Anne Hull: The Hardee’s biscuit slides toward the heat lamp, and the uniforms are waiting.
“That one’s mine,” says Brandi Garner, snagging the cinnamon biscuit. A digital clock overhead is tracking each customer’s wait time in the drive-through and transmitting the results back to corporate. Brandi folds the bag so the heat won’t escape, then leans out into the 8-degree wind chill with snow spitting sideways on her face and farmland all around. At home later she’ll have a few nice sips of Equate Stomach Relief, but now she’s counting four sets of headlights and two employees who called in sick.
“Let’s go,” Brandi says, drumming her fingers. “Where’s the egg and cheese?”
Two weeks earlier in Washington, a former Hardee’s biscuit shift worker had appeared in front of 32 million Americans to present her vision for the country.
Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, recalled growing up in the small Iowa town of Red Oak and working the biscuit shift at Hardee’s to pay for college. Ernst, 44, cited her own striving as proof that opportunity is available to any American who wants it.
“You just need the freedom to dream big and a whole lot of hard work,” she said.
Brandi didn’t see the speech. Neither did any of her co-workers. They had never thought of the biscuit shift as a parable. Hardee’s is a job, and paychecks come out every other Wednesday. Trina Starkey, who is 18, spends hers on rent and ramen noodles. Emily Abell, who is 20, buys diapers. Brandi, who is 31, drives around Creston with a bank envelope to pay her bills, including a stop at Leslie’s Dance Emporium to cover her daughter’s tumbling class.
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