Trash Disposal

Despite being urged to boycott Chick-fil-A—see “But Is it Oatmeal?—I had breakfast at my local Chick-fil-A restaurant today. When it was time to return my tray and discard the paper and other trash left on it, I found myself dumping the trash into an oval opening in a horizontal surface over the trash container. This is probably a better disposal system than one sees at McDonald’s and elsewhere, where one is required to push one’s tray through a vertical door hinged at the top that seems designed to resist trash deposition and to sweep it off the tray and onto the floor.

Here’s a suggestion for Chick-fil-A, however: Make the opening, oval or otherwise, wider than the trays, so that one can tip a tray and be assured that everything will fall through the hole.

I suspect that Chick-fil-A’s oval opening is intended to keep patrons from depositing trays into the trash. That the design used at McDonald’s does not prevent this eventuality leads me to suspect that it does not represent a serious threat.