Volunteer Sign In Sheet And Liability Waiver: Fill & Download for Free

I don’t think that free fries refills at McDonald’s will ever happen because it would be prohibitively expensive and is ridiculously impractical in reality, you know, like in the real world, not in Unicorn Union land. Besides that, corn tortilla chips are not as expensive to process , produce and maintain the quality that customers have come to expect. Logistically speaking, lets take the comparison of fries and tortilla chips and break it down into some simple and obvious parts. Let’s look at what it takes from potato to french fries and from corn to chip in a bowl.Fries at McDonald’s. Let’s take a look.Plant, grow, tend and harvest potatoes. McDonald’s fries are proprietary. Special potatoes and processes.After harvesting, potatoes are shipped to plants for processing.Potatoes are sorted.Potatoes are washed.Potatoes are cut into stick shapes.Then blanched.Then dried and seasoned.Then pre-fried.Then flash frozen and packaged.The frozen packages of fries are shipped to every McDonald’s franchise by refrigerated rail cars and by refrigerated trucks. Transportation/ DeliveryFor the sake of fairness, how are tortilla chips made? Let’s look at premium, authentic tortillas first. Corn tortillas are what Mexican restaurants use for making tacos, enchiladas, tapatias and flautas. The corn tortillas are also sliced into quarters and deep fried to make tostadas.Special maize is planted, tended and harvested.Then the dried corn kernels are removed from the cobs, packaged and shipped to tortilla factories or plants.Here is what the maize or corn looks like at this stageThe corn is washed clean then the nixtamal process begins. This is the ancient Mesoamerican process that creates the masa or corn flour dough for tortillas, gorditas , tamales and tortillas.The corn is boiled and then soaked in a natural chemical called prepared lime, slaked lime, pickling lime, aka calcium hydroxide- just as it is for making hominy. Springfield-Greene County Library -- Bittersweet It makes the skin fall of the kernels and makes the kernels puff out. The texture becomes meatier.Lime is a natural substance that comes from a rather simple process of burning things like shells or wood and mixing the ashes with water. This is also how Lye is made for old-timey soaps my New Mexican frontier ancestors made. Nixtamalization: Aztecs and Ash | Feast and PhraseSo here is the nixtamal process in a factory.See how puffy the corn kernels are at this point? Look carefully in the blurry picture and use your imagination.Then the corn is thoroughly washed until all of the lime is washed out.The new clean and rinsed and dried corn ( actually it is hominy now) is called “Nixtamal” or “Nixtamalado.”Then the Nixtamalado is ground between 2 volcanic stones.And it makes masa, the delicious corn flour dough.The tortillas are pressed and cut using machines.then cooked on the conveyor beltAnd now- real tortillas are ready to be sliced and fried into corn chips from heaven.Huge factories can produce enormous batches of tostada chips using modern equipment. They purchase the corn flour that has been made by the nixtamal method- maize to hominy then ground and dried.Look at the size of the corn flour that will be mixed with water to make the tortilla chip dough.A huge sheet is rolled out and this rotating cylinder cuts the triangular shapes!The shapes are separated and dried on a conveyor belt. Then it goes through an oven.This is the oven they pass through for about a minute.Now they are ready for frying.Wow, pretty amazing.Okay, let’s compare the cost of French fries versus Tostada Chips.Which do you think would be cheaper to ship? Shelf stable tortillas or dry masa or frozen potatoes. If you guessed frozen potatoes, you are right. They have to be shipped by refrigerated trucks and rail cars.Tortillas are shelf stable, Totilla chips are shelf stable and very light.So the cost of shipping already makes McDonald’s a loser of money in this case. Mexican restaurants have a shelf stable product. Let’s add the cost of keeping french fries frozen. Electricity is not free, unless you are Bernie Sanders.___________________________________________________________________________________McDonald’s is a fast food joint. Mexican Restaurants are restaurants- not Taco Bell fast food joints. Mexican restaurants have the cost of tostadas and salsa worked into the fabric of their price structures. Have you ever noticed how Taco Bell doesn’t give “free”, endless chips and salsa? You have to buy the chips. That is how they keep the price down.Customers dining inside McDonald’s can help themselves to refills on their beverages.Free refills includes tea and coffee. A drink, no matter what size is a buck. Sweet deal.LOGICHow could McDonald’s practically have endless fries at a self serve station? They would have to rebuild the station to add the fries.Do you think McDonald’s insurance would cover customers doing this?If the crew makes the fries and puts them into a customer refill station, how will they know how much to make? How will customers handle safety around the heat lamps? How do customers get trained? Does every customer need to sign a waiver?How about food safety issues? How could McDonald’s keeping dirty hands from touching the serving handle? How would McDonald’s keep that handle clean as many people use it?They probably would be required by Health Codes Enforcement to have a mandatory hand washing station.How will customers be reassured that the customers ahead of you at the hand washing station, before the refills station, are washing their hands properly? Does McDonald’s need to train the customers in proper hand washing? Does their need to be a monitor? Do customers need to sign another waiver, a release of liability? How often will a McDonald’s employee need to sanitize the station?Say that they just set up a heat table and keep it loaded with premium fries. The fries are supposed to sit for no more than 15 minutes after cooking before they are tossed. The fries are kept in a specific order- by the amount of minutes since pulling them from the fryer so that the fries are always revolving- the minutes older ones to be served first.Have you seen how people behave at self serve buffets? How do you think this would go?Maybe McDonald’s would have a special employee to manage the free fries refill station. Who is going to pay for that extra employee? Maybe people would volunteer to be trained and volunteer a shift a week? Volunteers are unpaid. Does that sound likely to you? Will that be Bernie Sander’s version of free?Or do you think that maybe they would be forced to increase their prices on their food or downsize their quality/ quantity of menu offerings in order to make french fries, “free”? Somebody will have to pay for “free” fries if they were to keep the Golden Arches opened and not bankrupted.Let’s talk logistics about the physical plant here. The building, the square footage, the seating (the money making real estate), the additional electrical wiring, and the hardware. The hardware being the heat table and lamps and bulbs. Will extra ventilation be needed? Hmm. Maybe. Who will pay for that ? Will that be another addition of free to the citizen of the Democratic Socialist nation of McDonald’s , a la Bernie Sanders?McDonald’s would need to produce more potatoes, hire more people to process more potatoes into frozen fries ready to ship and probably increase freezer space in their buildings to accommodate more fries. Buy more oil, too. Who do you think would pay the farmers, machinists, the truckers, the rail workers, and the extra employees of many stripes to offer f extra fries to hand out for “free”? People need to get paid for their work, would you not agree?Do you see how it would be ridiculous to implement and be “free” ? Someone would have to pay for it. Perhaps those evil, rich and greedy customers should be charged “their fair share” so that economically challenged and corporately abused customers get theirs for “free”? Maybe those rich truck drivers should drive for free in service to the community. Maybe rail workers don’t need to get paid. Maybe the Mom who works at your local McDonald’s who is trying to keep food on her table at home for her kids will work an extra day or two for no pay so “free” french fries can be provided to all the Citizens of the Democratic Socialist State of McDonald’s for the sake of Social and Economic justice for the diners!Free is never free. Someone has to pay for it. “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”