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Football is a big part of our school’s culture here at UCF, and going to a game is an experience every student should try out at least once. You can start off with tailgating, meet up with your friends, find some good seats, and maybe grab a bite to eat from the concession stand. Actually, on second thought, you might want to skip that last part. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling all my friends since this past weekend when I spent eight hours working in one of the many food stands inside the stadium.
I volunteered to help work concessions as a way to help earn some extra money for an organization I’m part of on campus, which I won’t name here so that the organization won’t face any backlash if they want to work concessions again in the future (although, you can be certain I won’t be back anytime soon.) Volunteering to help out with concessions seems like a nice idea at first, and one that many organizations take advantage of, since the company that does concessions at the games gives the organizations that volunteer a small percentage of the profits in exchange for working. This seems like a pretty cool thing for the concessions company to do, that is, until you realize it’s likely all just a clever way to save money and use cheap labor. By calling it “volunteering” and making it a partial proceeds rather than actual work and wages, the company is able to sidestep labor laws that require workers to be paid a minimum wage (in Florida, this is $8.05 an hour.) Since I worked eight hours, if I had been paid the legal minimum wage, I should have been paid about $64 for that night. I can tell you that, when divided from the number of members who volunteered and the total profit our organization made, I was not compensated for my work anywhere close to that amount.
Ok, I know what some of you might be thinking: whiney millennials complaining again about everything and being entitled, and after all, wasn’t this technically volunteering? Well I haven’t even begun to dive into the hundred other questionable aspects of the night. You might think that since I was technically a volunteer I was welcomed graciously by the employees of the concessions company and thanked for all my hard work. The reality could not have been any farther from this. The only representative from the actual concessions company that I interacted with the entire night was a woman which, for the sake of privacy as well as accuracy, I will call Snack Witch. Snack Witch was a woman in her 30s or 40s who in many ways reminded me of Miss Trunchbull from the movie Matilda. She was rude to me and the volunteers from the start, acting like anything we did was just wasting her time, and becoming annoyed if we dared to ask any questions. I can tell you, there’s nothing quite like spending a Friday night being yelled at by a bitter woman who clearly doesn’t value you at all as a person. In my whole life, I don’t believe I have ever been talked to as disrespectfully before, or treated as such an idiot, as I was that night. By the end of the night, I was impressed with my own self-control that I hadn’t snapped and screamed some things I would have regretted at this miserable woman.
To add to the unpleasantness of the experience, it wasn’t just one woman who I had to take abuse from. In addition to Snack Witch, there were the customers themselves, who were professionals at yelling at me, complaining about everything, criticizing the way I worked, and demanding their money back. The last part made my job especially hard, since Snack Witch had made it clear from the start that profit, not customer satisfaction, was our prerogative. In fact, that principle applied to pretty much every aspect of my job that night. We were coached not to give anyone a refund unless we absolutely had to, a rule that I abandoned completely by the end of the night, as a means of self-preservation from customers’ wrath, as well as for the satisfaction of knowing that I was probably making Snack Witch’s life harder by doing so. Aside from the “no refunds” guideline, there was the fact that the way we kept track of the items we sold was by the number of cups and cardboard boats that we served the food in. We had to count all of these at the beginning of the night and at the end of the night, and if our count didn’t match the profit we made, we were warned that we might not be going home before 2:30AM. This created an issue, as there were many, many customers who asked for cups for water, or extra food boats for spillage (both completely reasonable requests that I was forced to deny, and then was met with sometimes yelling, sometimes an eyeroll and huffy breath as the customer turned and walked away.)
The biggest customer complaints, however, were in regard to the actual food we were serving them. This is actually the part of the whole experience that makes me angriest. I can deal with rude supervisors, I can deal with angry customers, but it’s the most frustrating thing in the world to be yelled at for something that is completely out of your control, and to know that you’re in that situation because of the cheapness of some crappy company with terrible business practices. The stand I was working at alongside a few other volunteers was one that, among other things, served kettle corn, caramel corn, lemonade, and sweet tea. Common things, popular things, and things that shouldn’t be that hard to get right, right? Wrong. The amount of complaints I received from customers about the quality of the food by the end of the night was insane. The lemonade was watery. The tea was watery. The kettle corn was so stale that I stopped even offering to sell it by the end of the night. I tried selling the caramel corn instead, but within half an hour of selling three buckets of that, I already had three customers visiting me again to complain that it was also stale. This was probably the exact moment I gave up on everything, started giving every customer who complained a refund without question, and knew that this was the type of awful experience that I needed to write about.
Now we get to the grossest part of this story, and the part that might make you resolve to never buy a single thing from the football stadium concession stands again. The conditions in which I was working were disgusting, to say the least. There were times throughout the night when I was ready to run to the bathroom and vomit, and then call the local health inspector to provide an anonymous tip. At the beginning of the night, Snack Witch advised us all to make sure we were wearing our plastic gloves when serving food. That was where the concern for health and food safety began and ended (even then, that mandate was followed by the statement “because I think the health inspector might show up tonight,” leading me to question the motivation of such instruction in the first place.) When I first showed up at the stand I was assigned to, every surface was covered with warm, still water that had been sitting there for god knows how long. The bags of pre-made popcorn and the bags of hotdog and hamburger buns were also soaked in water. The counters were not clean, to say the least, nor were any of the containers the food was being kept in. A fellow volunteer who had worked concessions there before told me about the roach she had found in the Italian ice stand the last time she worked there. The drinks we were supposed to be serving, lemonade and iced tea, were sitting out in the sun in reused water jugs, sealed only by a plastic glove tied loosely over their tops. They had clearly been brewed and then transferred to these containers, and therefore were very unlikely to have any sort of preservative in them that would have made it ok for them to be sitting unrefrigerated for an extended period of time. When we started pouring them, they were warm, and I had serious ethical qualms about serving them to people. The kettle corn and caramel corn, which were incredibly stale, were likely leftovers that went unsold at the last game, as another volunteer who had worked there before seemed sure about. I was shocked when, at the end of the night, I asked if I should throw out the leftover meat we had been serving for hamburgers and hot dogs, and was told that no, I should take it over to an employee at another stand, where I can only pray it was being disposed of and not saved to be used again at the next game.
At the end of the night, I went home tired, sweaty, and smelling like low-grade beef. This was my first experience ever working a food service job, and I now have an even greater appreciation for anyone who works food service. Never again will I dare to complain or be ungrateful about “bad service” I receive from servers working in what I now know to be exploitative, high-stress, and low-income positions. I can only hope that even places like McDonald’s have better practices and treat their workers with more decency than what I experienced working stadium concessions. I also realized that as young people we are vulnerable to companies and people who are looking to take advantage of us as workers because they think they can get away with it. There are people who think they can treat us without respect and expect us to still work hard, just because we’re young and are expected to put up with that sort of treatment. But just because we’re young doesn’t mean we aren’t worthy of respect and proper treatment in the workforce, and we certainly don’t owe our labor to anyone or any company who denies us that. When my shift ended that night, I decided that I would never again work concessions for a UCF football game after the horrible work conditions I had to deal with and the way I had been treated. I am a young adult, a good student, an active leader on campus, and a human being, and I am worth more than to be used for cheap labor and treated without respect. This is something we all need to remember from time to time, and I hope that any fellow student who is dealing with a toxic situation in their job, internship, or organizational involvement will remember that sometimes throwing in the towel is the right thing to do for yourself.
And while you’re at it, maybe avoid eating food from the UCF football concession stands.
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