I'm kind of fine with not overmarketing fast food to children.
Yes, but the right trajectory wasn't to make the building dull, it was the make better food for kids.
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
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie 😄
The gorilla was shot and killed though.
TBF, the latter is a much better reflection of how lifeless and awful their food is.
i was really hungover and had taken some painkillers with codeine and i had a single mcdonalds cheeseburg and it was dynamite
I would wager it was the codeine painkillers that were dynamite and the burger was mostly a side effect
Well no. McDonald's is pretty tasty it's just horrific for you and the planet.
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.
That's the point that I thought was obvious. Everyone else seems to be focusing on other factors..
They wanted to shift from marketing to children to marketing to adults so they could raise the prices.
If I recall correctly, they were forced. There's an obesity pandemic going on in children, mostly driven by excessive use of sugars and overconsumption of fast food and sodas. So, there were certain regulations limiting how directed at children the marketing could be. They can still charge exorbitant prices to children, their parents are the ones paying anyways.
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.
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.
Whenever I take road trips I try to spot the old Pizza Hut buildings by the shape of the roof. It's surprising how many there are.
I do think they have an obligation to be pretty. Pretty things make people happy. It's a contribution to the social project we're all working on.
A walkable city, not that a McDonalds drive-thru is specifically part of that, should have greenery, places to hang out, and pretty buildings to look at. People should like being wherever they happen to be.
If you compare the two buildings in the picture, the top one I'm sure you have to drive to, but it at least looks like an inviting place to hang out with your kids or something. The bottom one almost seems hostile to that idea. And the main reason it even looks like that is austerity. At least I think so. Big gray cubes are cheap to build and easily templateable.
Ahem, not marketing to kids is bad?
Nah, bottom is better. Attracting kids to get the habit of eating unhealthy isn't.
This isn't about McDonald's this is about society. All the colour and excitement has gone, McDonald's is just one of the casualties.
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.
Your Radio Shack example is legit. I had an uncle who worked at Radio Shack as some sort of, idk, tech or something? I was a kid and it was in the 80's, all I knew was that he worked there and made good money doing it.
Then one day he gets recruited by a multinational tech corporation and moves to Berlin to work in a lab. He could've taken my aunt with him, but she cheated on him as soon as he left for the 2 probationary weeks he spent in Germany before the company in question committed to hiring him.
He eventually became a millionaire with dual citizenship and my aunt married some abusive dipshit who immediately went broke. Now she works in a pickle factory. Ain't life interesting?
Well fuckin said and spot on!
Also thanks for reminding me how great Radio Shack used to be. It used to be a place to get actual electronics components. And the people there knew their shit. And there was enough intelligent folks around to keep a place like that in business! God I miss those days..
Why should garbage unhealthy "food" be marketed to children though?
When will people stop eating that garbage.....?(probably never)
It's getting too expensive so more are quitting now than ever.
I stopped when I got old enough to realize the only thing I actually liked about McDonalds was the play place.
Now I give it a try like once every 3-4 years to remind myself how much it sucks.
Ronald's second term
I really miss the unhinged topiary that used to be outside of every fast food restaurant when I was a kid.
the unhinged topiary
Looks like they changed their target group.
I think their target group is exactly the same, they just aged a bit
Yes, that's what I actually also considered writing - you're reading my mind :)
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.
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.
What... Is it saying? They changed branding? It sounds like it's supposed to say something more interesting?
Thanks for reporting the often ignored extinction of wildlife at the local Mcdees
I have never seen a McDonalds that looks like the top pic. I remember plenty with play spaces, but they weren't visible from outside.
Iirc this was the McDonald's just outside the Dallas zoo.
If it isn't that one, the same thing happened to that one. Sad times.
I spent a lot of time in the car crossing the U.S. in the 80's and 90's so I saw a LOT of McDonalds. Most of them are bog standard but once in a while you come across one like this where they spiced it up. I've seen one with a train engine out front, one with a parked airplane, etc. There's one in Tucson with a giant T-Rex statue in front of it. I've also seen some crazy play places with slides going out of the building and back inside. Would've loved that when I was a kid.
I don't eat at McDonalds for many reasons, but if I had to walk through such a Chuck E Cheese-ass entrance to grab a burger I'd have one more reason to avoid it.
Just more proof of the efficiencies of Capitalism
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