The Sysco Kid or: The Absolute Boredom of Wealth

An Edited Version of This Piece Was Published in New York City’s The Indypendent on Feb 9th, 2026

This past summer, I worked at an elite country club in a coastal New England town, all of which shall remain nameless due to my signing of an NDA and my reluctance to burn all my bridges. I had no idea what this job would entail, and I only went out there so I could spend the summer with a dear friend of mine who would also be working at the club. If I had, perhaps, researched the club and its clientele, I might’ve thought twice about going. But the heart wants what it wants and, as they say, “That’s How I Got To Memphis”. 

My job at this club was the Food Expeditor, or “Expo” for short, at the club’s poolside cafe. Working Expo, for those of who don’t know, means you facilitate coordination between the kitchen and the servers. I was in charge of making sure orders were correct and going to the right place, making sure each dish got its finishing touches, and communicating special requests from the servers to the kitchen. In short, it means that everyone is yelling at you all the time. The kitchen specifically requested me on Expo because they knew my time working as a line cook gave me the patience and empathy required to communicate with an exhausted and overworked kitchen. Basically, I wouldn’t take it personally when they screamed at me, and every day ended with a knuckle bump and a “good job”. The days were long, often 11 hours or more, and you were lucky to get even one day off a week. I would say I was paid well, but I wouldn’t want to lie. I was paid fine, and in a town where a cocktail is $27, I would’ve appreciated a little more than “fine”. 

I’ve gotten sidetracked. I have nothing but love for the people who employed me and the people I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with, most of whom were here on J-1 Visas and split their time between clubs in Florida and clubs in New England. I do, however, have numerous other feelings besides love for the people who paid to become patrons of the club, who shall henceforth be referred to as “Members”. They were the kind of people who would pat themselves on the back as they read your name-tag and thanked you for their food as you ran it out to them. The members were multi-millionaire, sometimes billionaire, often-white New Yorkers who would fly their private jets to the town and do nothing but sit by the pool and eat what our cafe had to offer, which was a shockingly boring and uninspired menu of inoffensive and predictable American classics. The members seemed to love the simplicity of getting a burger and fries from a club where they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars just to walk through the door. It was incredibly frustrating to watch talented chefs with real passion and understanding for food be forced to cook what was essentially “elevated” fast food. Most of what we were serving these millionaires and billionaires was the same frozen Sysco schlock you could get from a college cafeteria, and the members were either too oblivious or disinterested to care. 

These people are, to be frank, disconnected from reality. They obsess over their hyper-specific and fad-based diets to the point where they were willing to pay upwards of $60 for 8oz portions of lobster, which was rung into the kitchen as “Two Lobster Rolls, no sauce, bun, or side”. I’d describe to you the look on the chef's face when he read that ticket but months of cognitive therapy and breathing exercises have helped me forget my demons. We had the same individual come in every day and order two turkey burger patties, a whole avocado, and two sides of farro, a mish-mash of trendy, TikTok-health-guru-approved food that was decidedly not on the menu.  To quote the kitchen, “Fucking Whatever”. They would obsess over their diets and their macros while their children, who knew they could get whatever they wanted on their parents’ account, came in several times a day to stuff their stomachs full of milkshakes, cookies, french fries and cheese quesadillas. I had to resist the urge to interrupt these vapid and delusional millennials as they explained to me why their make-your-own smoothie was going to add 100 years to their lifespan to tell them that I had watched their daughter eat a hot dog and a chocolate milkshake for breakfast. I never was able to figure out if the parents just didn’t know or just didn’t care. 

The expectation, both on behalf of the members and the club’s upper management, was that every request should be met with eager acceptance and understanding. These people were, to be fair, paying a large sum of money to be members at this club, but their frustration often went far beyond what I thought a normal human could feel at a minor inconvenience. I watched billionaires scream at me with tears in their eyes because they couldn’t get breakfast after 10:30am or because they had yet to receive their side salad. I had to stop myself from laughing at each of these occurrences because to me, more than anything, it revealed to me that these people have never not gotten what they wanted. The fact that they were being told “No” or being asked to wait because the kitchen was in the weeds drove them to the point of frustration that most of us only experience on our very worst days. 

However, the most egregious crime that I watched the members get away with, day in and day out, was being utterly and unforgivably boring. It was clear and each and every one of them had been born into their wealth, not a single great inventor or intrepid entrepreneur among them, and that this lifetime of wealth had protected them from both the highs and lows of the human experience. Believe me, I overheard a lot of their conversations, and most of what they talked about with each other was their wealth. The billionaires would chide the millionaires for their measly millions, and would often joke about picking up the tab for them so they could save money. They would debate The Hamptons vs Nantucket, Florida vs New York, and discuss recent property and plane purchases. They didn’t care that the menu of our cafe was a grown-up version of the kids menu because that’s exactly what they wanted. Picky eaters who grew up eating whatever they told their Nanny to cook for them and had never developed an appetite for anything else. They could be using their millions to fly to Tokyo or Brazil or Paris and eat racks of lamb with saffron rice and instead, they were wasting away their days by the pool and eating chicken caesar salad wraps. Most of them didn’t even swim in the goddamn pool. 

They have more money than God could spend in a thousand lifetimes and they were spending it on $30 cheeseburgers. I sincerely believe that these people, like a lot of rich people, do not know how to spend their money. The club, with its upper six-digit initiation fee and flashy allure of being part of something that only the rich can afford, provided them with an easy place to throw their money and feel as though they had spent it on something worthwhile. These people have never and will never understand the true value of a dollar, and so it was probably very easy to get them to spend hundreds of thousands of them. It was like I was watching mass delusion in real time. In a world where many live within one hospital visit of poverty and each and every purchase is deliberated until it is deemed absolutely necessary, it was incredibly frustrating to cater to the childish needs and desires of people who spent their money like it was weightless. They don’t realize the power and importance of what they have because most of them have never lived without it. The world in which they live is so far removed from what so many of us experience on a daily basis, and I came to realize that that’s what they were paying for at the club. It was a paradise where they could sit undisturbed amongst each other, eating the same boring food they had always eaten, raising their children to be just as spoiled and rotten as they are. Best of all, the people who existed only to help them even wore little name tags so they never had to remember the name of someone who wasn’t in the same tax bracket as them. Paradise, indeed. 

Lives of convenience and ease rarely craft interesting individuals. To a certain extent, I almost feel bad for them, and especially for their children. They might have been able to blossom into exciting people with passion and drive ,but instead they were just going to become more rich people with more money and time then they knew what to do with it. They’re going to waste their days talking to each other, avoiding meeting interesting people or appreciating exciting food, and they will never fully understand what it means to be human. Every time I remember that and I start to feel a little sad for them, I remember how easily these people’s money could be used to help support universal childcare, fast and free buses, free college education, fully invested parks and libraries. I remember how easily a small tax increase on these people could change the lives of millions of New Yorkers, and I remember how staunchly opposed they are to their bountiful wealth being used to help anyone but themselves. Maybe if we convinced them that “Universal Childcare” is the name of a beautiful, all-inclusive country club being built upstate, they might be a bit more inclined to chip in. It’s worth a shot.