Restaurant Review - Wingstop

January 6, 2017

Now I have always thought highly of Richard Sherman, ever since he came out of Stanford University to the Seahawks.  Because of our son’s experience there, we know how they prepare students to take their places on the world stage and make something happen, and we’ve seen it over and over.

So when we heard that Richard had joined a partnership in a new restaurant based on various types of chicken wings, we put it on the back burner as something to check out.

Well, be that as it may, my fellow intrepid explorer of the depths of White Center, Marty Etquibal, and I were footloose and fancy free today, and decided the time was ripe for a venture into the wilds of Westwood Village, where the one and only WingStop holds forth on a pedestrian corner between Sleep Country and the 24 hour fitness joint (motto:  Come work out here, then pig out on some wings on the way out!).

We’re here to join forces and tell you, don’t.  Much as it pains me to pan anything with Richard Sherman’s name attached, if invisibly or in any other way, I must in all honestly rain a reality blast down on this particular endeavor, and tell my friends, “Don’t go there.”

Philosophically, I realize that you can not critique the entire menu of any given restaurant  without eating there many times, to allow for hidden gems in the menu.  It’s like, when the nurse asks you, “are you allergic to any medications?” all you can say is, “Well, I haven’t taken them all yet, so I can’t rightly say… got any you want me to try?”

In this case, such hope is soon dashed, and the clues that shout themselves as you walk in the door are undeniable.  First, it’s the middle of rush hour, and the place is empty.  There’s exactly one other person inside, and she’s from the Post Office, so she’s probably on break.

The décor is heavy on fast food chic mixed with IKEA frills, with great views out into the empty parking lot and vacant sidewalks.  The menu is brief, very brief, and really only wants to know one thing:  boneless, or boned?  There are lots of sides available, but it really boils down to what kind of sauce you want on your wings?

I ordered the combo in bone with French fries and smoky barbecue sauce, while Marty asked for the same sauce over boneless wings, with potato salad on the side.  We both got a tall paper cup to fill at the fountain, which surprisingly contained no diet sodas, or even water.   I poured a cup of ice and waited for it to melt, and talked into it to speed up the process.

It took a surprising amount of time to prepare two small orders in an empty restaurant, but my ice was not even half melted when we dug in.  That was where reality set in.

The barbecue sauce was unmistakably none other than Sweet Baby Ray’s, off the shelf at Costco, and I would swear to that on a stack of the wimpy brown paper towels they supply for napkins, which is unfortunate, because they dump enough sauce on the poor wings  for you to eat your lunch three times over and still make chili with the leftovers.  The boneless wings turned out to be the most severely over-breaded Chicken Un-Tenders out of those 47 pound bags of thrice frozen remnants with the Foster Farms label in the Costco bulk foods section.    And Oh, Look, over there the huge tubs of Kirkland potato salad look just like the formless wad served to Marty in an overstuffed paper tub, probably less than a week old.  At least the bony chicken wings had real meat on them, all six of them for $10, I must grant that.  The “boneless” wings could have well included some tofu, if not a lot of beak parts, not that you could tell under all that breading.  My fries were good, until I ate one and discovered they were covered in toxic levels of sodium chloride.  At least they were real potatos.

To sum up, the Wing Stop restaurant is a prime candidate for a new reality show, “Costo Gone Wild”, but not one that we can recommend for our friends or any other discerning palates.  If you feel piqued by this, if your hopes were dashed because you were thinking the same thing as me but hadn’t found the place yet, feel free to check for yourself.  I’d suggest soon, though, restaurants that are empty at lunchtime are soon empty all the time.  Marty and I deserve a medal of some sort for exposing ourselves to this experience, so you don’t have to… urp.  :-{)}

Bread and Roses

People forget in this time of conservatism and division how things used to be, say, back in the Thirties, during the Great Depression.  People learned to get together, and to make do, and to get by.

My mother used to tell how, on a trip to town, they would throw a couple of the best spare tires, along with some tubes with the fewest patches on them, and the patch kit, into the back of the truck before leaving the farm.  With war rationing on and rubber in short supply, a couple of flat tires per trip on the old country roads was typical.

Mom would talk about how, with Dad out in the fields early in the morning, there would be a knock on the back door, and there would stand a starving young man who had just jumped out of a boxcar at the crossing, asking for work.  Grandma would invite the young man in and seat him at the kitchen table, then put a glass of fresh milk in front of him, along with a big ham sandwich on homemade bread, surely the best meal the man had seen in a few days.  After he ate, she would send him out behind the shed, where a pile of unsplit firewood lay in wait, so he could recover a shred of his dignity by splitting a few pieces of it before going on his way.  She always packed a bit of lunch for them also.

If you had a farm, you did not go hungry, in those days, and neither did anyone who crossed your stoop.  You darned your socks over and over, and made new dresses out of old, you did what you had to do, and you got by.

This is why I don’t get too concerned about the real fear that America can disintegrate into the same kind of chaos we lived through then, because we have shown that we will pull together in our communities and realize that we can get things done if we get together and work at them.

Look at what came out of the Thirties and Forties, as we survived war, starvation, and political upheaval, and formed Unions, fought the rich guys for a piece of the action, won that battle, and built the Working Class into the Middle Class.  Over the years, we got too complacent and secure in our positions, then we started feeling threatened by newcomers, forgetting that we were all newcomers once, too.  This led to the tendency to arm up, build fortresses, and man the ramparts against all comers, real or imagined.  This led inevitably to the conservatism that demands walls, and borders, and snoops into the neighbors back yards looking for enemies.  It’s no wonder the middle class is fading back into the workers again, always looking up at a carrot that is pulling away.

The tendency of Capitalism to always search for the lowest operating cost was best summarized by Karl Marx, when he said something like, “the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life." The class struggle is based on the tug-o-war across that line.

But nowadays the product of labor is more often an idea, in the form of a program, or a service generated on and by the Internet.  Furthermore, the increase of robotics in manufacturing and customer service applications has become a geometrical progression, to the point where an article in today’s Seattle Times http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/automation-could-replace-one-out-of-three-us-jobs-within-about-15-years-report-says/  says that 38% of American jobs can disappear due to automation in 15 years.  Now is not the time to consider a career in driving truck, for example.

But maybe now is a good time to start the conversation going on the concept of a guaranteed minimum income for all people.  Imagine, if you will, the potential savings to the companies, which translates into earnings per share, as robots take over.  In trucking, for example, you could program the robots to always stay in the right lane, leave plenty of room in front of them for cars to merge in and out (or even in a separate lane just for them, when we get going on the idea), and drive all day and all night, stopping only for fuel or recharging their batteries.  All the money those robots would make as they drove down the public highway could either go into the pockets of the owners of the companies who bought the robots, or it could be shared evenly with all the displaced truck drivers, so they could go do what they want to do.  Each owner-operator could buy just one truck, send it out to work for him or her, and sit back and manage the operation from the home computer.  Trucking companies as we know them will disappear.

I see no reason beyond technology that we could not ultimately, as a human race, decide to use technology and robotics to make life easier for literally everyone on the planet, starting with the poorest and hungriest and working our way up to the wealthiest, who by that time will be getting hard up for household help and personal servants, so we will let them belly up to the public trough with the rest of us.  If you look closely at anyone who thinks this is a bad idea, you might see a big ol’ hog with his trotters already in the trough up to his hocks, just trying to avoid competition.

Imagine a world where the robots have freed the people to restore the planet to the original pristine condition in which we found it, and build the means to explore outer space, and pull our material needs from the asteroids that are the crumbled remains of a different planet, or the gaseous upper atmosphere of Jupiter, where the countries are so peaceful, because nobody is starving anymore or feeling like they have to steal or kill to get ahead, so you can go anywhere and visit in peace.  Imagine what we could accomplish if we decided collectively to make that world our goal, and work for it determinedly.  Some already have.

But, you say, what about the rich elites who already suck up the vast majority of the income in this world for themselves?  Don’t you think they might have an opinion about such a goal?  And that will lead us right back to the old tug-of-war, and the final question that everyone must answer at some point:  Which side of that line are you on?  :-{)}