I know my way around a fry basket.

I can juggle and bubble fries, corn dogs, fish and tater tots all at the same time to a golden brown. And I can tight wrap a burger, bag an order of tots, slice a tomato, crack a head of lettuce, fill a condiment dispenser, sweep a parking lot, mop a floor, empty a grease trap, clean a bathroom, handle a rush at the counter, make change and pound a tough steak into tender submission.

I am a veteran of Dixie Burger Broil.

The long-failed model was to buy defunct gas stations around town and convert them to fast food places. I think there were five or six of them in the late ‘60s. I trained on Lamar near Holiday City and in Frayser and ended up on the counter on Poplar just east of White Station.

Conaway: Pauses in the flow, a city’s tragic losses

The eponymous broil was accomplished by two bicycle chains about a burger wide on a pulley in a stainless-steel box under flame. Drop the thin patty on the chain, and pick it up on the other end, if it made it. Many broke and fell through the chain. If the trip was completed, the hamburger was cooked. Mostly. The “steak” sandwiches took two trips, after they were beat with a spiked mallet into something chewable. Sort of.

Everything else went in the fry basket. Including a couple of my fingers a couple of times.

A buck an hour. My meteoric rise from scut work to counter included a promotion that lasted four months. At the end, I was making ... a buck an hour.

I was 16. That wasn’t my life work, but it is for many. It wasn’t skilled labor, but skills were learned, and the labor was honest.

Last month, Nora and I pulled into a gas station/food stop/merchandise store/gift shop/one-stop-everything interstate stop on I-10 in LA (lower Alabama) called Buc-ee’s.

You experienced travelers are way ahead of me at this point, but this was my first Buc-ee’s visit and I was in wide-eyed amazement. You could lose four or five of Haslam’s Pilots in there, in fact, you could throw in a couple of Love’s, too, with room to spare. And there was no co-branding with McDonald’s, or KFC, or Subway, or Krystal, or Dairy Queen.

Conaway: The Lucca Model — a proposal

This was all Buc-ee’s, and that eager little beaver had his mark on every tree in this considerable retail forest.

This place is its own world, more pumps than a fitness video, more branded food and merchandise than a Walmart warehouse, more flavors of peanuts than Planters, more flavors of trail mix than an REI Co-op reunion, more brisket than a Texas home game tailgate, and bigger and cleaner bathrooms than a convention center.

And to get to those bathrooms, you had to wind your way through the whole experience.

They were cooking brisket five or six ways right in the middle of the massive place, and every time somebody ordered whatever the buzzword brisket of the day was, everybody in the cooking circle hollered something in unison complimenting the customer’s choice.

This was a lesson in branding, but I submit the lesson for us was outside on a sign.

Nora went in first while I waited in the car with the dogs — too hot to leave them with the windows up, so somebody needed to wait with them.

Right in front of me was a sign about job openings. The entry-level job on that sign — cashier — paid $18 an hour. That entry-level job came with insurance — medical, dental, and vision. And with paid vacation. And if you don’t use it, you can roll it, or cash it. And the job comes with a 401K, with an employer match up to 6%.

Conaway: The Tasteful List 2022

Maybe that was what those folks in the brisket circle were hollering about.

There’s a new kind of woke out there — not the buzzword kind of racial-awareness woke that so bothers people on the right. This is the kind of woke that so bothers people at the top of America’s public companies. This is the kind of woke that keeps Amazon’s Jeff Bezos awake at night. This is the kind of woke that keeps Starbucks up and restless far more than a double shot of espresso.

America’s service workers, the folks out there cooking our brisket, packing our boxes, and steaming the milk on our lattes have become aware of what they’re worth. That awareness may be bringing the Bezos rocket ship down to earth and frothing Starbucks.

They believe they’re worth a living wage. They believe they’re worth benefits. Buc-ee’s, a private company, seems to believe that, too, and seems to believe that’s the way forward.

And don’t start with the “if wages go up, prices must follow” knee-jerk Pavlovian responses.

If there’s enough margin in Amazon to build rocket ships for Bezos and buy him The Washington Post to play with, there’s room to hold his prices and stop holding his employees hostage. If there’s enough margin to pay American CEO’s hundreds and hundreds times their employees’ average salary, salaries can go up without taking prices up.

And surely if there’s enough margin in a Starbucks Venti anything to build stores across the street from each other, there’s enough to bump wages up.

Ironically, Starbucks, the darling of the hip and the originator of the five-buck cup of coffee, has recently lost a couple of local court battles here along these lines, and has been forced to hire their employees back who were planning to organize and were fired because of it.

Starbucks loses appeal; must take Memphis 7 back

Amazon is facing union organizing efforts in distribution facilities across the land, and news of their brutal tactics is leaking.

The cavalier attitude of public companies toward their employees in favor of their shareholders is beginning to pay the dividends they deserve.

That attitude is building a new union movement.

For another local example, a few years ago someone we know worked for ServiceMaster. He was promoted several times and was featured on their website. A couple of weeks after his promotion and pay raise, his whole department was laid off just prior to a quarterly stock report. Hey, they needed to look good for the shareholders.

While I was writing this, I think ServiceMaster probably sold another one of their brands.

Post COVID, unemployment in Memphis and the nation is very low, but turnover in the service sector is high. If a job is lost in the morning, another job can be found by the afternoon shift somewhere else.

Any job at $12 or $13 an hour — or less — with no benefits looks pretty much like any other.

At a minimum, minimum wages must go up, and employers have to start paying more attention to the welfare of those they employ. Anybody who owns a business knows the cost of turnover, and the frequency and cost are increasing.

Invest in your people to keep your people.

Meantime, try the brisket at Buc-ee’s when you see one. It’s reasonably priced and served with a smile.

I’m a Memphian, and I’d love to see smiles on the other side of our counters again.