Mick Hartley

Have Times readers responded to Giles Coren’s nasty little piece on the “spotty teenage losers” serving in MacDonald’s?

Oh yes. Here’s a letter today:

Later this week my daughter starts her final exams at university and my son graduates from Oxford with a first-class degree. Both have had part-time jobs in the fast-food restaurant at our local service station and both have had to put up with comments from customers who, like Giles Coren, believed them to be “lower down the food chain” (Comment, April 26).

If Mr Coren bothered to converse with some of the youngsters who work at McDonald’s and similar outlets, he would find that many are either undergraduates struggling to eke out their student loan or graduates who, because of the lack of decent jobs promised by the Government in justification of increased tuition fees, are forced into low-paid work.

So you see they aren’t all spotty teenage losers: some are decent young people, with Oxford degrees and fathers who write letters to the Times, just disguised as spotty teenage losers.

Glad we sorted that out.