The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - March 24th, 2008
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09:27 am
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Things I McWonder
The other day I had some Chicken McNuggets. And I wondered how they would taste to me without an entire childhood memory of McDonalds-as-comfort-food backing it up. They'd probably taste awful to me, but how awful would they be without the electric charge of the Happy Meals and the playsets and Grimace to transform "grease and mustard" into something I'm used to?
Then I wondered how bad the diners had to be beforehand, for McDonalds to rise to power. See, the reason McDonalds was so successful is that until then, there had been a zillion different greasy spoons, each owned by its own Mom and Pop team, and you never knew what you were going to get. Even early on, every McDonalds was supposed to be cookie-cutter identical.
I think we've all seen how bad a gas station can get when there's no competition - unwashed bathrooms, crappy pumps, lousy selection. I can only assume a lot of those diners were as bad, and served awful food because hell, what else is next to the highway? But it's not like McDonalds food is great, either, and nine times out of ten I'd choose a below-average greasy spoon burger to an above-average Big Mac.
So that's the question: Were the diners that bad, on the whole? Or was McDonalds actually good at some point in time, their burgers comparable to actual meat cooked in a diner - not great, but good enough to be above the national average? In other words, did McDonald's get worse, or were the diners so terrible that anything would have been superior, or do consumers rate "consistency" so highly that they'll eat processed shit as long as it's the same shit?
I wonder. I'd like to see a comparison menu between several of the restaurants that McDonalds put out of business and McDonalds' meals as they existed then. Just to know what it was like sixty years ago.
Or maybe it was convenience! Maybe people valued the quickness of the drive-thru, and the speed, to get back on that road and hit the highway, eager to burn up the cheap gas in their newly-purchased-with-post-WWII-flush-economy cars! It's hard to say what it was, back then.
But it'll be interesting, if I am around, to see where we are in forty years. I suspect there'll be a kid saying, "Why the fuck do we drink this Starbucks shit? It's terrible. Were the indie coffee shops so bad back then that this crap rose to the top?" And I think I'll be the old man explaining that yeah, a lot of the independent coffee shops were surly and served awful brew, and Starbucks actually used better ingredients back in the naughts, and we all thought that drinking capucinnos was so kicky that we thought we were trendy to drink the cool brews, and now it's just a part of the landscape.
Hard to say. But I still want to know what a 1952 McDonalds hamburger tasted like. And to see what the service at their competition was like.
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