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Came to say this. McDonald is not a great allegory on the downfall of the US. The style just changed from colorful cartoon aimed at children to stylish minimalism to attract centrists. The product it's selling stays the same. It has always been fake. You just grew up.

He didn’t glorify anything.

Pole here. I love how it goes against what I see here. We were under communist rule for a long time - you know, utilitarianism over all, gray being almost the only acceptable color...although we did have a lot of green spaces. These were fun.

What I am seeing as time progresses is that bleak building style going away and even commie blocks gaining colors. Sadly, some of the green spaces get cut for parking lots...but that's sadly obvious, back then people simply didn't have cars so parking spaces weren't really that big of a thing. Like, what, there was 0,1 parking space per unit? xD

So it's funny that bleak and bad communist vibes USA propagandised so much against is now slowly coming to america, while leaving countries which were under USSR tyranny. xD

Counter - take: this is the natural outcome of Americans' obsession with simplicity. If you mock every design with character and try to reduce visual noise at all costs you end up with these

I feel like 9/11 was the inflection point. The great recession was just another symptom of the problem. Banks can't get overwhelmed by underwater mortgages if people aren't underwater in the first place.

The economy objectively never did actually recover from 2008, in terms of returning to the previous growth pattern/trajectory.

Japan's economy had more or less been in the same situation since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.

They call this state of their economy 'the lost decades'. Growth never returned to the previous levels, and has been either stagnant or modest since, requiring massive active management from the government to keep everything from totally breaking.

... Sound familiar?

We have also been in our own lost decades, we just have about one less such lost decade than Japan.

In both cases, the only way to keep things going is to keep financializing more and more of the economy... but this results in an increasing wealth concentration gap and more volatility in financial markets.

The cure isn't really a cure, its a stopgap to prevent essentially a near total reset... but the stopgap itself is also harmful if you get addicted to it, and don't come up with a better solution.

The better solution is in fact to do that near total reset, and also set up something analogous to, or actually, a UBI.

But the only way you can do that is if you expropriate the capital owners.

So, the boom bust cycle of capitalism continues, until it breaks so hard that either everyone is basically dead (cough climate change cough)... or you have some kind of massive popular revolution.

Shallowest of Friedman doctrine? I’d argue that this was their goal all along. “greed is good”

But, really, capitalism always finds ways to milk more value for the capitalist out of an industry. It’s the whole enshitification thing. There may be periods at first where the excess value is spread around to incentivize various stakeholder adoption. But, once the competition is dead, the capitalist will milk as much profit for himself unless other stakeholders can defend their share through unions, regulation, or healthy competition.

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.

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?

I'm 35. I'd take whimsy and fun over the "trendy bank" look.

No offense, but McDonald's is not a good example for your scenario.

if you're out getting a coffee and a bagel as a 30 or 40 year old[...]

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.

They just want to charge more for adults.

Same -- at least in some contexts. Bauhaus, Commie blocks, all those were never meant to be perfect, they were meant to house as many people with basic comfort as possible. Many of the palaces of the past were made using resources that could have housed the poor.

On the other hand, fuck McD and fuck corporate soul-less-ness.

It's way better

Because it better captures your ongoing despair?

No. In some ways, I do. Like the design on the right. I think it's more about the context, like McDonald's pandered to children by actually creating a fun environment. Now, their environment is set up like an industrial prison, where nothing means anything, but just the corporate projection. It's like the lowest common denominator. Like it was always going to end up like this. It's just about overpowering and consolidating and destroying small business so the only thing that's left is the brick building where you get your gruel.

Not really bad. It's functional and pragmatic design, but visual design is also a statement of sorts. Kinda like the empire in Star Wars, all business, 100% order, no fun

Pretty bad yeah

Correction: Scrapping shit that doesn't make the maximum possible amount of money.