• Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Not even remotely the same but in the 90’s mcdonalds still had salt and pepper shakers on the tables. I knew a guy who loved throwing them in the bag when he got up from the table along with the ten straws he grabbed and wad of napkins. He really was under some serious financial stress in no way due to anything he had done. I refused to use the salt and pepper shakers at his house and he kept bugging me as to why. I told him he didn’t want to know but he insisted. Finally I told him about the time I saw some kids going from table to table licking the tops of the shakers. He immediately threw them all away. Later they started to reappear and it was because he figured out at the first of the month they replaced them and the new one usually had the seal left on them.
    Before you trash the guy for doing that. The guy made 80 grand one year and could barely afford food. All that money went to paying his wife’s medical bills. She had grown up inside the boundary of a superfund site out in new mexico and had all kinds of tumors and other problems. It was called a pre existing condition and his insurance wouldn’t pay for hardly anything. They finally divorced so she could get SSI. That was in the early 2000’s. This country sucked then and it still sucks.

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Yeah no judgement for being frugal at McD’s expense. 1) Fuck McD’s, and 2) Do what to gotta do. There was a point in my life where I got meals from the condiment station at a college cafeteria. They had free ketchup, and a hot water dispenser thing for making tea, so I’d make ‘tomato soup’ by making myself a bowl of hot ketchup water. Couple handfuls of a single package saltines, and there’s lunch. Life sucks when you can’t afford anything, but it does make you become pretty creative when it comes to saving money.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      The concept of cleaning things also saves a ton of money compared to throwing things away.

      • Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        They were disposable salt and pepper shakers. I know you think it saves money but you can bet some bean counter at corporate did the math to prove that wrong.

    • dutchkimble@lemy.lol
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      5 days ago

      Why did he need more than 1 or 2 pairs of salt and pepper shakers though? Why did Mcdonalds need to replace them every month instead of refilling them?

      • Zink@programming.dev
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        5 days ago

        I’m going to take a guess that throwing away little cheap plastic shakers each month costs less than paying a person to clean and refill them.

        So into the landfill they flow!

      • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        iirc, they were those plastic shakers that didn’t actually have a way to get into them - nothing to unscrew to refill it. They were designed to be used until empty, then discarded and replaced.