Flight of the Grande

Last week, 23-year-old Matthew Webb died after getting shot in the neck at the Brooklyn McDonald’s where he worked, allegedly by the adult son of a customer enraged over cold French fries. Earlier this year, 19-year-old Burger King worker Krystal Bayron-Nieves was shot and killed at a Harlem Burger King, even as she complied with a robber’s demands. Yet neither of these fast-food giants is leaving the inner city. By contrast, Starbucks is closing locations across the country, including in Washington’s Union Station—not because any worker has been killed recently, thankfully, but because of rampant disorder. The different corporate reactions offer a parable for our times: poorer people stuck living and working in increasingly dangerous inner-city neighborhoods suffer far more than the affluent newcomers who can come and go at will. Unlike McDonald’s, Starbucks could afford to support progressive policies a few years back because it knew that leaving was an option if things got rough.

Contrary to intuition, New York’s fast-food restaurants, until recently, weren’t dangerous places to work—even as Burger King, McDonald’s, and their smaller competitors weren’t shy about locating stores in dangerous neighborhoods and keeping them open well into the night to serve their minority customer bases. According to Bureau of Labor Statics data, New York City had zero homicides of workers at “limited-service restaurants” between 2011 and 2019. Nationwide, such homicides ranged from 14 to 29 annually—low numbers, considering the scale of the business. (These numbers don’t include customer deaths.) Fast-food companies and franchisees have been able to keep risks low for workers in high-crime neighborhoods partly because they take precautions, including hiring guards, quickly securing cash, creating physical space between customers and workers, and restricting locked bathrooms to paying customers. The inside of an urban Burger King feels more like a half-competently run state mental institution where the patients have earned some walking-around privileges than a European “third place” café.