Corporate real estate is some truly dystopian shit man. They all look so depressing because they don't want whatever tax office or vape shop leases it next looking like a McDonalds. Now apply that thinking to an entire society.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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everything, not just MacDonald's, but every conceivable facet of society
isn't every conceivable facet of society just MacDonald's in the USA?
Have you bought a desk or dresser recently? The cheap ones used to be made of plyboard, now it's 90 percent plastic and the same price. Resources aren't as plentiful as they used to be and minimalism is the result of that.
And the crappy wood ones are so expensive! I was at Ikea and all of their dressers were like $250-$500 or more!
Exactly! Somehow, in my lifetime, plyboard has became mid tier. This shit is insane.
IKEA does use a higher quality particle board than say Canadian Tire. Or at least it's better than what it used to be at Canadian Tire, since I stopped buying furniture from there (so who knows if it's still that bad). After one move, the old Canadian Tire stuff was wobbly while all of my IKEA stuff is still solid, even though I was feeling less patient last time I moved it and had a "if it doesn't survive, so be it" attitude.
Though note that I do tend to avoid the bottom tier IKEA stuff, since some of it does look pretty short term.
I've never bought from Canadian Tire before so I can't completely speak to that. I will say my IKEA bed is very obviously made of plyboard. It's fairly sturdy, but cost almost $300 used. The point is we used to build things to last with strong materials, but we can't now due to the fact that resources have dwindled faster than we can replenish them.
And this is why it now costs $50 to take my family to Micky Ds.
The lighting changed drastically in 2025
We blocked out the sun to stop the machine uprising
these are grim times
Peak America to make the point with a fast food franchise.
I'm ok with not marketing addictive junk food to children
Kinda missing the bigger picture
You sound like James monsees ignoring FDA about adding flavours to nicotine and using that as a selling target to younger generations.
Yes, however, that wasn't the point.
It is the point. It's the point every time this gets brought up. If the only thing that brought you joy as a child was a multibillion dollar hamburger franchise that made its profits on the back of childhood obesity, then you should be glad it is going downhill.
Seriously, "oh nos! McFatty's doesn't look like a kid vomited up a box of crayons anymore!! What is the world coming to???" isn't a compelling argument to anyone who has realized that there is more to life than shitty cheeseburgers. I don't care that McDonalds changed its color palette to gray because I do not care about McDonalds, other than hoping their entire business model collapses.
Are things worse now today than they were before? In some ways, yes! Show me an example of that! Show me a beautiful river full of trash now, or a local coffee shop that went under, or literally anything other than McDonalds.
Sure, if you narrow your view to literally only what is in front of you. But everyrhing has gotten cheaper, duller, less colorful, and just clearly designed for nothing but extracting capital.
Yes, you're right, we shouldn't be advertising that crap to children. But I would like to buy a car with an actual color painted on it, or have a house with actual character, or pay for services that actually work because at least someone behind the scenes actually cares. I feel like we've just lost all soul in society and it shows up in all sorts of places you wouldnt expect.
Places like how were all more lonely than anytime in history even though there's more people than ever, or how people are so scared all the time even though we live in the safest time in the last 150 years, or how people seem to just be angry and have less patience in public any more.
McDonald's is just an easy target because of how shocking their change has been, and how ubiquitous these changes have been.
These are all reasonable points to make with literally any example other than McDonalds. Saying everything is worse and ruined by capitalism because no one cares about anything except profit anymore is not the trajectory that McDonalds took.
McDonalds in the 1990s was just as cold hearted, capitalist, and profit-seeking as it is today. Its target demo was children who would cry until they got a happy meal, and their weak-willed parents. Thus, it used bright colors, clowns, and ball pits to entice its demo into bringing their money in. McDonalds didn't suddenly become more greedy and capitalist. They were already maximally greedy and capitalist. What happened is that the government told them they couldn't advertise to kids anymore. So McDonalds, being greedy and capitalist, pivoted to appealing to adults. They got rid of the play places and ball pits, which were expensive and labor intensive to maintain and which were constantly covered in children's saliva, puke, and shit. They toned down the color scheme to be less assaulting on the eyes and more relaxing. They improved the quality of their food, and they replaced benches made of cheap hard plastic for padded seats made with some kind of fabric. In many ways, the McDonalds of today are superior to the McDonalds of 20 years ago - it's a place you'd be comfortable grabbing a quick lunch with some coworkers without feeling like you suddenly stepped into an overstimulating children's movie.
I honestly like the new look. It says "We're McDonalds. We sell cheap hamburgers so you can eat and leave quickly, because you aren't rich enough to have free time. We know it, you know it, we're all adults here so we don't have to pretend. Come grab a cheeseburger and get on with your life."
Lol even the plants look dead
The dead plants were the lucky ones.
Can we please not glorify the commercialization of america. Clowns selling calories to children has done nothing good for this country. I hope all commercialized businesses die in a greyed out abandoned lot.
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.
I hardly think fast food is the devil you should be focusing on while your country burns
You dont even fucking know then.
The problems in america stem directly from corporate greed. We are a society not a factory. We need to use the factory to better society. Americans think they need to use society to better the factory. This inverted thinking is a disease.
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Yeah, in a lot of ways, it feels like the great recession never truly ended in the sense that people had recovered from it; it feels more like people just got used to it. In the oughts, a lot of the pretenses of cold war capitalism got dropped in favor of a whole hearted embrace of the shallowest (ostensibly; I'm going against my nature and giving Friedman the benefit of the doubt here) possible reading of the Friedman doctrine. Everything turned to "how much cash can we scrape out of this for the investors?" Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you'll eat our bullshit anyway. Minimum wage hikes? No way! Your burgers will cost $20! Oh, well, I mean, that's going to happen anyway, but at least you guys didn't get raises lmao. You want a truck that just works? Eat shit, idiot, pay us $100,000 for a lifted mini-van in a masculinity-protecting trenchcoat. Need somewhere to stay? Great news, we're going to do nothing to improve the apartment and increase your rent $200/year. Or you could just choose to afford a half million dollar home; the free market is all about choice, after all. Want health insurance? Cool, that'll be half of your income, your boss gets to the carrier for you because it's a free market system all about the freedom of choice, and we're going to personally throw sand in your eyes if you ever actually try to use it. At least you can ~~go swim in the public pool or go enjoy your city's fine taxpayer funded services~~ nope those all got cut permanently in the recession, and now that money's going to paying out for cops fucking up instead.
Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you’ll eat our bullshit anyway.
I really have to push back if you are describing McD's previous aesthetic as "cool". That shit hurt my eyes and my soul.
The removal of play places was due to a number of reasons, not least of which were regulations barring how much fast food restaurants could advertise to kids. Without being able to target children as effectively, McD's changed strategies to appeal to adults more. More comfortable seating rather than hard plastic benches; dim, relaxing lighting rather than bright colors; fewer ball pits full of shit, drool, and vomit. It became more of a neutral place where an adult on lunch break with some coworkers could get a hamburger without feeling like a pedo or expecting to be assaulted by the screams of uncontrolled children.
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.
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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.
There are some folks who want to accelerate the total reset and maybe create a UBI. Those are the Dark Enlightment folks (sometimes Dark MAGA), and they are called neoreactionary accelerationist. The intentional destruction of the US gov is the acceleration of the reset that you mention. These are a bit different from the Heritage Foundation and mostly tech bros. They are considered far right, but I'm far left and can't help but see a lot of truth in some of what they say. I've had the same opinion you have for 20 years now, that it would be better to just let this all fall so we can hurry up and rebuild our economy into something that is not a plane with locked engines falling straight out of the sky. I totally know what you mean.
Yep yep yep.
Except... for those folks, UBI is basically viewed the way a promised feature is in a highly scalable app.
That is to say, entirely optional, subject to terms and conditions, subject to market conditions... likely just a marketing gimmick that only a few naive truely believers think was ever really seriously on the table.
What they actually want is technofeudalism.
Ironically, I would basically describe myself politically as an Anarchist.
But... I am actually entirely terrified by the idea of just suddenly collapsing the entire economy without very, very solid plans in place for the transition, and the future.
If done poorly...literally billions could die, or be made into slaves.
I am all for detaching yourself from the capitalist death machine as much as possible, setting up alternate systems, mutual aid, co-ops, etc...
But if you just pull the legs out of the entire economy all at oncr and let it freefall... that'll be the layman's idea of anarchy: total fucking mad max / fallout style chaos.
20 years ago, we might have been able to do something like collapse neoliberalism entirely... you know, back around when Seattle rioted againt the WTO.
Its too late now, it would be way, way way too hard to just pivot suddenly back to much less global trade and more autarkic societies.
Farming alone is a nightmare to try to imagine that for.
On the other hand, climate change will basically cause that same economic near total collapse in most places within 20 years, by my reading of projected future impacts.
So uh yeah, we're just fucked, unless we somehow have a massive revolution and also a very competently executed plan to transition the economy off oil ... and that scenario is nearly impossibly unlikely.
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This is my own personal conjecture so take it as you will:
Profits, incomes, and disposable incomes across the board are lower for those not in or above the multi millionaire class. People, businesses, and just general society spent more money on aesthetics 30 years ago. People had more time, money, and energy to utilize designers, artists, and talent. Nowadays it just feels like everything from architecture, to cars, to public infrastructure is just barebones utilitarian. Like, when was the last time you saw a new marble statue go up? When was the last time you saw a new building made in the same style as the city halls/state houses of 100 years ago? When was the last time you saw public art that was intricate and had form over function? When was the last time you saw huge sweeping infrastructure upgrades like third spaces, burying power lines, pedestrian paths, or underground tunnels?
In 150 years, people will look back at this time period and say we were all miserable and poor and couldn’t afford anything outside of necessitation.
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"Welcome to McDonald's! What can I get for you today?"
"You are in McDonald's: CONSUME AND LEAVE."
I think zoomers are extremely aware of it because we won't stop telling them about it.
From my perspective, zoomers are most of the people talking about it. We remember the '00s.
Just like how only 90's millenials remember the 90's, only 00's zoomers will remember the 00's soon. Such is the cycle of azlheimers.
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.
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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.
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Capitalism in a nutshell. Profits gotta go up, and that means scrapping shit that don't make money
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