This guy was in the lobby at the McDonald’s in the local mall jamming on a self playing piano throughout my childhood. Now it’s just a bland, boring lifeless shell of its former self.
This post brings back a recent memory of my high school senior field trip to Disneyland where we went to the nearby McDonald’s first, and trying to do hygene stuff in the crowded bathroom felt so ghetto, and then at the tables while other kids were talking I was writing a comment on a pull request on Lemmy’s GitHub repository
I don’t like McDonald’s. I’m just old enough that the Play Place thing wasn’t for me.
But I’ve got family that likes that stuff, especially the kids. The one closest to my house was kept to look like a 50/60’s diner with murals of rock n roll musicians and an old school juke box (with the lil baby singles records).
It was a pleasant, if not fun, setting. They gutted it to look like the prison picture.
I miss everything having distinctive features, personality, and allowing themselves to use colors and shapes.
Restaurants, business logo and branding in general, apps, everything getting normalized to the death. I know a large part of that is accessibility and cost reduction, but it’s a bit sad.
In my town, subway stations where all themed around what’s above them. No two stations where the same (there isn’t a lot, so there’s that). Now that the network is getting extensions and the old stations are remade, they’re all flat, white walls with square lights, flat uniform labels (harder to see, since they’re lined with the walls). If you were dropped in one without indication, it’d take some time to even know where you are.
And just none of it is fun anymore. Noble Roman’s Pizza, before it became gas station pizza, had windows where kids could watch them make the pizza and they showed old silent movies and cartoons on the wall. It was awesome.
Now? Even the McDonalds playgrounds I’ve driven past look depressing.
Tbh I’m finding that to be quite the trend for everything today as a car guy do see some cars being cool and fun but compared to the 50s when even their equivalent of a Prius shit box was still trying so hard to look like a god damn spaceship rocket thing with so many colors that almost every car had two colors per car green and pink where common place today everything is ether trying to look like a ford focus or a SUV brick granted I currently work at a Toyota dealership so I’m constantly surrounded by Toyota cars that are in my opinion are the blandest of bland cars that only good because of their reliability Honestly even when modern cars try to copy old car design they always end up looking like the old car having a allergic reaction
I mean there you go, Toyota’s are appliances. They have to look bland because their style has to remain inoffensive after decades on the road.
That being said, I’m impressed with how much style they’ve managed to put on the new Prius while still aiming for long-term fleet vehicle role. I also like what they’re trying to do with the BZ4 styling wise, even if it’s a compromised first gen product.
in my state, NC, they don’t even have the playgrounds anymore (I think they outlawed fast food joints being allowed to have play places, as I typically only see them when I vacation in Virginia)
I think there’s now a law about the modernization/regulation of fast food restaurants. Just so we don’t have a bunch of leftover Pizza Hut buildings anymore when a store closes.
I don’t now, but it was pretty standard when I was growing up in the 80s to go to McDonalds birthday parties. Happy Meals were something most kids loved getting. It’s like Disney. Yes, they’re a big evil corporation, but they also make things fun for kids. That’s the loss me and others here are lamenting. They’ve taken all the fun away from these places.
Idk if other countries had this period, but there was a time where mcdonalds in sweden all had these semi-transparent glittery green glass mosaics on the walls and that is 100% the nicest it has ever been, it was actually nice to look at and the generally dark interiors made it very comfortable to be there.
The current interiors are… okay, but so fucking uninspired… At least they have some wood panels here and there, but christ would it kill them to tone down all the stark white?
This is true. Its one of my better arguments for revolution.
This society is not for you, in the sense that even with all the efficiency of machinery/automation and economies og scale and expert craftsmen, its probably still less work for your clumsy not-a-boat-maker ass to look up a wikihow and build a boat from scratch than it is for you to ‘earn’ enough to buy a boat.
Its less work and expense to grow food from scratch to feed starving kids in your community than it is to lobby the government to use food that would have been thrown away to feed kids.
And I don’t know if any random stranger would make good decisions that wouldn’t get lots of people killed, but making any random dipshit off the street supreme emperor of earth, you wouldn’t get, on average, worse decisions than our current oligarchs. Like, basically anyone could do better. Maybe not good enough; we’ve got some apocalypses on the horizon, but at least not worse. And I think we could do better than random dipshit emperor if we put our anything to it.
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