Well, the "served piping hot" part is an optional bit of passive-aggressiveness on the part of the worker, though I see no way for the worker to give them any "resting" time. If they toss the newly-cooked fries into
that metal thing with the heat lamp over it (I have no idea what it's really called), the fries would get residual salt all over them from the last 10,000 batches of fries that have rested/cooled in that thing. So keeping them salt-free means taking them directly out of the
frying basket-thing and putting them into the
carton-thing that they serve the fries in.
As you can see by my "technical terms," I've never worked in a fast food place, but I've certainly eaten at plenty of them.
The customer has already waited for the "fresh" fries to be made, so having them wait even longer for the fries to cool would only add to the wait time. Kinda defeats the concept of "fast" food.
Fun fact: In my original post, I wrote
What they don't realize is that when you pass off fast food workers
...when I actually typed that P word with an I in it. I went to "edit" and it said the pi.. word, but the edited version also shows up as "pa.."