A Boring Dystopia

I'm kind of fine with not overmarketing fast food to children.

This is misleading. The top picture is bright and sunny and the lower one is gray and dreary. Notice the tree in the background on the left without any leaves?

That is because the top picture was taken in the summer and the lower one in the winter when it is cold and the animals have been moved indoors to keep them warm. They will be back in the spring.

smh

TBF, the latter is a much better reflection of how lifeless and awful their food is.

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.

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.

They wanted to shift from marketing to children to marketing to adults so they could raise the prices.

It's the subtler version of hostile architecture. You know how they designed benches to be impossible for homeless people to sleep on? They do not want a customer to stay at the building after they have made a purchase. It is more efficient if the children do not come inside and a new customer can take their place. The building is not made for humans, it is made for money.

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.

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.

Ahem, not marketing to kids is bad?

Nah, bottom is better. Attracting kids to get the habit of eating unhealthy isn't.

Ronald's second term

All fun and games untill obesity sets in, probably before puberty. McDonalds tries it's very best to instill the habit of regular fast-food consumption in to children across the world. I'm all in favor for fun and games for kids, but I get uncomfortable when you target your fast-food chain at children. Let's just make a public playground for kids, and let's not allow the obesity-salesmen to target them.

Why should garbage unhealthy "food" be marketed to children though?

When will people stop eating that garbage.....?(probably never)

Honestly sometimes I wonder if some form of Solipsism is true and the reason the world isn't bright and colorful anymore is because I'm no longer a kid.

Now do I genuinely believe I'm the only one who really exists and the world around me is a reflection of my mental state? No, but sometimes it's fun to think "What if?"

But yeah the only fast food joint in my town with any color or a play place is a single chic-fil-a, and it's always overly crowded, so clearly customers respond to this stuff.

Don't eat at Chic-Fil-A btw, the profits go to passing Anti-LGBT legislation.

I really miss the unhinged topiary that used to be outside of every fast food restaurant when I was a kid.

When places go bust faster resale value is more important. this means you need to build generic buildings that hold value when sold or rented.

Looks like they changed their target group.

McDonald's is now trying to appeal to adults and the building reflects that. They did away with Ronald and all the characters long ago. No more indoor playgrounds. No more cartoon movie toys. I think they still have happy meals but we're better known for their dollar menu now called a McValue menu

The playpen was nasty af tho

Architecture in the Soviet Union

yes, the brutalist taco bell aesthetic, will go down in history as one of the more curious periods of fast food branding, i'm noticing recently they're just now starting to feather in color and new signage again

Looks like their customers have grown up and they tried to follow suit and became boring adults.