this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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I get the point they're trying to make but McDonald's is not a good example.
Whats changed for them is tastes and perceptions of fast foods. Marketing fast food at kids has becoming socially less acceptable, and McDonalds has pivoted towards competing with Starbucks and the like as more of an adult friendly food venue. They've pushed the coffee and cafe menu concept, and the pivot to a more adult style for the main restaurants partly started in the UK where it drove sales up when they refurbed restaurants and changed the menus, and also from longer term experience in Australia where the McCafe style subsidiary coffee shops continue to grow faster than the main business.
Of course kids are still important to them and they do the happy meal etc, but if you're out getting a coffee and a bagel as a 30 or 40 year old would you go into the McDonald's on the left or the right?
The early story of McDonald's is one of the great American tragedies. The food used to be excellent fresh-cooked hamburgers, real milkshakes, all this real food and available cheap and fast because they were well-organized. There's a reason it got popular on a historic scale and started making a basically unlimited amount of money. Then, Ray Kroc pulled an Elon Musk on the (original) founders who had invented it all, hijacked the whole thing and took it over, and ruined the food to save money. Not satisfied with having fucked over the McDonald brothers, he then sued them for using their own name and then successfully drove them out of business from even having the single hamburger stand serving real food -- now with a different name -- that was all they had wanted to have in the first place.
It's like everything good and bad about America, all wrapped up in one heart-rending little anecdote. Look up the whole story if you want to get upset.
Mark Knopfler had a good song about that - Boom Like That
Competition? Send 'em south
They're gonna drown? Put a hose in their mouth.
Do not pass go, go straight to hell
I smell that meathook smell...
Can't say who was worse, Ray Krok or Jack Welch, but we're definitely still feeling the consequences of their deeds. And whomever lead Walmart into ruining commerce. Everyone hates Amazon, but Walmart started it all.
Good job. Yeah. It's so fucked up. People just don't want to know how the sausage is made. They always want to be in a dream state.
I'm 35. I'd take whimsy and fun over the "trendy bank" look.
They just need an adult ball pit
What's the difference to a kids' ball pit? A special corner for having existential dread?
A sign, mostly. Adults aren't usually allowed
Bigger. Deeper.
But not harder? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
No offense, but McDonald's is not a good example for your scenario.
I do, and I am! And if I want a decent bagel and cup of coffee, McDonald's will literally be the very last place I consider. (Well, most days it's a breakfast burrito, but the point stands) McDonald's is one of the greatest examples of enshittification because they pay their employees shit, they're as expensive as a nearby restaurant where they prepare your meal from scratch by a chef, and the quality is terrible.
Yup, fast food has become quite expensive to the point that a local snack joint will have better quality and make you full for less. Still, people go to fast food places. I believe it is the comfort of the known, of not having to think about whether a place is sanitary or which of the scary middle eastern shawarma guys has good value for money and which will sell you microwaved shit. People don't like to think
Thant's funny. Here in Canada. People prefer McDonalds over Tim Hortons. Tim's used to be OUR go to place for coffee.
They just want to charge more for adults.
That's funny.