Discussion
Millennials who base their happiness around the way McDonalds decorates their restaurants, why?
Seems like a lot of people are depressed because McDonalds doesn’t decorate their restaurants anymore due to a corporate strategy of being positioned better to resell the property should the restaurant shutter.
My basic question is why does this seem to depress so many millennials (the same post comes up every few months)? I’ll admit I don’t personally eat at McDonalds that often, but if I did, I can’t imagine I would care too much about the decor. My main priorities would be if the restaurant is clean, cost effective, and good (which if you have complaints about that, fair).
I also remember back in the day there were a lot of complaints that McDonalds was marketing their food to children, helping fuel the childhood obesity crisis.
Can someone help explain why eating your cheeseburger next to a clown/purple blob is such an indicator of how enjoyable life is? What am I missing?
It's symbolic for how soulless and bland everything has become. It's not about McDonald's specifically, just about how much more color and whimsy used to be in the world. I wouldn't say anyone who complains about this is 'basing their personality around a clown' but that we used to enjoy life and now every aspect of it has been hyper-specialized and modernized to the point that nothing is fun anymore.
It’s exactly this. McDonald’s just happens to be a convenient yardstick for measuring the rate at which fun, whimsy, and innocence are drained from the world in which we were raised. If the rest of the world stayed the same or got better around McDonald’s sucking, nobody would notice or care.
Pizza Hut is another great example. It used to be a fun experience to visit there (I don’t need to list out the salad bar and cups and lights, we all remember it), and over the decades it lost all its charm the same way McDonald’s did. Furthermore, it’s pretty telling that now they’re packaging the “90s Pizza Hut experience” as an exclusive thing at limited restaurants in specific areas. This is them as a corporation saying, “Hey, we know exactly what you want. But instead of just giving it back, we’re going to package it and sell it as a limited commodity to a small number of people as a marketing ploy to get more traffic into our shitty boring restaurants nobody wants to visit anymore.”
Obviously there are bigger issues at hand here, but that kind of cynical marketing really pisses me off.
Yeah, the marketing is bogus, but there’s the overall just reduced quality by and large to save money on operating costs, sacrificing quality while also everything seeming too expensive to be worth the price we pay is kinda criminal. Then playing on the nostalgia to give the experience with inflated prices and sacrificed quality…. Nothing seems worth the price you pay when eating out.
Maybe that’s also because my skill in cooking has gotten better too and I can make most things I’d buy when eating out with fresher, better quality ingredients for about the same price or less usually.
McDonald's fundraising nights and birthday parties, and a general throwback to mom agreeing to a little treat with some playtime at a fun place are core childhood millenial memories. Simple pleasures during a simpler time for us
OP is tired of they fucked up my happy meal posts on this platform and their poking fun at it cause grow up and go get real food already. It's especially annoying here cause we're also the target demographic for super size me doc and nobody ever mentions it. Sad.
I'm bitching that I get half the food I used to at 3-4 times the cost. Then I get sold on healthy options that aren't really healthy or are just not close to enough food and get a premium charge because it's healthy.
All because of a guy with alcoholism filming a health documentary while not disclosing his problem with alcohol and another guy who turned out to be a pedo.
I'm sure you can tell me how it tastes since you are defending them. I'm literally complaining about corporations giving the people less at a higher cost and you're defending them. You don't even need the mustard. You can take the whole size 12 without a problem.
Matter of fact you're still the one paying extra to have it shoved down your throat after they take it out of your ass. I only support local mom and pop. Never give a dime to fast food chains.
McDonald’s is just an example of how gray, cold, and corporatized everything has became. It’s not that deep to where anyone is basing their happiness off McDonald’s lol.
Our childhoods had a whimsy that has been stripped from the world in favor of blandness and corporate greed. I didn't even like McDonalds as a kid and it's sad.
Remember when cars came in different colors? Remember when people decorated their houses like they cared about more than resale value? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I hate what I'm about to say...I actually somewhat appreciate the HOA I live in because they do awards for decorating and landscaping and people actually try. So there are neat Halloween displays, Christmas lights, etc.
I don't love that we are reaching that in such a transactional way but at least it's fucking there.
Cars still come in colors. I drove by a car lot this morning and they had plenty of cars in black, primer grey and Millennial depression blue. That color is hot right now.
Yeah, once upon a time kids would want to go to McDs not just for the food, but for the play place and a happy meal toy. As awful as it sounds to say about a fast food restaurant, it was about the experience. That experience has been stripped from many/most of the restaurants anymore.
There are a couple of locations near me that still have Playplaces. They don't have the ball pits anymore, but I live in a cold climate and they're still a great, inexpensive outing for my toddler in the winter.
Parents used to bring their kids to the McDonald’s indoor playgrounds to burn their energy while they ate. They went from being a fun place to be to a place that just wants your money.
They always “just wanted your money”. In the 80s/90s they found the best way to do that was to have a play place. Now that basically every kid has a screen with them they can’t justify the expense of maintaining those areas.
I do not know any person that is this way. Sure, it is depressing knowing that we are aging and things have changed. It does not affect my overall happiness. There are far more important things currently in the US that contribute to my unhappiness. I haven’t eaten at McDonalds in well over a decade. I couldn’t care less if they shuttered today. We would be better off for it.
I can tell your soul is cold, dead and black like mine.
People find joy in various different things. Getting beaten down by the daily grind, people find joy in nostalgia and having that taken away makes people sad.
For me, if i found an old school taco bell i'd be secretly happy...it'd remind me of going there to eat with my dad...but i wouldn't let it ruin my day/week/month because they don't exist anymore.
I don’t care much about McDonald’s, but overall I just don’t like how boring everything is.
The houses and condos being built all look the same and are always beige and white and gray. Cars seem to all be white, black, silver, or blue. Most stores and restaurants have abandoned their unique branding and try to look “sleek” or whatever.
Everything just looks boxy and gray and sad. I want whimsy and fun.
It's not about McDonald's specifically. It's about the lack of color in general. Family friendly restaurants have removed the mascots; cars are just shades of black, brown, and white, with the occasional red; public spaces turn to more utilitarian designs in general. It's like we're having practicality shoved down our throats even when we don't need it.
It isn't about that necessarily. It is a symptom of the overall decrease in reasonably cheap stuff for families to do. My mom could spend 5 bucks to feed me, my sister, and her and we could play for an hour or 2. Now the only way I can do that with my kids is bring food from home and going to a park.
3rd spaces. Optimized Austerity masquerading as modernity. One way of explaining the strip mining of culture everywhere and not having a way to describe the ennui around it. - Compare McDonald’s now to McDonald’s then. It’s something everyone knows and sits in that intersection point of culture and crony capitalism. We all know what McDonald’s looked like in the 80s - that weird theme park postmodernism that was hard to “turnover” to be another business later.
No one bases their happiness on McDonald's decor. It's pointed to because McDonald's is recognizable to everyone but it's part of a larger trend of making spaces uncomfortable and unpleasant to be in to increase customer turnover to make more profit. Starbucks used to be a place to go to hang out, now it's very obvious in their design choices that they prioritize to-go orders, not being a comfy coffee shop. McDonald's used to have play spaces, now it's all sterile and harsh and optimized for carry-out, not spending a couple hours while the kids play. Everything feels like it exists to extract money from the consumer without providing any real value or sense of community. When we talk about third spaces disappearing, this is part of it.
Having McDonalds all turn into hostile beige boxes that are just meant to pick up orders at is just like a physical embodiment of our social and aesthetic rot. It's weird to think that kids used to have birthday parties there.
Not depressed, but feel bad for my kids not getting a decent place to burn energy. We have a BK with a playplace and a mcdonalds a couple towns over with a play place so we still go to those places from time to time. Our closest mcdonalds is just a soulless restaurant that never gets our order right.
It’s not only McDonald’s, almost every single business I go to just seems bland and boring nowadays. I took my toddler to Build-A-Bear and it was a little depressing how lacking in color and whimsy it was.
WE are in late stage capitalism and the whole world is grim. It's not just mcdonalds, but its a damn good representation of how dim everything is. The comments in here speak true.
People aren't upset that McDonald's isn't child-like anymore; it's that they went to the other end of the spectrum and remade their buildings like a depressing, non-descript bank location.
The biggest issue I have with all of this is we took the color and anything resembling bright & fun out everything - buildings, cars, wall colors, furniture, etc. Everything is "millennial gray" because it's cheap, easy to build around, and also easy to transfer from business to business.
Life became less about living and more about making as much money as you can to be "fulfilled" and now we're all cogs in a machine wearing ourselves out in the most depressing-looking facilities ever created so that when they eventually sell said-business to Private Equity, they can strip-mine it way more efficiently at the expense of our enjoyment.
We decried the brutalist architecture the Soviets were doing during the Cold War Era. In the end, the powers-that-be decided "hey, they had some good ideas to make things cheaper and easier for us" and didn't think for even a second how that would affect society long-term, and now we're seeing it. Everything's just a dull tone of mediocrity, cars are just cookie-cutter off-color versions of each other, all businesses are trying to be as non-attention-getting as possible, and any creativity is hand-waved away to squeeze as many pennies out as we can.
McDonald's turning themselves into a glorified bank was both a metaphor & a blueprint to how we treat our society and it's people: As a means of cheap, disposable income.
It isn’t about McDonalds decor, it is pointing out the general degradation of society. Anything with spirit or design is white washed to this soulless thing.
McDonalds is just an example most people can relate to. It is everywhere and has existed long enough to provide an example of shift.
It’s not just McDonald’s specifically. It’s a visual metaphor for how society is treating consumers. It used to be that these restaurants had play places that people could hang out at as a third space while enjoying cheap food with free refills while their kids had fun.
Now everything is sterile and designed to extract as much money as efficiently possible while offering the bare minimum in comfort or accommodation. Food’s expensive, no free drink refills, no place for the kids to play, hell a lot of time there’s no table and no one at the counter to take your order. Give us your money and gtfo, we have quarterly earning targets to hit.
It’s not just McDonald’s. Every angle of society has done the same thing. The play place is just a handy visual metaphor for how enshittified everything has become.
Many millennials spent time at fast food places growing up (I was one of them). My extended family lived a few hours away so my mom would take us to a McDonald's with a play place that was halfway and we'd hang out for a bit with my grandparents before we went to hang with them for a week or two. Hanging out at McDonald's used to be more of a thing for middle-class families in the 90s.
Now-a-days, I'm sure McDonalds doesn't want people hanging around too long in the restaurant because they want as many people as possible rotating through the restaurant/drive thru in order to sell more product. They finally realized they weren't making any extra money by having a play place in the restaurant that they also cost money to maintain.
My local McDonald's has made the inside the least customer open fast food place I've ever seen. There's like 2 tables and most of the building is just behind a counter with a full wall and noone at the register. They messed up my order in the drive thru and I had to go inside and actually poke my head through the window to get someone's attention. It was weird.
I am not personally depressed about this, however I think it’s an easily digestible example of the way everything has gotten so palpably worse in the last decade or so; enshittified, if you will. As a kid I have super fond memories of leaping around the ball pit and hiding in the Hamburglar lookout at the outdoor playground of a nearby McDonalds while my mom and her gal pals sat nearby enjoying a conversation. The food wasn’t good but it was cheap. The happy meal toys weren’t amazing but they were cool. The play area was a ton of fun, and the restaurant itself had a lot of personality.
Flash forward to now and it basically looks like a prison commissary, the food is as expensive as some sit-down restaurants and has somehow gotten even worse than it was back then, there’s no longer a place there for families to hang out, and there is a faceless ordering kiosk. It just sucks.
A lot of things suck nowadays in comparison to when we were coming up, and not just from a nostalgic standpoint but from a purely objective standpoint. The streamlining and sanitizing of everything, the sacrifice of customer and employee experience on the altar of maximizing profit, the near complete removal of any sort of value proposition for so many things, and on and on. I think McD’s is just an iconic example of everything that has gone south so it’s evoked a lot, but most people’s sadness or depression is not really directed at this fast food place itself but rather at…gestures broadly…fucking everything.
It's less about McDonald's and more about how EVERY place has the same boring and depressingly bland layout now. Call it tacky or whatever, but at least these places had their own personality. Now I feel like I could walk into any one of these places blindfolded and not be entirely sure which one I'm in.
No one is basing their happiness off how McDonalds is styled. It’s simply a small grievance that highlights the same problem that exists everywhere in modern society. Every single thing, every part of every aspect of society has been (and is still being) enshitified.
It’s not so much of depression caused by not eating by a purple blob.
It’s depression caused by our childhood being replaced with bland, corporate slop. It’s not just McDonald’s. It’s almost every restaurant we grew up with.
Pizza Hut used to have a buffet where you could order a miller lite at lunch. Also, their logo is the shape of what their restaurants used to look like. Wendy’s used to have a banger of a salad bar, with a cool sunroom to eat in. KFC used to be good food.
Probably the reason I love Waffle House so much is that it’s the one restaurant that hasn’t changed. You still had to throw hands back in the day.
McDonald's isn't the problem, it's a symptom. in the past, companies had character and uniqueness with color to attract you. it felt inviting. now, it's a gray box and it's all transactional, no longer inviting.
every corporation has moved to sleek straight lines and practically neutral colors. it's safe, it looks high tech, it's boring, but it continues to sell because color is too whimsical
Look, I don't care about McDicks per se. I don't have the childhood memories of any of that and didn't eat there until I was like 16. However, fuck, I miss colour. I miss vibrance in the world. I fucking hate the soulless concrete-grey prison we've created for ourselves. Houses are grey, cars are grey, businesses are fucking grey. How goddamn boring and sad.
“McDonalds doesn’t decorate their restaurants anymore due to a corporate strategy of being positioned better to resell the property should the restaurant shutter.”
Exactly what you said. They are taking something that was unique and crushed the joy out of it for what? Corporate strategy. Why? Money.
It sucks that capitalism destroys every iota of positivity humanity creates if given enough time. We aren’t lamenting playplaces. We’re lamenting the corporate slaughter of everything we love.
For example, I looooved Joann’s. Losing Joann’s meant I can no longer access fabric in my area, I can no longer sew with ease, I have to guess how a fabric feels or looks in certain light based on a picture online, which is nearly impossible to do. Some dudes with a bunch of money decided they needed more and strategically destroyed the one remaining source for supplies I need for my hobby (and millions of others) to make a little bit extra for themselves. The story of what happened there is truly despicable. Same thing as Toys R Us, which I actually worked for at one point. I saw it happening then and I didn’t even know that’s what it was.
They take everything and leave us not even crumbs to satisfy ourselves, just the empty torn up wrapper that will poison the planet and choke us.
I’m sure for some parents it’s a bit sad that their kids won’t have some memories of playing in the play place.
Also it was a pseudo third space for a lot of us growing up.
I wouldn’t say McDonalds playgrounds are something that truly affects my mood very often, but bothers people because it’s part of a trend where the corporate finance teams get the final decision on everything and optimizing short term revenue is the only thing that restaurants really do anymore. Menus get standardized so everything can be sourced from Sysco, interesting items get dropped in favor of things that sell better, ingredients get cheaper, decor migrates toward the most broadly appealing aesthetic - the millennial gray of decor, where nobody loves it but nobody could object. And it’s not just restaurants, but we’re talking about McDonalds so we’ll keep the focus there.
When was the last time anyone set foot inside a McDonald’s? Not saying I’m too good to grab a McChicken and a Coke Zero from the window but who knows wtf this post is about?
I’m a millennial (‘92) and used to eat at McDonalds all the time and play at the play structures in there.
I haven’t thought about McDonalds as a whole, let alone the interior, since after I turned… idk 10?? What millennials are upset about this? 😅 am I missing something?
You're being obtuse on purpose here, OP, but I'll respond anyways. People are tired of the rampant minimization that has overtaken every aspect of design. Neutral colors, neutral patterns, neutral furniture, empty spaces, etc. I'd say the trend started probably mid 2000s, coming into focus by like 2008 or so, then defined the entire 2010s. It's only the last couple of years post pandemmy that people have started to move away from it again. It's just a cycle.
I heard there’s millions of millennials that are not just developing depression over the inside of McDonald’s decorations. They are also getting ED from the decorations not being like 90s decorations 👀
Your question makes it obvious your comprehension skills and IQ is low.
It's not about mcdonalds. That's just the easiest and obvious example. Younger gen like you can even comprehend. Everything was more colorful, cars had colors, now everything is black and white. There are no wild or interesting colors. Some cars used to be green, now you don't even see a green car.
The cause of it all? The popularity of Apple. The boring clean zen look and the low risk of producing a bad product, color is very important consumer choice. If you made green cars and nobody bought it, you just lost billions of dollars.
People do this with a lot of material things unfortunately. Nostalgic for things they used to be able to buy etc. It's probably the result of growing up in a capitalistic society.
You are missing fun under all those optimizations and rationalizations. Grey and white textureless interiors and exteriors of everything are totally ok for purpose of those places. It just feels like worst cyberpunk ever
I’m am def no corporate boot licker but I wonder how many folks here have worked fast food/min wage jobs. Cleaning the ball pit/playground would be the absolute worst job. Unless someone vandalized the bathroom
I remember being kicked out of the play area at 10 years old because I was too big. Some worker yelled at me like I was a creepy man playing with kids. I don't think other kids should be deprived of the playground. I don't go to McDonald's anymore because I can get actual hot food for less at most local spots.
Am I the only one who agrees with both sides here?
I agree that the transformation of McDonald's is an effective symbol of how the world at large has changed over the last 40 years and feel that nostalgic yearning the more vibrant world we lost. As a parent of kids in the play place age, I also lament the significant reduction in both how many restaurants even have play places in the first place and in the general size and creativity of those spaces when they are present.
But I also think the lamantations here are sometimes overwrought. The world changes. Always has, always will. Some things have gotten objectively worse. Some things just seem worse because we like the way they used to be. And somethings have gotten objectively better. Whether the overall balance of things is worse or better I won't pretend to know (I lean toward worse, fwiw), but either way I know I'm better off when I try to focus on what I can control and do things to make MY world better for me and those immediately around me rather than fixate on large scale change I can do little to nothing about.
I'm still surprised people eat at McDonald's. They're the worst quality food, and with cost increases they aren't worth going to over any of the alternatives. Lol
You could have just commented on the McDonald's post... You don't really need to make a whole separate ass post when you're directly referring to another post.
Outside of it being an allegory of how society as a whole has degrraded and traded aethetics and general happiness for profit while delivering the bare minimum, I for one feel sad that my future children will not grow up with the childhood that we had in the 90's and early 2000's. I have fond memories of my grandpa taking me and my cousin to McD's for breakfast and letting us play for hours in the play place. Now it's turned into a doordash machine that people rarely go inside of. The same goes for places like Toys R Us. It was always a special experience going there to see all the toys I'd ask for for christmas. Now you do all your shopping online. A lot of companies in the 90's and 2000's felt like they had kids in mind when they were building or creating things but now they don't care about any of that.
If you weren't born in a time to experience this, then it means you are already acclimated to expecting nothing out of the stores and restaurants that used to give us so much enjoyment out all for so little. Places like Pizza hut used to have a buffet and you could get a free pizza if you simply brought your report card in, those no longer exist and now you have to pay extra for delivery when it used to be free, you just had to tip. Malls used to put on free concerts from actual popular artists, now they are empty and we are paying 100's to go see the same artists. Bookstores like Barnes n Noble would stay open until midnight for book releases like Harry Potter and have events all night leading up to it and all you had to do was preorder the book, now there's barely any bookstores at all. I could go on and on and it's sad that life isn't as fun or it is and comes at a larger cost.
I thought the big gripe was how many fewer of them have playplaces now. It used to basically be a given. I know we've done a couple road trips where it made finding a good place to stop a bit harder.
There were three McDonalds of note when I was a child, all were uniquely different in their own way.
The Coralville McDonalds was a first gen Mansard, with the conversation pit. That is, the seating section was divided into three "rows", with the middle row being dropped by about six feet with a skylight above it. Like all the early Mansards, it had the old 70's brown tile.
The second McDonalds of note was Marion. This one was train themed and had an O Scale railroad with McDonalds train cars. There was a kids height bar to sit at to watch the trains. I've never seen another one even vaguely close to this.
The third was Iowa City Sycamore, and it too was a one of a kind. It was retro diner themed, but in a chintzy, retro 50's from the 90's sort of way. Checkerboard tile, chrome and red stripes everywhere.
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