Fast food is.....something else. It has a certain "je ne sais quoi". It's a passive means for which big corporations slowly murder us, and we love them for it.
So; on the 12th of August, Popeyes came out with a signature chicken sandwich. That's not big news, right? Well, thanks to Twitter, the following qualifies as compelling: NEWS FLASH: A fast food joint that mainly serves chicken released a chicken sandwich!
Apparently what occurred was Popeyes released their sandwich as normal, and then Chik-Fil-A released an official tweet that indicated that they were the original chicken sandwich people. That's a fair point, but Popeyes' official Twitter retweeted the tweet from Chik-Fil-A with a comment that read "...you guys good?"
You...guys...good? This cute little passive-aggressive quip amounted to what has been estimated as the equivalent to a 30 million dollar ad campaign. People have been flooding their local Popeyes to get a taste of their chicken sandwich. The sandwich is great, I was eating it before this madness occurred.
In the meantime, Wendy's is chiming in with their usual brand of catty bullshit by constantly commenting on Popeyes' tweets in more aggressive than passive ways that amount to the type of harassment that occurs when a Chihuahua barks at the Moon.
All Popeyes locations in my area are currently OUT of chicken sandwiches, specifically the brioche buns. It would be stupid of them to not just slap a tender on a bun if they still had the buns.
Anywho. The internet is having its share of nerdgasms over the concept of ranking fast food restaurants, so to change things up I'd like to rank the absolute worst fast food restaurants and explain why:
#6; Burger King:
Burger King is neat, but it makes this list because something happened to their food recently. I'm not talking about the "impossible whopper". I used to eat a lot of Burger King, because in my younger days I was a pretty hardcore video game junkie. Something about Burger King, Mountain Dew, and XBox 1 just seemed to make the universe work right. Burger King introduced this new "2 for $6" deal, and I'd go there to scarf down two whoppers or two spicy chicken sandwiches. Dear Lord almighty, not long after eating two of any of the sandwiches offered for the 2 for $6 deal, I'd be experiencing Montezuma's Revenge. It made a horrible impression when it happened while my wife and I were riding on a subway train, and I ran into the nicest subway station attendant who quickly led me to an employee bathroom. I was a split second away from disaster, I owe that man my dignity.
#5; McDonald's
The food is passable, and this restaurant itself tries to sell itself like a big bag of crack. I've always despised how McDonald's markets themselves. They're the happy fun place! And you go into one and it's about as miserable as a downtown bus station at 3am. I can't get over just how backward they are compared to what they claim to be. There's also how they were portrayed in this old movie "Mac and Me", where football players in full gear were depicted in choreographed dance lines as just a normal occurrence at your local McDonald's. I truly believe that the world would have been a much better place if McDonald's never existed.
#4; Hardees:
The food is okay, and the employees are some of the worst I've ever encountered. These idiots NEVER know what's on their own menu, or even what's being advertised on TV for their restaurants. It's not the attitude of "Oh? You say that you saw an ad for a jalapeno cheese burger on tv? I must have missed that", it's the attitude of "You're a fucking idiot! And now I'm going to talk your ear off about the ten thousand reasons I just came up with for why what you just said was stupid!". I wouldn't be sharing this if it didn't happen at multiple locations, in multiple states, at different times of day. I get that occasionally any fast food place will throw an employee at you that's all "You want a number 5? What is that again?" At damn near every Hardees I've ever been too, I'm handed some asshole who apparently believes that there are only four options on the menu and that customers will occasionally just make up a random food item for fun.
#3; Taco Bell:
What in the fuck happened to you Taco Bell? You used to be so much fun. They were my number two option when I was a hopeless video game addict. Something changed though. They started doing these goofy ass commercials that rubbed me the wrong way, but I would still go back here and there. Lately though, across Taco Bells all over the country, stale fucking bread has become a thing. My go-to option was to get nacho cheese chalupas, where they replace the sour cream with nacho cheese. I had gone there last year, and the bread was fucking inedible. I went back, they apologized, and remade my food. The chalupas I got this time were OBVIOUSLY also stale, but reheated. I decided to never go back to that Taco Bell, and EVERY damn Taco Bell I've gone to ever since has tried selling me chalupas with bread that would seem to have expired months before serving. Also; fucking nacho fries? These idiots at Yum! Brands pinched off these commercials that have been going on for about a half-decade that imagine nacho fries being at the center of plot lines for parodies of movie trends, and they're not even THAT good. Nacho fries taste exactly like they sound, like you just bought a bag of something that has Andy Capp on the front of it. Fun for a silly stupid snack, but not worth a nauseatingly stupid ad campaign.
#2; Wendy's:
Does Wendy's realize that they're the type of restaurant that trailer trash would only reluctantly visit if they were unable to go anywhere else? Fine, some people go to Wendy's sometimes. Their signature menu item is a milkshake that, in it's normal form, can't be consumed with a straw. So they serve it to you in a cup, with a top, and a fucking straw. They have the Baconater, which is a pretty apropos name considering eating one of them is like hooking an IV full of pureed cow parts to one of your arteries. It's a play on the word "dominator", and it sounds a lot like a play on the popular movie villain "The Terminator". I'm pretty sure that a Baconater would have a better chance of killing Sarah Conner than a psychotic murder-bot from the future. Then there's their ridiculously overzealous social media campaign, where a slender Wendy mascot goes after literally anything that any of the other fast food joints share on Twitter. It's fine if you have a great one-liner smackdown that you can't resist sharing, but good fucking grief. If they put that much energy into developing a menu that won't kill you, I'd be more likely to go there.
#1; Church's Chicken:
Two words: stomach flu. Those are powerful words as they relate to a major fast food chain, so I'll explain. I went to a Church's Chicken that was located on Hurlburt Field in Fort Walton Beach Florida. It's no longer there because apparently this happened to a lot of other people. I ate their chicken sandwich, and a day later I started feeling nauseous. I still went into work, foolishly, and suffered through it because it was a Friday and I knew the weekend was coming. That weekend, I spent 99% of my time in the bathroom scaring the hell out of my dogs. Never in my life have I ever experienced diarrhea like that, which was coming out of me like a fire hose on full blast, only to have to immediately switch places afterward and erupt with vomit that would make the special effects artists for the Exorcist take notes, and then have to switch back again. I have never seen, or heard of a more harrowing experience that anyone else has ever had that involved a toilet. I managed to get through it, and be well enough for work on Monday. While those other restaurants have pissed me off in their own way, Church's Chicken hit me with biological warfare.
