The move toward self-serve stuff is actually revolutionary for people who don’t like constant social interactions, i have autism and holy shit just 10 years ago i would have been spending all my social energy just talking to cashiers.
The fancy look is just what everyone else is doing.
America doesn’t actually have style. They have architectural and design dickheads throw shit at a wall and we have to put up with it and that’s what winds up in peoples homes.
And I have remodeled some homes to look like McDonalds and the client doesn’t even recognize it.
Saddest part is, I also default to this sort of appearance. Though if I do see a cozy place, I like it - but if you asked me to design something, it would be millennial gray. I have no imagination.
i’m praying gen Z fixes this by telling corporations to fuck off and going back to how fast food worked for most of human civilization: just random people selling stuff from their kitchen, basically.
fun fact: at least in rome it was basically standard for most people to eat “fast food”, the streets were jam packed with various little food shops.
I think that’s still the case in some places, take countries like Korea or Vietnam, where street food is everywhere and it won’t literally kill you to live off of it.
'90s-'00s McDonald’s primarily appealed to kids, as the colorful characters and Happy Meals were a big part of the draw.
'10s-'20s McDonalds has pivoted to marketing towards adults, in part because they had come under fire for marketing greasy, oversalted calorie bombs to children as the US obesity epidemic took off. The other reason is that mid-to-low income adults became a much more lucrative demographic after decades of wage stagnation basically created an entire generation that’s too tired and overworked to cook for themselves but too poor to go out to eat anywhere else.
Don't forget that generation also saw home economics classes removed from school, so if they don't learn to cook from their parents they just don't learn to cook.
Did you miss the tired and overworked comment? Feeling exhausted and burned out doesn’t inspire most people to spend a large amount of time and effort learning something new.
I don’t think online resources are necessarily a replacement for in-person classroom instruction, and even if they were, it’s not a reason to take the option of home ec classes away from those who want it.
That said, I think it’s at least a good thing that so many good internet resources on cooking exist, and it helps mitigate the problem to some degree. Still, it takes time and energy to seek out those resources, learn from them, and put them into practice. Not easy to do for anyone who has been worked far past the point of burnout and are still just scraping by.
Yeah, those folks who work 16 hours and have no cooking knowledge should go out and buy a bunch of pots and pans and knives and a ton of ingredients. They don't need to sleep and have plenty of extra money to waste on ruined food.
really they could start somewhere and simple and build from it and be MUCH better off than fast food daily, for nutrition and money and time. throw some raw chicken on a grill and flip it over after 12 minutes. cut some veggies/fruit up. eventually add sauces or cheese or something.
Tell me your work isnt sucking 100% of your energy without saying so.
To be fair though thats a good thing, no job should exhaust people to the point of rendering them unable to take care of themselves but for many of us that is not reality.
It isn’t sustainable, which is what i am trying to explain my doctor.
I already stopped working full time and i landed an otherwise perfect job for me, i have no real bosses and a lot of freedom to choose my work.
I just happen to be autistic is all. The way my energy works doesn’t fit with this “work hours concept” a good work balance of me would be going to the office late when its dark, calm and quiet so i can focus, do twice the amount of work in half the time and just go home when i feel tired combined with a no strings attached guaranteed livable income.
I can’t partner up to start my own business because the concept of profit is immoral to me. My current job provides tax-paid free healthcare for kids in contrast.
The clutch is, so many people aren’t autistic and have it so much worse. Jobs where your boss gets upset because you’re sick, getting pressured to work overtime and still not being able to afford rent. How about cacao farmers who work permanently to pay of a debt to their employers and get fined for missing a days work?
The modern world is not sustainable and headed for disaster.
My daughter had whatever they call home ec now (consumer science?) last year when she was in sixth grade. They baked cookies.
And that was about all I did in home ec back in the late 80s too. That and sew a stuffed animal dog.
So I don’t know that home ec is actually all that worth it. Not the way it’s been done for decades, anyway.
Industrial arts was the same way. He had us make wooden tulips after telling a bunch of horror stories about how the power tools would maim you, so I refused to use them. And had I used them, I know now as someone who has used them since that cutting tulip pieces out of a piece of wood with a jigsaw is not much of a learning experience.
Yeah I definitely didn’t learn to cook at all from home ec. I remember sowing more though and I did learn the basics at least there but it was reinforced in my house, whereas cooking was not as much, so I can’t really tell if it stuck because it was a home thing too.
I think things like, what we called tech Ed that sounds like your industrial arts, was really more about introducing kids to the concepts and they could find out if it was something they were into. Most people would never attempt or maybe even know how to attempt woodworking if not introduced in school.
Wouldn’t they have to have the tools at home to continue woodworking? That’s pretty expensive. Isn’t that just telling kids ‘here’s something you might learn how to do someday if you aren’t poor?’
I guess you got a point there hobbywise but I was thinking more like if they’re thinking about college and whatnot, if those activities are something they enjoyed in high school they might consider going into internship or trades for that kind of thing.
A youtuber had a good take: MacDonald’s used to be cheap cheap cheap. Then they slowly tried to become fancier. So I think now they’re stuck in a weird middle ground. Great opportunity for a new chain to go back to cheap cheap cheap.
I don’t even think they tried. They became cosmetically fancier. Other than some coffee options to compete with Starbucks, it hasn’t really changed the menu a whole lot in terms of basic offerings. Just higher prices and slicker, more corporate restaurants. I’m guessing they still do most of their business in burgers and fries, plus maybe McNuggets,
Lots of things slowly crept up the prices. I looked it up awhile ago so going off memory: All day breakfast, new equipment for something or other, as you said fancier decor, fancy coffee. It all adds up.
My old McDonald’s in my hometown had a GameCube / N64 hooked up with 2 controllers. Was pretty dope. I think they got rid of it though, haven’t been in years.
I grew up with this McDonald’s, it had a jukebox. My sister had life threatening food allergies, so we only ever went there to get orange juice, but I still loved it.
nordic prisons are unironically way nicer than this, they’re basically particularly boring and secure dormitories with normal looking (if very clean) rooms.
I was thinking ‘Apple’ when I saw it, but I didn’t make the meme. So I put it in the title instead. If you change ‘prison’ to ‘designed by Apple,’ it works better.
no i mean OP. unless OP outright says otherwise, it’s fair to assume they probably have at least a marginally similar opinion to the original creator otherwise why would they post it?
It’s not terribly far off. The barebones brutalist style where the chairs are attached to the floor, hard plastic molded tabletops. Lack of items that can be moved or taken completely conveys “do your business and leave”. Obviously a screen that size that wouldn’t be that accessible in a prison, but it only adds the harsh nature and lack of human touch of the room.
“Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design.”
I would welcome expanding my knowledge but what style do you consider buildings of few decorative designs other than their harsh geometric edges and shapes? The inner walls of a prison are often the outer wall. Just straight rows of cinderblock. Inside and outside, the structures lack other architechtural stylings because it creates hiding places or is viewed as extra work/cost during construction.Everything ends in a corner or an edge - no soft edges. As far as my experiences are concerned, that lines up pretty well unless you would rather use the word “spartan” in terms of how little decoration the state puts up.
This is a great example of how reading a WIkipedia article imparts a lot of information and absolutely zero knowledge. This, this, and this are all extremely good examples of brutalist design. The McDonald’s in the OP in no way is reminiscent of such aesthetic concerns. Both are spartan, certainly; but then, so is a lot of post-modernist design (to say nothing of the various minimalist movements throughout time). I’m not here to debate whether or not prisons are brutalist in design, that’s far too sweeping a category to sum up in one school of design and additionally it’s not the point of the conversation here.
No, I see your point - brutalism is making an interesting structure and shaping internal spaces using building materials as a limitation.
Where prisons are function-over-form and may appear to meet the style - it is merely coincidental and is not usually artistic expressionism but rather necessity to perform a task.
McShungles is just ultramodern design that comes from a Corp cheaping out