Nothing Kills a Romantic Dinner Faster Than Trixter
Who decides what music to play in chain restaurants? I found myself wondering this as I inhaled my dinner tonight at Whataburger, sitting almost directly under a Bose speaker that was blasting out disco hits from the 1970s. I know that almost every nationally franchised eatery in this country fills their dining rooms with playlists pumped in from satellite radio stations; they’ve been doing it that way for years, long before XM and Sirius took the technology to Joe Public. However, who is in charge of picking the specific songs we hear? Regional managers? Corporate folk? The ghost of Wolfman Jack? Who is it already? “Funkytown” didn’t just interrupt my bacon cheeseburger and fries by itself, you know.
I’ve been curious about this for a long time. None of the on-site managers at the various low-paying and utterly demeaning food service jobs I had as a teenager/young adult seemed to know who was directly responsible for the tunes the customers were hearing. Most of the time, their only music-related duty was turning the receiver on and making sure the volume was at the right level. Everything else was out of their hands. The stock answer seemed to be, “I don’t know, it’s all computers now, shooting it here from some shack in Arizona via satellites. You know, robots and shit.” Then they’d change the subject to the dishes and how I needed to do them. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Oh, well. There’s no way this will be nagging at my brain one night at two in the morning when I’m twenty-eight.”
Some restaurants seem to cater musically to their largest demographic. Almost every Taco Bell I’ve ever been to has had the current Top 40 in rotation. That’s because teenagers primarily eat there, and I haven’t met too many thirteen year olds who aren’t totally obsessed with mainstream radio or MTV. The Bell I used to work at put an emphasis on R&B and dance cuts late at night; seemingly, this was to put the raver crowd at ease as they came in for their 10:00 P.M. breakfast. Arby’s, on the other hand, which appears to aim its eats at blue collar adults, usually has some variation of light rock or country going in its locations. Because after a long day toiling in the steel mill, no workin’ man wants to mosey on in to his favorite roast beef supplier and hear Kanye West droppin’ mad rhymes over a sick beat. No sir, he wants to clog his arteries to something peaceful and serene, like Harry Chapin.
Of course, not every chain is so in tune (pardon the pun) with their regulars. Some places don’t seem to care what’s going on over their airwaves. The Perkins that enslaved me as a bus boy for six months around the turn of the century is a good example. 90% of their cliental was approaching the age of 90, yet they insisted on an aural smattering of post-grunge, assaulting old fogies with the likes of Weezer, Green Day, and that annoying “If I Could Be Your Woman” song. Once I even heard Alice in Chains on Radio Perkins – and it wasn’t one of their soft acoustic numbers, either. Rather, my ears were confounded by the hard-driving “Get Born Again,” an obscure cut they recorded for their 1999 box set. I wouldn’t be that shocked by restaurant music again until 2003, when I found myself in a Bennigan’s that played nothing but 1980s hair metal. Let me tell you, nothing kills a romantic dinner faster than Trixter.
Are any of you restaurant satellite radio programmers out there reading this? Can you give us some insight into this strange process and why some of the more baffling decisions are made? Why are you forcing “Buddy Holly” on World War II veterans? Who wants to hear P.J. Farley while they eat? Who do you think you are, where are you located, and most importantly…are you by any chance hiring?
