[FLORIDA]- You can have it your way, but you can’t halve it your way — at least not at the Burger King on Cape Coral Parkway.
John Mack found this out a week ago Wednesday when he went to that Burger King, ordered a Whopper with cheese, fries and a drink and then asked the young man preparing the meal to cut the sandwich in half.
After Mack made the request, the worker looked at a woman Mack assumed was the manager. She told Mack that the restaurant policy was not to cut sandwiches.
The problem: Mack has one arm.
“I was a little flabbergasted,” Mack said, when the workers refused to cut the Whopper.
While serving in the U.S. military in 1977, Mack suffered a “traumatic amputation” of his right arm, the 52-year-old Cape Coral man said.
Mack’s arm is removed 6 inches above the elbow.
Wearing a short-sleeve shirt, he still pointed out the obvious and told the worker that he was disabled.
The woman said that plastic knives were available if he wanted to cut the sandwich himself. He said that if he could have cut the burger with a plastic knife, he wouldn’t have asked them to cut it for him.
“She shrugged her shoulders,” Mack said, “like whatever.”
Mack said he was hungry, so he bought the meal anyway.
“I sat there and let it fall apart and ate it,” he said.
I called the Cape Coral restaurant and the manager said she couldn’t discuss the incident.
The Cape Coral Parkway Burger King is one of 27 Burger King restaurant franchises owned by Southern Management Corp. of Belle Glade.
J. Blanco, the director of operations, spoke to me.
“That’s our policy, not to cut the sandwich,” Blanco said. “We want to keep the employees safe so they don’t cut themselves and for the customers, too. The less you mess around with the customer’s food, the better.”
Employees are afraid they’ll lose their jobs if they violate corporate rules, Blanco said.
Still, he contended, the manager should have exercised common sense and cut Mack’s burger.
Blanco added that if he had been in the restaurant that day, he would have broken the policy, washed his hands and cut the sandwich himself.
As Blanco put it: “Some things you do because it’s the right thing to do and the human thing to do.”
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