I was born in southern California, where both my parents grew up. Because my parents were from the Los Angeles area, they developed an early appreciation for Mexican food, long before most of the rest of the country had ever heard of it. They both loved to visit the street vendors and small restaurants that dotted SoCal, serving up burritos and tamales and such.
When we moved to rural middle Tennessee in 1977, no Mexican food was to be found – anywhere. My mother couldn’t even prepare her own Mexican food very easily because the ingredients for even the simplest Mexican dishes just weren’t available at the Shelbyville, TN Kroger store circa late 70s/early 80s. She was able to find some salsa and tortillas, and she was able to make her own refried beans from pintos. While other families had sandwich fixins in the fridge, we always had the makings of a tasty, Bell Buckle-style burrito. And we consumed many of them.
Eventually there were Mexican restaurants in Nashville, an hour’s drive from our house. But it would be years before there was a real Mexican restaurant anywhere close to where we actually lived.
Enter Taco Bell.
Taco Bell came to a town closer than Nashville sometime in the first years after we moved to Bell Buckle. It was the closest thing my parents had seen to the fast food-style Mexican they had loved back in L.A. Not great, but close enough. So sometimes on the weekends, when my mother got a hankering for something other than our homemade burritos, we would all pile in the Datsun station wagon and head 20 miles up the road to the nearest Taco Bell, where I would gorge myself on a variety of tasty items, smothered in Taco Bell’s no-longer-available (damn you Taco Bell!) green sauce. As family finances and logistics made eating out at all a huge and rare treat for me as a child, these trips to Taco Bell were – dare I characterize a trip to a fast food restaurant in a strip mall this way? – quite special. In any event, they were memorable and pleasant times spent with the fam. So I became a Taco Bell fan early on.
Fast forward to college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where I spent the next five years with no car and no money. The Taco Bell within walking distance of campus, with its extensive menu of 99 cent items, became a staple, sometimes THE staple of my diet (the exception was during one period when my boyfriend worked at a nearby pizza restaurant called Stefano’s, during which I was able to consume massive quantities of free or discounted pizza and beer…). My love for Taco Bell only grew during the college years.
In other words, I have a long and storied history with The Bell. I have already run for the border approximately 65,998 times in my life span. So I was pleased to find when we bought our current house, in 2006, that a Taco Bell was located just two blocks away, in the parking lot of the infamous Fellini Kroger. Unfortunately, over the past several years, I have determined that just as there are “Bad Times” Locations for grocery stores, convenience marts and drug store chains, there are also Bad Times Locations for Taco Bell franchises. And our Taco Bell is clearly one of them.
For starters, the store is often less than clean. I usually use the drive thru, but on the rare occasions I go inside the place, I always have a sort of, “My eyes! They burn!” reaction, and I promise myself that I will never again risk my ability to eat the drive thru food by grossing myself out with a peek behind the curtain. When I use the drive thru, I can pretend the place is clean…enough. So that’s what I do. But even the exterior periphery of our Taco Bell is sketchy. I frequently encounter people in front of my in what is supposed to be the car line trying to walk thru, or even trying to beg the window cashiers for change. One time, as I was busy ordering at the drive thru window, my 11 year old daughter asked plaintively, “Mama, is that man dead?” and she pointed out to me that there was a man who did indeed appear to be deceased sprawled in the “decorative” landscaping that rings this Taco Bell’s exterior. I turned to the window cashier and pointed the man out to her, asking of she could please dial 911. She just shrugged and told me that “he sleeps there all the time.” I did end up calling 911 myself, and the responders came quickly, but they seemed familiar enough with the guy that all they did was poke him with some sort of long pole, at which point he got up, shook himself off and staggered away.
But the real problem with my neighborhood Taco Bell is with the food. They almost always get my order wrong to greater or lesser degree and/or the food just isn’t very good. How an individual Taco Bell can manage to ruin their formulaic menu items, I have no idea. But they do. I have recently calculated that it is only approximately one in every five to seven visits that my order is both A.) correct and B.)prepared in a way consistent with other Taco Bells I have visited. And those times when the food is correctly prepared and my order is accurate aren’t necessarily the same times. I’ve learned with this Taco Bell to just eat whatever happens to turn up in my bag once I get it home. If I ordered three crunchy tacos, but instead find myself in possession of a crunch wrap supreme and an apple caramel empenada, I just eat what they gave me. It’s less trouble than returning and trying to correct the order (an ordeal that’s worthy of its own blog post altogether). As far as the food quality, it’s rarely inedible, but it’s often close.
So why in the world do I keep going back to this Taco Bell at least once a week? Well, I’ve been asking myself this as well. I’ve decided that it’s a combination of laziness (it’s nearby and thus, convenient), warm childhood memories, and a type of Pavlovian response. What I mean with that last reason is that it is five to seven times more likely that my order will be wrong/bad than it will be right/good, I am clearly motivated psychologically – even conditioned – to continue buying food from this Diane Arbus Taco Bell in front of the Fellini Kroger by those rare and completely random occasions when the food is tasty and my order is correct.
In other words, I am like one of those piano playing chickens in a box at the state fair. I keep pecking the keys because I know that eventually I will be rewarded with what I really want. I may get the electric shock five times in a row, but I keep going back for more in hopes that the next time will be the time that I get the tasty treat instead. It’s kind of pathetic, actually.
12 Responses to “My Pavlovian response to our “Bad Times” Taco Bell”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
My husband could have written your post about our local McDonalds. He stopped enjoying the occasional Big Mac because he had to deal with a dirty store, workers uninterested in the customers, and never got what he ordered in his bag. I completely gave up on ever having a treat from MD, it’s better for my health.
I think it’s the owners of the franchise, they don’t give a shit, and the attitude trickles down to the people who work at these places, otherwise if management cared the place would be clean, the bums chased away, and the workers engaged and the food you ordered would be in your bag.
We have the same problem here, the franchise owners changed and the whole store and workers attitudes changed.
Oh man, that Cumberland Avenue Taco Bell. At one point it became noticeably worse. I heard hey fired the staff because they tried to unionize and re-staffed with guys out on work-release. It was a sad time. The burritos were crudely constructed.
I’m lucky to have a mexican deli on my block (having some tamales right now). It is always funny to go there. Yesterday there were a half-dozen kids putting super hero stickers all over the floor. Today they were listening to a spanish-language version of “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em Like That Anymore)”. Last weekend the owners’teenage son was trying to teach three little girls how chess is played and they were all screaming at him. You could see his mind melting. The food is good too. They don’t really do burritos, though one time when I ordered a torta milanesa I got a pretty fantastic chicken wrapped-in-a-tortilla thing by mistake. I’d order it again but I don’t know what it’s called.
I laughed out loud at this blog post. I am a psychologist, and you are right, you are on a variable reinforcement schedule, which is the type of scenario that keeps people playing slot machines in casinos, it’s the most behaviorally reinforcing algorithm there is. You will have to be very focused and diligent to break your “bad” Taco Bell habit.
I will now count my blessings that I live in California and have never had to eat at Taco Bell my whole life. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Mmmmm. Just had a bean burrito from the fabulous Fountain City TB. Your TB in nasty.
If you haven’t been to the one on the Strip lately, it’s worse. At least the people at the one near you are generally friendly. At the one on the Strip they are frequently rude as well as incompetent.
I am also very fond of Taco Bell for nostalgic reasons–my first job, the summer after my senior year of high school, was working at the Kingston Pike TB, where, garbed in a lovely brown polyester flare-legged uniform, I worked my way from sweeping the parking lot and washing dishes to taking orders and hawking Pizzazz Pizzas and the new Taco Salads. I still miss Taco Lights. And I forgot about the green sauce till you said that!
As a kid, I had refried beans for the first time at your house! How’s that for an intro to Mexican food? In Austin, where there’s plethora of Tex-Mex, Interior Mex, and every other kind of Mexican food, I rarely eat at “Taco Hell.”
Your post is, in a variable reinforcement kind of way, making me miss Fort Sanders. For all its passed-out bums and bad fast food (I stayed away from Taco Bell but had the same reaction to the nearby McDonald’s–orders wrong, bad food, scary people, some incompetent staff (but some good ones, to be fair)—but I couldn’t stay away.
I am also in love with the Bell. When I moved to Santa Barbara I would ride my bike almost two miles to get to one. They put something addictive in their food I’m sure. Sorry to hear your local branch needs improvement.
I ate my first Taco Bell when I was 16 and we were on a vacation trip to Florida, and never again until college, since we didn’t really have Taco Bell in West Tennessee until sometime in the ’80s. Memphis might have had one or two, but if so, I never saw them. Much like you, though, Taco Bell became a staple thru college. I don’t remember the green sauce, but I remember being ticked when you couldn’t get little cups of salsa anymore.
As for your current struggles with the North Knox one – it’s not just that one, it’s not just Taco Bell, it’s all fast food in general. Since it’s too much trouble to cook for just me and the fast food places are convenient, I go to several a lot, but don’t really eat a lot of burgers and stuff – I go for healthier fare, or baked potatoes, etc., and I tend to do breakfast a lot at a few.
These outings are usually my only meal that day since I generally just eat once a day, so it’s doubly frustrating when there are almost always so many issues. If you screw up my order on what is my only meal of the day – not a happy camper here.
Twenty years ago it was just an occasional occurrence that my orders were ever wrong. Now orders from anywhere and everywhere are consistently wrong, food is lukewarm to just plain cold, staff is unfriendly and indifferent to downright rude. Everywhere.
There were a couple of places in my general area – one a Taco Bell – that were the exceptions for a long time, where I knew the food would generally be good and warm enough, the order correct, and the workers not indifferent or rude. Unfortunately that particular Taco Bell is now going down the same road as so many other fast food joints in town and the other place (a McDonald’s) barely holding its own and starting to mess up here and there.
I don’t think I ever expected too much to have my food edible and warm enough I don’t have to throw it in the microwave after the two minutes it will take me to arrive home and my order correct. And I’m not asking to be fawned over by any means, but a simple “thank you” would suffice over having my food practically thrown at me out the drive-thru window by some surly-looking silent worker.
Unfortunately all this seems to have been becoming the norm, especially over the last several years. People care less and less and I guess hate their jobs more and more and I get that it’s probably not the greatest job in the world, but it seems like the days are long gone when people entering the workforce were taught about customer service as a priority. That makes me sound old and grouchy, I guess, but the change has just been so very noticeable (not just in food service but really every aspect of business) in the past 10-15 years, it’s hard to overlook.
I just hardly ever bother anymore and mostly eat at home now, even if it’s just a bowl of oatmeal or cereal or something else equally unexciting. As high-priced as groceries are getting nowadays, it’s not necessarily cheaper, but it’s a lot better than the disappointment of having my order messed up or the food not edible. I think the last couple of times I did venture somewhere, I ended up throwing away more than I ate (if I ate it at all – most recently I took a bite of a sandwich and ended up doling the rest out to my dogs).
The Taco Bell craving will still hit me tho and I’ll be forced to go. Fortunately right now at what was my “good” Taco Bell, the food is usually still good and the orders are usually correct, but now that I’m noticing the same staff indifference/apathy there that I’m used to seeing at other fast food places, I expect it’s only a matter of time before the decrease in order quality/correctness there begins.
When I was pregnant with you, Katie, we ate a lot of Mexican food at a restaurant down the street. You literally grew up on it. The most traumatic thing about leaving Southern California was not having access to my favorite food. We would drive to Huntsville, Alabama, because there was a real Mexican restaurant there, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy my craving.
Frankenfood.
It’s just not the same food or ingredients anymore, even here in the Southwest where the small Mexican places are being replaced by chain canned processed avocado, fake cheese, etc…
Even Taco Bell isn’t the same in subtle and not so subtle ways. Bleh.
The BEST Taco Bell in Knoxville was on Clinton Highway. It closed about five years ago, but it was totally old skool, didn’t even have a drive-thru, and had staff that had worked there since the seventies. It probably closed because they all went on social security. Anyway, it was clean and GOOD, but they would never honor any TB coupons, and they didn’t do any of those new-fangled items. My fondest memories of the Taco Bell on the Strip are of the stucco walls that must have been impossible to clean, because they collected smears of every type of yuck possible. Beans, sauce, who knows? Instead of remodeling I think they tore the whole thing down and started over.
Does anybody remember the pizza place that was back by Raven Records, where they would give you a free pizza slice if you were broke? You just had to ask for the Humble Pie. :^)
Good times.