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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.
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.
Well fuckin said and spot on!
Also thanks for reminding me how great Radio Shack used to be. It used to be a place to get actual electronics components. And the people there knew their shit. And there was enough intelligent folks around to keep a place like that in business! God I miss those days..
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.
Whenever I take road trips I try to spot the old Pizza Hut buildings by the shape of the roof. It's surprising how many there are.
We’ve been turning in Russia all this time without even noticing.
The difference is commie blocks have utility.
Soviet bus shelters have more pizzaz than American McDonalds.
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.
I'm an adult who also enjoys fun. 😢
Enjoy fun?? Pftt grow up
/s
I don't eat at McDonalds for many reasons, but if I had to walk through such a Chuck E Cheese-ass entrance to grab a burger I'd have one more reason to avoid it.
Vou can roast the entrance but going to mcD and getting to play xbox inside, for someone who didnt have one at home, is a core memory
Fuck mcdonalds and all that but honestly if a respected buisness had some fun and personality on their building why avoid it? Anyone can just put up a brick and mortar store it takes someone who actually cares to try and have fun.
Also Charlie's entertainment cheese is now very much like this with their few locations it's just very basic no fun houses or little rides it's just an arcade now with VERY muted colors.
Looks like their customers have grown up and they tried to follow suit and became boring adults.
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.
That's the point that I thought was obvious. Everyone else seems to be focusing on other factors..
someone got tired of mopping up all the jizz from the ball pit.