Burger King: Paper towels in the bathroom please
I have been working for Doug for almost 4 months now. I am happy to say that I have learned a lot.
One of these things is proper hand-washing. So every time I go to a public restroom I keep my eyes open and watch every detail.
I often notice when someone skips the hand-washing step or someone who doesn’t dry up afterwards.
Just the other day I went during my lunch break to Burger King to grab a double cheeseburger. I went to the restroom first, and when I was in one of the stalls, a woman came in with her kid, telling him to scrub his hands. I heard water running. Then they just left - but I didn’t hear any paper tearing.
Well, there wasn’t any. No, BK didn’t just run out of paper. They didn’t have a paper towel dispenser at all. Only a drier. And a very lousy one. The evidence:
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BK employees should not only wash their hands, but dry them as well.
Frustrated I left, and hesitated: Can I still eat my burger, knowing that employees (or at least the women) don’t dry their hands properly in that establishment?
No more BK cheeseburgers for me. Doug wrote in a letter:
Blow dryers should not be used because they accumulate microorganisms from toilet aerosols, and can cause contamination of hands as they are dried by the drier (Knights, et al., 1993; Redway,et al., 1994).
Every bathroom should have running water, soap and paper towel.
Check out this other BK incidence: Restaurant sinks are not bathtubs
http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/admin/trackback/87285
I agree that the BK staff should wash their hands, but when I was 15 and working in fast food, we had a separate sink in the back with soap and paper towels. Paper towels in public restrooms make the place trashy and hard to keep clean. And when you are making $5-6 an hour in hot, unpleasant conditions, making the even more unpleasant aspect of cleaning the bathrooms a little easier makes a difference.
As for washing and drying my own hands, I used to be compulsive about it, soap, water, anti-bacterial hand gel, many many times a day. I was sick all the time with nearly everything that goes around. Now I wash my hands before meals only, skipping the every-time-I-pee routine. Truthfully, I cannot remember the last time I had a cold, flu, stomach bug while I used to have them all the time. I truly believe that I've fortified my immunity and that this country is WAY too over-the-top germ-phobic.
Food handlers should absolutely have clean hands, but perhaps the fact everyone else is killing any immunity is the reason people get sick.