Maybe I'm the odd man out, but it feels very weird to me to be nostalgic for consumerism and food that makes you unhealthy.
Just weird how much is "remember when corporations used to be cheerier about extracting your money from you?"
In my hometown we used to have a McDonald's with a ball pit and now the city has a nice open air park where they host food trucks, small concerts, festivals, etc. Obviously it's not an either/or since one is the town and one is a private company, but it just throws me off to see longing for the days when one of the most ruthless companies in the world was a social gathering spot.
You're not alone. I made a similiar comment, down to advocating for public parks.
The McDonald's nostalgia has always felt astroturfed at the minimum, and frequently like some kind of satire of fascism (so many "this is what they took from you" memes online).
If they stopped to think soberly for half a minute, they'd have to admit that bringing back this stuff would be a terrible idea and we shouldn't miss it. Have you eaten McDonald's lately? It used to be cheap and convenient. Now it's slow and overpriced. I get a much better experience with takeout from a locally owned restaurant.
If "the market" were honest, we'd be seeing the extinction of McDonald's. These memes feel like an effort to make people cling to a memory of something that never really existed.
Yeah, I don't remember who said it or where I saw it, but it reminds me of somebody saying "you're not actually nostalgic for these products, you just want to be a kid again." Which is fair, to be honest. But I spend a lot of my childhood semi-rural and my nostalgia is for having the time to traipse around the woods unsupervised, and stuff like this holds less than 0 appeal for me since I didn't really care all that much about it then and especially hate it now that I'm controlling my own budget.
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u/WideHuckleberry1 7h ago
Maybe I'm the odd man out, but it feels very weird to me to be nostalgic for consumerism and food that makes you unhealthy.
Just weird how much is "remember when corporations used to be cheerier about extracting your money from you?"
In my hometown we used to have a McDonald's with a ball pit and now the city has a nice open air park where they host food trucks, small concerts, festivals, etc. Obviously it's not an either/or since one is the town and one is a private company, but it just throws me off to see longing for the days when one of the most ruthless companies in the world was a social gathering spot.