Basic Trope: A fast food place that's bad to work at, especially as a first-time job.
- Straight: Charlie is a teenager getting his first job at Burger Queen. He ends up hating it.
- Exaggerated: Charlie and all of his friends have to work at Burger Queen, and they despise it because the boss will kill them if they fail their jobs.
- Downplayed: Saying that Charlie hates working at Burger Queen is an overstatement, but he doesn't necessarily enjoy it either.
- Justified: Can be Truth in Television. Jobs at fast food restaurants aren't necessarily sought for, and this can be due to many factors including bad customers and minimum wage payment.
- Inverted: Happiness in Minimum Wage: Charlie loves working at Burger Queen.
- Subverted: Charlie doesn't want to work at Burger Queen, because he thinks it's going to be a terrible job, but goes in to find that he actually likes the job.
- Double Subverted: Until people berate him for not getting a "real" job.
- Parodied: Working a single hour at Burger Queen is considered a Fate Worse than Death.
- Zig-Zagged: Sometimes Charlie enjoys the job, but sometimes he doesn't.
- Averted:
- There isn't anything notable about working at a fast food restaurant.
- Nobody works at a fast food restaurant.
- Enforced:
- Based on the author's experience of working at fast food places.
- "We need a place for Charlie to work at, where should it be?" "He's 16, right? Let's have him working at a fast food restaurant."
- Lampshaded:
- "I really hate this job."
- "I'm 19 years old and I've already wasted my entire life."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Implied: The conditions at Burger Queen are never shown, but every time Charlie comes home from work, he's visibly drained.
- Defied: Charlie decides that he will not work at a fast food restaurant as his first job.
- Discussed: Charlie is shown to grow more and more cynical and angry as he works at Burger Queen.
- Conversed: "Fiction has always made me nervous to work in the fast food business."
- Deconstructed: It is steadily revealed that Burger Queen is only terrible precisely because of a complex network of the way society treats people who end up working at menial labor jobs like this:
- Customers mistreat the workers because they view them as beneath them (bonus points if it turns out the customers preach about solidarity with workers, only to turn around and sneer at the "servants" working at fast food for daring to act like they deserve better wages).
- Management and the chain actively subjects workers to abysmal treatment in order to squeeze as much short-term profits for themselves (or for their own sadistic amusement and flexing their power over the workers).
- Society needs menial labor to be kept underfoot in order to feed the need for endless consumption and to keep the workers from rising up against their abuse. Any genuine benefit to be gained from treating Charlie properly only means that other workers will start asking for better treatment and wages, and they don't want that.
- When Charlie finds out about all of the above, he tries to get people on his side to fight for better treatment of workers, only for them to sneeringly dismiss him, telling him to "get a real job" or to suck up the abuse.
- Played for Horror: After being abused one too many times by his Pointy-Haired Boss or obnoxious customers, Charlie completely snaps and shoots up Burger Queen, killing several people.
Back to Burger Fool. Would you like some fries with that?
