For those of us with a long commute, a car snack for evening rush hour is sometimes an evil necessity. "Car Consumption" is a tricky business---forbidden entirely by my husband in his new vehicle---and food packaging is a critical factor for ease and neatness of the auto-meal. And so I made a pit stop at the local Whataburger after leaving work yesterday: they are the lone fast-food outlet providing the small "bucket" of ketchup instead of squeeze-packets.
I had a craving for french fries. Hot, thin-stick variety, dipped one by one into ketchup. Whataburger was the only game in town for this type of road cuisine (hey, you try squeezing ketchup from a packet onto a lone fry with your elbows on the steering wheel). I pulled into the drive thru and placed my simple order: LARGE FRIES. I paid the fare and the teenager ruling the cash register handed me my change and the bag o' fries.
"Can I have 2 containers of ketchup?" I asked.
"We're out of ketchup," she responded flatly, as if this were of no more significance than "We're out of bendable straws" or "We're out of half-dollars."
I stared at her, in shock. NO KETCHUP? This is a fast-food restaurant, where ketchup is probably part of every meal in the joint with the exception of maybe breakfast pancakes. NO KETCHUP.
She looked at me and I looked at her, considering whether I even wanted these fries if there was to be NO KETCHUP. I could ask for a refund, I thought, since NO KETCHUP is surely a breach of fast-food contract of a sort. Then I had a mind-flash of the next half-hour of my life, waiting for some manager to come from the undervaults of Whataburger to do a void and get the money, and me having to explain why this was all related to NO KETCHUP. Better to drive away and save that 30 minutes of life, I figured.
Fries thrown to the passenger seat since I don't want them with NO KETCHUP, I started wondering about this situation in more detail. Did the cashier mean they were out of ketchup 'buckets' for the drive-thru, or ketchup altogether? A mystery.
If they were out of all ketchup in the building, wouldn't they be right to just close the whole place down for the day? They do, after all, have that whole million-dollar ad campaign devoted to telling you about all the ways you can have your Whataburger custom-made for you, potentially even slathered with ketchup.
And if they were out of the ketchup-buckets only, shouldn't they try to come up with some sort of workaround where ketchup could be provided to the drive-thru masses? Surely someone could take a drive down the street to Costco and pick up those little plastic portion cups...? Or why not borrow some from another Whatburger nearby?
What happened to their allotted ketchup anyway? Did the ketchup delivery truck go off the freeway in a fireball? Surely it wouldn't be something as common as "We forgot to get some," like a housewife explaining why there's no toilet paper. I'll bet they wouldn't forget to order "meat" for the burgers, and even if they did I predict they would at least put a sign up on the drive-thru saying "NO MEAT today. Get other stuff instead." This NO KETCHUP situation was purposely concealed from the unsuspecting drive-thru patron, a terrible surprise after the cash has changed hands and the deal done.
By the time I worked through all this, I was in fact home. I pitched the bag of rock-hard fries into the big garbage can and that was that.
NO KETCHUP.