The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
I don't agree that she was acting as a menace to her coworkers. At least, I don't think you can come to that conclusion from her blog post alone. I would be pissed too if I wrote an official blog post for a feature that I cared about, and someone else went behind my back and rewrote it and published it without even telling me.
A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
You might not want to visit a farm, processing plant, warehouse, grocery store, or restaurant. They all throw away enormous amounts of food. Throwing away a Big Mac because it got too cold is a rounding error in perspective.
That said, we produce more food than we ever have. Is there a difference to starving people whether a grain of wheat went ungrown or was wasted?
What was the author meant to do, walk the hamburger and fries (with bites missing) to his closest homeless shelter?
In kindergarten, I starred in a play that haunted me for years and years. My role was to explain the amount of food waste produced by America every year.
I wonder how it is today, but at the time it was on the order of half a billion tons a year.
Spent the rest of my childhood trying to be hyper-conscientious about the waste I produced.
Got to high school, got a job at a local restaurant, eventually moved onto large-scale corporate catering, and then went to live and work on a farm.
As I moved up the scale of food production I only saw more and more waste. It was sickening but at the same time completely understandable when you realize that there are diminishing returns. The larger your business is, the more waste becomes "not worth our time".
I just can't feel bad about throwing away half a pizza here and there anymore.
After I left the farm I took one more job in food service before moving to tech, and that was at a small-scale startup that produces healthy, fresh, TV dinner style foodstuff, and distributes them at retail locations.
I was blown away at how efficient the whole process was. One of the chief philosophies of my boss was conservation. With a business model that revolved around maintaining a supply of each meal reflective of its demand, and making dishes that could be built upon common base ingredients, we were able to exactly calculate the amount of food we needed to make each day. If for some reason there was a piece or two of chicken left, or some rice, an employee would just take it home. I just wish every place could be that committed to not wasting food, by creating a business model that incentivizes such behavior with a better profit margin.
Part of the issue with scale is that this extra profit margin becomes more and more marginal. Supporting local farms, co-ops, and cooks is probably the best thing we can do to enable less food waste across the industry.
About 1/3 of the food in the US is wasted. And this is exactly what we want!
Food is a renewable yet spoilable resource. Easy to create, hard to store long term. Having more food then we need means the system has the capacity to absorb disruptions. If we consumed 100% of the food created, any disruption such as a cold spell in Florida would cause people to go hungry.
Resources farmed is not the same as food produced. If you consumed all food produced but had stocks of farmed resources that could be used to make more food (wheat, sesame, beef, onions, say) then with excess capacity you could readily produce more food. Our supply chains are such that we can go from field to table in a day, that allows us to go field to freezer (or canning factory, or whatever) too.
This perhaps relies on non-capitalist management of food production however.
Mine too. I have the terrible habit of finishing all the food on my plate, even though 1/4 of it will be converted to fat/simple sugars. Our portions are much bigger than those our parents had.
Are you talking about in the US? Because they're much larger than most of the rest of the world too!
I was pretty amazed the first time I went - for McDonalds specifically, the US's medium size for drinks and fries is bigger than our large size in Australia! And we have no super-size or drink refills. (Our Burger King equivalent is about the only fast food chain I can think of that does free refills. It's very rare for restaurants in general here).
Well, I guess I should give up on recycling and get a gas-guzzling car because doing my share isn't going to make a difference. Maybe I should rob a bank because banks are being robbed everyday. The author could have saved it for later or heated it in a microwave because he spent good money for it.
That still wouldn't make it useful. Most westerners consume far more calories than we need to survive. Eating beyond that is just for pleasure; from a purely practical standpoint, it's just as "wasted" as if you threw it away.
No no no, you separate out the vegetation, if any, and keep it aside. Microwave any non-vegetable remainder for 15-30 seconds, depending on the mass of the burger: just enough to warm the meat. Transfer from microwave to toaster oven in two halves, toast briefly to crisp the buns, re-sizzle the meat, and melt the cheese. Arrange vegetation back in between. Enjoy a McDonald's burger that rivals its freshly served cousin. Finally, sit back and question the life decisions that lead you to putting this much thought into reheating fast food from McDonald's.
I worked at McDonalds and we would throw burgers after X minutes if they didn't sell. Can't remember what X was but we were throwing a lot of . Same thing with fried stuff like mcnuggets except we would wait longer before throwing it. I don't know why we were following the rules for burgers but not for fried stuff... It all seemed like waste to me because X was pretty short. But this was to ensure good quality, crunchiness and all that jazz. Mind you that it was not a franchise and it was in France (where McDonalds restaurants have higher standards).
Used to be 10 minutes. Not sure now. Fried foods like McNuggets, McChicken and Filet O Fish were kept in a cabinet, then assembled into sandwiches. They were kept for roughly 30 min? The reason for the 10 minute rule was a quality issue; after that amount of time, cheese was gross, and the various condiments were trashed.
How tightly do they manage their production rate, presumably they're more careful than just "keep 6 on the warmer" and more like "the usual rate at this time is 70 per hour, we only lose 15% of those sales by asking the customer to wait, 5% of those losses go for other products, so we'll make at a rate of 1 every X minutes unless we have more than Y on hand"? (numbers completely off the top of my head)
I worked at a franchised US Burger King in the late '90s. The shift manager would tell us how many fully assembled copies of each popular sandwich type to keep on hand. I never saw any charts or evidence of number crunching, but the numbers did vary based on expected traffic for the day of week and time of day, and the popularity of the specific item.
The sandwich wrappers had the numbers 1 to 12 printed on them, and you were supposed to mark the pre-made sandwiches to show when to throw them away. For example, if you assembled the sandwich at 12:15, mark the 5 to show that it should be thrown away when the clock's big hand is on the 5. Literacy not really required.
I worked back before they had installed microwave ovens, so the person in charge of coordinating the production rate had to be a good judge of the sales rate, the abilities of the grill team etc. We usually tried to time things so that we had the most food ready for lunch rush, and then let it tail off so that we didn't waste a huge amount. McDonalds had all sorts of little charts that averaged sales rates per hour, item rates within that hour etc, but a good employee running the "bin" was far better than someone who just used the charts.
I was in a pretty busy McDonalds so we were usually asked to do one more of X when doing X, or two more of Y, or 5 more of Z, ... depending on the rush. That's how we ended up trashing some.
That's because, when doing a big mac for example, it's almost as easy to make one or five on a tray. So better make 5 if you're in a rush, they will likely be fulfilled.
In cool periods we would only produce on command. So no waste. Fresh burgers.
Everyone used to say that Franchise didn't care too much about these rules (where they should), and the director didn't like getting employees from Franchise McDonalds because they had to re-learn all the hygiene standards. Since that day I avoid franchise restaurants and go only to the official ones.
In my experience, franchise stores were generally better run than McOpCo stores. Many of the McOpCo stores were stepping stones for their mgmt staff so they didn't care about profits as much. They ran their stores by the book, but that didn't always correlate with a well run store. I used to be able to spot a McOpCo store within a few minutes of walking in.
define better run? You mean from a business stand point? Sure. We would throw a lot of things, wash our hands all the time. From a hygienic/client point of view? I wouldn't agree.
I meant from a QSC standpoint. I'm sure this varies from region to region, but of the 200-400 stores I visited in my career, it wasn't even a close contest. Better quality food, better service, and better cleanliness. Even things like physical premises were generally kept better. I wouldn't hold this against any crew/mgmt team, since facilities maintenance was usually out of their control to a large extent.
Our stores were generally earning 4s in inspections, because Joan Kroc lived about 4 miles away from our best/highest volume store and frequently stopped in. Our worst store was probably closer to McOpCo stores, despite our efforts to improve it over time.
And what you say doesn't really make sense to me, of course my personal experience and what I was hearing at McDonalds is very subjective. But the official restaurants are here to show off what McDonalds is, they are supposed to hold the bar way higher than any other McDonalds restaurants.
McOpCo stores have to follow all the rules and policies that Oak Brook dictates to the franchisees, but they also have to be profitable. Oak Brook was often out of touch with how life was for franchisees, and would make requirements that just didn't jibe with making a buck. A franchisee would make the decision to either emphasize or de-emphasize a new policy/procedure, and deal with the consequences from their regional manager if it became an issue.
McOpCo stores weren't immune to business pressures either; having to follow (in theory) all the policies and regulations imposes a cost on their business. And one of the keys to a well run franchise was a stable management team and stable staff under that team. With McOpCo stores being a stepping stone for managers to climb the ranks, it was harder to develop the team cohesion that a good franchisee could.
What do you think they'll do with it if you complain that it's cold? If you don't want it, it's getting tossed either way.
"Eat your peas, there are starving children in Africa" only makes sense if there's a ready means to get your peas to the starving children. If the choices are eating food you don't want or throwing it away, it's wasted either way. Eating it isn't the superior moral option; it doesn't accomplish anything but making you fat.
The temperature of food can be easily changed with the ubiquitous household appliances called "refrigerator" and "microwave oven". And it isn't as though a drop in temperature of 5 degrees changes the flavor.
It's like throwing your pants away because you spilled ketchup on them, or throwing your car away because it ran out of gas--trivial issue, easily remedied.
Besides that, McDonald's corporate considers the service temperature of their food to be deadly serious. Complaining to the management with cold food and receipt in hand would almost certainly generate an overly obsequious response sufficient to satisfy even the grumpiest of customers. If not, going to management above the restaurant would probably get everyone at the restaurant re-trained right quick.
> And it isn't as though a drop in temperature of 5 degrees changes the flavor.
Leaving aside the rest of the discussion, and not even addressing if throwing it out was good/fine, this line stood out to me.
I often feel that temperature changes the taste. More obvious in ranges > 5 degrees, but still noticeable at that range. Given how subjective taste is, it's hard to prove, though I'm sure some neurologist has hooked a pig or chimp up to try and measure the "taste" reaction. My two questions for you are:
* Do you feel temperature has no real (direct) effect on taste, or only in larger swings than 5 degrees
* Do you have any reason for your above statement than your own experiences? (not a criticism, curiousity)
But, I think his comment was changing the temperature is easy, and having food get cold does not change the taste after reheating. However, there is a large food safety issue with how long food stays between 40f and 140f, which is probably the root cause of this policy.
Correct. Flavor is an important component of taste and the eating experience. Temperature is a separate component. They are weakly linked, but with the temperature I envision for fresh McDonald's fries left on a tray for 15 minutes before serving the customer, there is no meaningful difference to me in flavor. The change in temperature is obvious, but as I don't value it much in my own eating experience, I have difficulty imagining its importance for others.
In my mouth, flavor is the dominant component. Temperature only matters if the food has fats or volatiles with a phase transition temperature between 25 and 40 degC. If food is too hot, I taste burning heat instead of flavor, and when it's too cold, the ice crystals numb my taste buds. But in between, my perception of the flavor is more affected by chemical composition than temperature. Room-temperature french fries are fine. You can chew them up without burning your mouth. Refrigerated fries aren't quite as good, because the fats solidify and the flavoring volatiles don't vaporize as readily. So pop them in the microwave, and they're good again.
For many people, texture is a major component of the enjoyment of fries. Room-temperature fries are limp and rubbery, and microwaving them does not restore their original crisp texture. (Though heating them in a toaster over does, and fairly quickly.)
> The temperature of food can be easily changed with the ubiquitous household appliances called "refrigerator" and "microwave oven". And it isn't as though a drop in temperature of 5 degrees changes the flavor.
You know, that gives me an idea for a science fair project. Conduct a blind taste test for the same food prepared in different ways. I'm thinking hot dogs, though.
I'm puzzled by your response. You list some stats about waste and that justifies what the guy is doing? Of course it's probably hyperbole but people are working hard to defend this guy's statement.
It seems like a growing number of comments on Hacker News are of this virtue signalling, amplify the problem but offer no solutions variety. This is not the hacker ethos.
The hacker looks at your parent and says woah -- grocers throw away 30% of food? There's a startup opportunity. And when they succeed they accomplish more than all the hand wringing in the world about someone else not doing their part.
I think even bigger is the 10:1 gains or more you lose feeding crops to animals. If we all went vegan we would almost instantly double our food supply.
It's fairly normal. In the first world, we waste a lot of food because consumers can afford to be picky or forgetful. In the third world, they waste a lot of food because storage and distribution infrastructure is worse.
Well, it is. So don't be wasting water unnecessarily. If you spent time and money eating at McDonald's why would you throw it away? Our society wastes a lot for sure so try not to. Don't go to McDonald's in the first place.
We don't have a water shortage problem just like we don't have a food shortage problem. We have a water/food distribution problem. Throwing away a burger in the US takes nothing away from Africa.
If you bought this burger, you already gave back to society by paying for it. It has zero influence on the rest of the society whether it goes through your belly or not before being disposed.
Respectful sure, but I could argue I'm disrespectful to the world's poor every time I light a joint, kick back on my couch, pig out on taco Bell, and watch Vikings in my air conditioned condo.
1. Whether or not I eat the food is irrelevant to the poor.
2. The amount of food I order is completely up to me. I usually order, and eat, more than I need to survive (because I'm stoned). I revel in the decadence and my ability to buy and eat so much food I'm disgustingly full. I could argue that I do this to "flaunt" my wealth and privilege.
(really, I do it because I grew up dirt poor and hungry, so I gain inordinate pleasure from excess. Probably unhealthy, but it's my birthday and I'll cry if I want to)
Only if you threw it away instead of giving it to a poor, starving person. Between two choice of eating it or throwing it out, neither affects the hungry any more than the other.
The article indicates he tried to suggest to the employee that his fries should not be sitting on a tray getting cold while waiting for a burger and got ignored, nor should a burger be cold if you had to wait for it. I am not even convinced he was being literal. That reads to me as possible hyperbole to emphasize the point that he only goes when it has been so long that he has forgotten how bad it is.
Plus, see other remarks here about how 40% of food goes to waste for various reasons.
Just customize your order in such a way that they have to make it fresh. I don't eat raw tomatoes, so if I tell them not to put those on my burger/wrap/whatever I end up getting freshly made food that's even hot.
You can specifically ask for them to make it fresh; you just have to be willing to wait around for them to make it.
On a similar note, I hate the "exploit" of "Ask for fries with no salt to get them to make you a fresh batch of fries" when you can just ask them to make you a fresh batch of fries. Potatoes are about $6 per hundred pounds; they could not care less about making you a fresh batch if it means chucking the old fries out.
The other thing to hate about asking for fries with no salt is that making them has a fairly high chance of flinging hot oil on yourself. Usually the addition of salt causes the oil to soak in a bit, without the salt it doesn't soak in and gets thrown around the place.
Wow, look at all the responses and downvotes. More privileged assholes with money to burn feel it's fine to spend $10 on a meal and just throw it away. Just because there is so must waste doesn't mean that you have to behave like you don't know the value of money.
What things do you feel it's acceptable to throw away without being a privileged asshole? Is there a way you made this decision that can be generalized beyond Big Macs?
Reminds me of the scene from the Into the Wild movie - McCandless is working in a McDonalds-alike fast food joint, and the camera lingers on a signs that says "It's O.K. to waste fries"
What do you think they're going to do at a McDonald's if you say that? They're going to throw it away and make you a new one.
The reality is most of the food McDonald's serves nowadays is served cold. It's an unfortunate side effect of moving away from actually grilling meat to just warming it in trays.
If you're 40 you've probably experienced 2 to 3 boom/bust cycles (depending on the industry) as an earner. I think that kind of volatility and hope for the next windfall leads people to believe debt will work itself out. Or as is oft misattributed to Steinbeck: "... in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
As an engineer, boom/bust cycles like this remind me of system instability with insufficient damping. It doesn't work itself out; the oscillations get larger and larger, and then something breaks. Remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?
They are getting larger. You're looking too far back. After the Great Depression, policies were enacted which served as dampers to improve system stability. They worked for quite a while. But eventually these policies were eroded or repealed, and other societal factors came along which degraded stability, so the oscillations picked up again, and grew larger and larger (think 80s S&L crisis, '00 dot-com crash), culminating in the '08 recession. Now we're going to have a much bigger one with Trump and the GOP in office. If this one doesn't cause a collapse, the next one will.
The dot com crash was big for the stock market and for the tech industry, but it wasn't a really big recession; it barely touched economic fundamentals, just look at GDP.
Personally I doubt the next recession/slowdown will be anywhere near as big as 08, but I guess we'll see.
We always have recessions when there's Republicans in power (I'm not sure why voters haven't figured this one out yet); there was one with Reagan, one with Bush I, one with Bush II, etc. Trump and the current crop of Republicans are advocating very extreme changes (namely trade restrictions), so I think we're likely to have a more extreme recession because of this.
There's criticism, and there's not knowing what you're talking about. Unless one has run an online community like Reddit before, it's more than likely that that individual is playing armchair CEO.
Unless you're the CEO of Reddit, you're by definition playing armchair CEO. I don't need to be Cristiano Ronaldo to have a legitimate criticism that he needs to fall back and help the defense sometimes. I mean, he's the best, but he doesn't have to score all the goals.
This response always drives me crazy. The "well why don't you make something better" has to stop. If everyone had to be on the same level of what they were criticizing, then there would be absolutely no feedback. I'm not a director, but I've studied film enough to know the elements of what makes a good movie. If you've never been displeased with something, then I applaud your saintly hood, but please understand that often the most passionate users, are the most vocal. Regardless if they are are singer/guitarist/artist/ceo/presidentoftheus/whatever.
Because you're going to more or less make the same dumb decisions that the person you're criticizing made once you're in that same position dealing with a thousand different angles, people, and pressures your limited mind could not imagine before, and that's a fact.
I've seen that line of thinking with newer devs who don't understand the right tool for the job. Unless your client specifically wants a custom solution for a custom purpose, you will spend the first week writing a CMS in Django and the next 20 recreating .1% of WP's functionality because you didn't anticipate the full list of client's needs correctly.
But then you need to manage a server and ensure that the time is running accurately. Why add such a large level of responsibility for little to no gain?
How is that extra responsibility? Do you think Snapchat aren't already running servers?
And you don't care whether the time on the server is running accurately if you're just using it to generate tokens which are checked against the time on the server. It just needs to be consistent, it could be an arbitrary counter and would still work fine as long as it counted up reliably at consistent intervals.
Because instead of depending on a 3rd party, you depend on yourself (and in this case you'd hammer your own server, and notice). It is not far fetched; Windows and OS X work this way. By default, they use their own NTP servers. OS X even has separate servers for different regions (Europe, Asia, and Americas).
That's not the ratio of men to women in the tech industry, and said ratio is not caused by competency discrepancies. It's actually partially caused by exactly this kind of sexist drivel that you're spouting; who would want to enter an industry that is so unwelcoming?
Why is there so much sexist trash in the HN comments today?
Theirs is not just an opinion when you have a few decades of sociological research to back it up. If you want to see research supporting the claim that you are wrong a good starting point would be Project Implicit's webpage.
Indeed, the person that responded to you could have been less inflammatory, but it is pretty hard to keep it cool when you are surrounded by people that dismiss an entire group of people based on gender, sexual orientation or skin color.
FYI, the definition of sexism I'm using is the dictionary one, not "things I disagree with". I called your opinion sexist because it is sexist. Here's the definition:
1. prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially discrimination against women.
2. behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex.
If you want to argue, instead of going all ad hominem and somehow trying to make it be about my supported ignorance or inability to handle disagreement, let's actually stick to the issues.
