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In the Fascist States of America, a McDonald’s techbro named BigBallz voice will serve you a burger with no beef, charge you double, and call it freedom.
You ask, where’s my Mcplayground? Well, it is outsourced, replaced with a sad bench on which a crying Ronald McDonald sits, holding a sign about liability.
Even the architecture of their fast food joints is fascist.
I usually hate the removal of fun from public spaces, however not having a horrifically unhealthy place designed to attract children is probably a good thing.
The advertising model has changed, but the food is still slop and the goal is still to draw in big families who can't afford to make dinner. What's changed over the last forty years has been the means by which people are incentivized to enter the building. You're no longer trying to bait children from the side of the road with a big van that says "Free Candy". Instead, you're focusing on bombarding kids with advertisements on YouTube streams and targeting parents with gamified repeat customer incentives. But they've also focused more on getting customers out the door than in, improving the speed and reducing the front-facing staff, such that customers are encouraged to get their food and leave rather than linger in kid-friendly private sector daycares.
still to draw in big families who can’t afford to make dinner.
What
How would making food at home be more expensive than McDonald's ? Is this some sort of an American thing I'm too European to understand?
How would making food at home be more expensive than McDonald’s ?
Time is money and if you can't afford the time to cook and clean, you're stuck brown-bagging it at a fast food restaurant.
Is this some sort of an American thing I’m too European to understand?
It's a consequence of American suburban life. Transit time costs are enormous. If you're throwing an hour+ into your commute, you often don't have time to cook. Fast food lets you grab a meal and eat in the car on the way home.
Okay that's an explanation with some logic in it, but like unless they have your order ready when you drive into the parking lot, there's several dishes I could cook as fast as it takes for you to go pick up a brown bag.
Granted time is a luxury I find myself having too much of often so maybe I'm like one of those super rich guys who doesn't understand the cost of a milk carton.
But nah, I don't think I am here to be honest.
If you said "doesn't have the energy to cook" I'd get it but time/energy, eh pretty interchangeable.
It isn't faster but what it is, is more convenient and that I can see.
This was a McDonald's next to the Dallas Zoo...
That's because the nature of the marketing model has changed. Mcdonald's has shifted their marketing demographic to exclusively adults due to the decades of growing backlash and lawsuits over the nutritional value and predatory practices of targeting children. Among many other controversies. Of all the businesses in any industry, this is probably one of the worst examples to give.
Yes, their's truth from an architectural stance that does show a shift to contemporary minimalism. But McDonald's, while perhaps not the most inherently evil company in the world, at least by the amount of true harm they purposely do or the product they provide and those who voluntary choose to consume it. Is still a reflection of many of the United State's problems. Everything from issues concerning wages, labor relations, nutritional literacy, and lifestyle practices, to name a few.
Well this adult wants a colorful, fun, whimsical eatery to forget the humdrummery of daily life, is that too much to ask?
As an adult, when I entered a redesigned MacDonald's it did not appeal to me at all. It was like being inside the architectural embodiment of depression.
Not that it matters. MacDonald's didn't seem to mind Trump associating himself with their brand, so I won't be eating anything from there ever again anyway (ignoring the myriad of other reasons to avoid them as well).
I'm kind of fine with not overmarketing fast food to children.
Yes, but the right trajectory wasn't to make the building dull, it was the make better food for kids.
I don't think McDonald's can make food that is fine for kids to get hooked on, without completely changing their whole deal
This is misleading. The top picture is bright and sunny and the lower one is gray and dreary. Notice the tree in the background on the left without any leaves?
That is because the top picture was taken in the summer and the lower one in the winter when it is cold and the animals have been moved indoors to keep them warm. They will be back in the spring.
smh
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie 😄
McDonald's is now trying to appeal to adults and the building reflects that. They did away with Ronald and all the characters long ago. No more indoor playgrounds. No more cartoon movie toys. I think they still have happy meals but we're better known for their dollar menu now called a McValue menu
The McDonalds near me recently clobbered their tiny playplace and turned it into a ... conference room/center?
About the only time I went there was when I need a place for my kiddos to spend some energy on a rainy day at like 8am, before other things opened. I was happy to buy a coffee and biscuit for myself and maybe a treat for them to pay for my occupancy.
Now, though, and I know I wasn't a giant source of income, they have lost my custom and I just can't see how any real business would ever run a meeting in a McDonalds conference room, so it just seems like a dumb move.
Maybe they want to discourage parents bringing their children? That also seems pretty stupid.
Wasn't part of it related to backlash McDonald's got from essentially marketing themselves to kids? Make the place look nuts, kids say that's awesome, let's go there, now you got kids eating McDonald's. Not suggesting that is how it goes, but I believe I recall reading something to that effect, regarding a rationale behind the new look.
As an aside, the building looks boring, but so does everyone's "shades of gray" interiors inside and outside their homes. I drove black cars forever because black is best color for cars, but I got a blue one now, because we are just surrounded in shades of gray everywhere, and it is, as the sublemmy states, a boring dystopia.
One is makeup the other one is the ugly truth
Not entirely, the food and price was also way better back in the day, especially the 90s
When places go bust faster resale value is more important. this means you need to build generic buildings that hold value when sold or rented.
McDonalds isn't a fast food company. They are a real estate investment company. Their former CFO said as much "we are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent." - Harry J Sonneborn
I know it's not a perfect example but I'm sick of modern design trends. Muted colours and uniform shapes, nothing ever interesting or emotion inducing. I'm probably pretty biased but still I'd love to see something that had some life to it.
TBF, the latter is a much better reflection of how lifeless and awful their food is.
Hey, I live near that McDonalds!
It's right across from the Dallas Zoo, so you can imagine that there was a not insubstantial traffic of kids leaving the zoo and getting a McNasty with Cheese with their parents.
Everyone around here hated that they turned something fun and unique into another corpo hell hole of blandness, so there's that at least.
The death of Skeumorphism, the rise of brutalist minimalism.
Personified into the real world.
It's the subtler version of hostile architecture. You know how they designed benches to be impossible for homeless people to sleep on? They do not want a customer to stay at the building after they have made a purchase. It is more efficient if the children do not come inside and a new customer can take their place. The building is not made for humans, it is made for money.
Honestly sometimes I wonder if some form of Solipsism is true and the reason the world isn't bright and colorful anymore is because I'm no longer a kid.
Now do I genuinely believe I'm the only one who really exists and the world around me is a reflection of my mental state? No, but sometimes it's fun to think "What if?"
But yeah the only fast food joint in my town with any color or a play place is a single chic-fil-a, and it's always overly crowded, so clearly customers respond to this stuff.
Don't eat at Chic-Fil-A btw, the profits go to passing Anti-LGBT legislation.
All fun and games untill obesity sets in, probably before puberty. McDonalds tries it's very best to instill the habit of regular fast-food consumption in to children across the world. I'm all in favor for fun and games for kids, but I get uncomfortable when you target your fast-food chain at children. Let's just make a public playground for kids, and let's not allow the obesity-salesmen to target them.
They wanted to shift from marketing to children to marketing to adults so they could raise the prices.
If I recall correctly, they were forced. There's an obesity pandemic going on in children, mostly driven by excessive use of sugars and overconsumption of fast food and sodas. So, there were certain regulations limiting how directed at children the marketing could be. They can still charge exorbitant prices to children, their parents are the ones paying anyways.
Ronald's second term
I remember getting to play Nintendo 64 at our McDonalds. You could play things like smash, and usually could get in a full match before it did its mandatory reboot things.
Grocery stores would often have childcare areas up until the 90s I think.
So many of those little casual extras/“customer service” has gone out the window. It’s about stripping out everything that doesn’t immediately gain you profit.
Like, back in the day - retail worker was supposed to know their shit. It was a full time job. You could go to Dillard’s and some older guy could give you advice on what to match with what. You could go to a Radio Shack and say you were having trouble with a project, and there’d be a good chance that you’d end up getting some help.
But businesses would rather pay someone $9/hour for a part time job that’ll fuck with their hours every week. Why have someone who’s paid a living wage who can help sell you a really nice coat for a few hundred bucks, when you can pay some shit for some teenager to hawk polyester shit that wouldn’t even be worth paying a commission on?
It goes into this rejection of aesthetics - that all of these retail businesses are things which exist to funnel money. Aesthetics has cost - and might not even be agreeable to everyone! Why risk it when you could have Brutalist McDonalds.
Your Radio Shack example is legit. I had an uncle who worked at Radio Shack as some sort of, idk, tech or something? I was a kid and it was in the 80's, all I knew was that he worked there and made good money doing it.
Then one day he gets recruited by a multinational tech corporation and moves to Berlin to work in a lab. He could've taken my aunt with him, but she cheated on him as soon as he left for the 2 probationary weeks he spent in Germany before the company in question committed to hiring him.
He eventually became a millionaire with dual citizenship and my aunt married some abusive dipshit who immediately went broke. Now she works in a pickle factory. Ain't life interesting?
Isn't the business model based on getting people to love it when they're kids and become addicted then, before they're able to critically think about food, and then coasting on the people that have fond memories of it?
The adults going there now were kids in the 80s and 90s, and remember the old style. No kid gives a rip about a place that looks like this, with no characters or colors. Even today when I see red and yellow together it makes me think of them, but now it's all gray, brick, and beige, with a dollop of yellow just for the logo.
Personally I like this boring look fine. But damn if it's not gonna take a huge hit from being loved by generations that have no memory of fast play places and mascots.
Getting rid of the play area is probably good though because I mean really they are gross if you just think for a few seconds. But capitalism does dictate wringing every drop of injury money from anyone whenever possible.
Now while I support draining the bucks from corporations, ruining opportunities for kids to have fun memories too. If only having fun wasn't so injury-prone.
I'm my country they made it illegal to market fast food directly to kids. It may not be a choice, it may be regulatory.
What do y'all expect from an industry based on torture and murder, destroying the planet, wrecking your health, and supporting genocide? Fun for the kids?
Not just McDonald's, every big chain has it's own neutral toned square box exterior now. Nothing interesting about any of the architecture. Not that they have to be great works of art, but everything looks exactly the same.
Ahem, not marketing to kids is bad?
Nah, bottom is better. Attracting kids to get the habit of eating unhealthy isn't.