass to hold power. So does this. The chains changed material, that is all.
FOR THE RECORD
In 1963, Congressman Albert Herlong read a list of 45 Communist Goals for America into the Congressional Record, January 10, 1963. A few of them describe the restaurant I just walked you through with unsettling precision.
Goal 17, get control of the schools and use them as transmission belts. Take a look at what a graduating senior knows about compound interest, then get back to me.
Goal 32, support any socialist movement to centralize control over any part of the culture, education, social agencies, welfare programs, and mental health clinics. Read that list again slowly. Then look at who is running the ketchup.
Goal 40, discredit the family as an institution. Fifty years of program design that penalizes a married couple for staying married is not an accident that happened forty separate times.
I am not telling you a conspiracy read this list and followed it. I am telling you the outcomes match the list, and at some point in science we stop calling a perfectly reproducible result a coincidence.
THE REAL McCONGRESS ROBBERY
While we are on the subject of a government that cannot deliver a hot french fry, let me tell you what it CAN do efficiently.
It can take money from combat-wounded veterans.
Right now, roughly 54,000 servicemembers who were medically retired because a bomb or a bullet ended their careers before twenty years have their earned retirement pay reduced dollar for dollar by their VA disability compensation. Two separate things. One earned by service, one owed for injury. The government offsets one against the other and pockets the difference.
The fix is the MAJOR RICHARD STAR ACT, H.R. 2102. Ten billion dollars over ten years. That is a rounding error in a federal budget that found $4.2 million for seagull fry preferences without breaking a sweat.
It has overwhelming bipartisan co-sponsorship. Hundreds of members have signed onto it. And it still sits there, because co-sponsoring a bill is free and passing one requires courage.
There is a discharge petition, H.RES. 1247, that would force it to the floor for a vote. Signing it costs nothing but a signature.
So call. Seriously, call. Tell them you are calling because they co-sponsored H.R. 2102, and it is time to honor that signature by signing H.RES. 1247. Tell them combat-wounded veterans should not be penalized because their careers were cut short by the injuries they received serving this country. Ask, directly, whether you can count on their support. Then call your own representative, because yours has the most reason to listen to you.
All talk and no action has been the standing policy on this bill for years. Volume is what changes that.
, this one is for you specifically. You have found room in the budget for a great many things you called urgent. You have not found ten billion dollars over a decade for men and women who left pieces of themselves overseas. I would love to hear you explain the arithmetic that makes that a hard call.
CLOSING TIME
So that is McCongress. Twenty-two dollar Big Macs, a milkshake fund with an IOU in it, a manager with forty Band-Aids instead of a doctor, a drive-thru window that has never opened, a dining room split between people who pay and people who do not, and a Ketchup Equity office that stays open during the shutdown.
Nobody would eat there. Nobody would work there. No sane human being would invest one dollar in it.
And yet every year we hand these same people a larger share of your paycheck, your healthcare, your kids’ education, and your retirement, and then act surprised when the fries come out cold.
This country was founded by geniuses and is being run by people who could not pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel.
But what do I know. I am only a guy who has actually read the bill, actually run a classroom on a budget, and actually watched a seventeen-year-old learn more about economics in one summer at a fast food job than he learned in four years of being told the system is rigged against him.
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Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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