McDonald's holds communities together (2016)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
As a 16 year old it was awesome to work alongside other folks of varying ages and nationalities and get to know that other "walks" of life existed. I made friends outside of my highschool, fell in love, got burnt by the fryolator like 8 times, and most importantly learned about hard work and the value of money.
But I also saw veterans from the VA having their Saturday breakfast meeting. I remember watching them sit for hours with smiles on their faces as they talked about their time in the service. I watched regulars come in and make smalltalk at the register. I saw the homeless get their daily meals. I saw people at their worst, screaming about McChickens, and at their best, telling jokes and making people smile. It really is a watering hole and I'm thankful for the time I spent there.
Newer online games like Overwatch (which I play more now) have distroyed this community spirit. The normal mode of playing is no longer that one joins a server full of regulars, rather, you're matched up with random people. You can play with specific people, but it's weird to randomly friend request someone after the length of a game (20 minutes or less). The mitigating factor is that you can choose to "stay as a team" if you enjoyed your 20 minutes, and it'll group the people who select that together. After playing more games in this group, you might start chatting ("fancy another game?" or "you did great in that!" etc.) and then add each other as friends. But it's not the same as hanging out.
Old games were more like going to your local running club every week. New games are like going to a different fun-run in a different part of town each week, and then maybe someone asks you to to run with them again at one of the fun-runs, but there's a very low chance of that happening and it's kinda weird.
Chat servers/channels/whatever that allow off-topic discussion seem to be the go-to "third place" online now. HN and Reddit are too large to qualify in a meaningful sense for the majority of users.
discord servers seem to have filled the niche, to some extent, as each server can develop its own norms. i’m hoping that OW2 takes the opportunity to address this design problem in-game, via guilds, clans, or tournaments, something along those lines.
If you are interested in Third Place stuff, Howard Shultz talks about how that philosophy is behind the success of Starbucks much more than the coffee :)
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[0] - Not technically, but the costs of not being there are generally too high to give one any realistic choice in the matter.
All that said, I'm amazed that Chick Fil A is able to maintain such a high quality of customer service within cities, even when they seem to be just slammed all day long. I have no idea how they pull that off so consistently, but they do, and they've earned my respect because of it.
The small town McDonald’s are actually pretty similar. Usually they are owned in the community, while urban McDonald’s are usually part of a multi-unit franchisee. Chick-fil-A doesn’t allow that.
When the economy is having problems, adults work all shifts at McDonald's and service is more attentive.
You don't go to Maccies for a good coffee but fucking hell, they were the only place we could get it from. Drive through was closed but I could order inside. Some tough guys hanging out and flexing but they're just waiting for their mate to finish their shift.
24 hour coffee is a total boon when you've got a 2 hour drive ahead of you after a big gig.
Well, IIRC, they had upped their coffee game a lot in the past decade or so, to compete with the coffee incubents.
Besides, it's not like e.g. Starbucks coffee is anything but artificial piss for a European coffee drinker.
> Besides, it's not like e.g. Starbucks coffee is anything but artificial piss for a European coffee drinker.
To Australians the difference is even more pronounced.
It is seriously as good as coffee from nearly any anywhere else, and consistently so.
Many snobby people from Melbourne will protest.
But it's true. Especially compared to coffee elsewhere in the world.
I’ve been working in Japan for a decade and one of the things that made morning Roppongi much more tolerable was being able to slide into a Maccas and quietly drink a coffee before going to work.
I’m heading back to Aus now and the thought I wouldn’t be able to do that was actually a little depressing.
It really isn't that cheap tbh. A coffee at McDonalds is gonna cost about the same price, and starbucks is like $0.5 more.
Also, they build Tims in some very rural areas that Starbucks would never bother with, and keep them open pretty early/late (sometimes 24hrs), making them one of the few places to congregate at those hours in small towns. Tims (and A&W, oddly) are where you'll find the seniors who can't stop getting up at 3AM, sitting and reading the paper.
I try to support small remote gas stations & buy stuff there, but the coffee is often undrinkable.
My children are still young, but I've long thought I'd want them to work a basic job for a large employer (fast food, supermarket, etc) as a teenager to get an appreciation of how small cogs working to a fixed formula can create something massive.
this is the actual genius of the McDonalds' franchise. It's not the menu nor the food recipe, but the formalized business process. Every step is listed, there's a manual for everyting, and training is sufficient for anyone with a brain to get it.
It makes every maccas exactly the same everywhere.
For a certain range of "other walks". Rich and upper middle class kids would seldom work there for example.
Which makes compulsory army service an even better version of the "meet people from all walks of life". It also helps with not over-dramatizing things (think "emo" teens) and generally being lazy (think kids whose parents do everything for them well into their 20s). And most people could do with more discipline, not less.
Unfortunately it comes with the baggage of you know, killing people. That said, in countries not in the offense this (being involved in combat) is almost never the case. Though these countries, with exceptions like Switzerland and Singapore, don't have an army service.
Perhaps an alternative, where people have to spend time with all walks of life, privileges are minimal, and they get to do some good, like e.g. planting trees, helping in crisis situations, etc, would be great.
They all left before starting uni to focus on study but I think it's untrue that upper class kids do not work at McDonald's. They just don't keep working there for the long term.
I read it as McD workers somehow got special access to hardware...
Military service has a lot of benefits. But it probably wouldn't serve the same purpose that Mcdonalds does in these communities
I agree that is had a big advantage for me that I met people I would never have met otherwise, and would not have believed existed.
> Unfortunately it comes with the baggage of you know, killing people
I disagree in two ways.
1) A professional army, which is the realistic alternative, kills people just the same, should war happen.
2) By far the biggest baggage in my view is the involuntary servitude being forced on innocent young kids. That is not worthy a free country to me.
(1) the "innocent young kids" are 18+ grown-ass adults. Time to learn the also have some responsibilities towards the society they live in, not just privileges. Paying taxes alone doesn't count. This country they grew up, gone to school, and live in only exists because some people fought hard (and many died) to defend it.
(2) It's not "involuntary servitude" it's citizen service. Free countries don't come for free - they're fought to create, to defend, and to keep free.
I served over 10 years in the military and it was a great decision for my life but I'm somewhat against conscription except in dire times.
That sounds like a microcosm of American society as a whole.
Nationalism with extra steps.
Those speaking derisively of "nationalism" more often than not do so from the vantage point of being within a free nation and having a citizenship.
But it's doubly ironic to dismiss nationalism so from the sweet privilege point of being a citizen of the most powerful nations on Earth (e.g. for an American).
When you don't have a nation (e.g. a colonised or enslaved people, ethic minority ill treated within an empire or a larger nation run by another ethnicity, immigrant) you very much want to get access to one.
The choices are staying strong enough to defend the nation or slavery. You could ask the former colonies of the old colonial powers about that. Or the Native Americans. Or the former subjects of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". Or, more recently, the Ukraine.
I am a liberal but denying the importance of the military is just foolishness.
An idea like:
"I'd like to live in a free country but I don't want to ever fight for it, so please don't invade it people, we're all pals and everything right?"
only flies when you're already in a strong nation, that others don't dare mess with. And that's because others in your nation didn't let that idea fly in their heads.
"Paying taxes alone doesn't count."
Who said anything about "paying taxes alone"? A role that involves paying taxes also involves working as a participant in society. You can choose to gatekeep about who and what counts if you wish. My gate says that teachers and healthcare workers are far and away a more important societal good.
"This country they grew up, gone to school, and live in only exists because some people fought hard (and many died) to defend it."
So this land and the people living on it wouldn't exist because people chose to kill other people? Huh.
"It's not "involuntary servitude" it's citizen service."
Just call it a different name and it's a-ok!
"Free countries don't come for free - they're fought to create, to defend, and to keep free."
A free country is hardly a free country when it forces you to die for, in most cases, bogus reasons for bogus wars.
Well, depends on the country/culture. In several they are allowed to handle an alcoholic beverage just fine too at that age (heck, even slightly younger). And that's just on the level of law. In their own, they manage just fine to consume alcohol, with schemes ranging from an older friend buying, to fake IDs and all that.
That said, if a country is under attack, then it doesn't matter whatever one is ready or not. You handle it with whatever you have. Especially if the enemy, or the fate imposed by the enemy, wont spare teenagers either.
>Who said anything about "paying taxes alone"?
Many people - who think it's their one and only duty as a citizen. I'm not just replying to what has been said, but also to common attitudes and more general themes related to the subject.
>So this land and the people living on it wouldn't exist because people chose to kill other people? Huh.
A country is not it's land, it's the state, it's sovereignty, it's infrastructure, and so on. So that land would exist, and others would be ruling it, including you. Huh.
>A free country is hardly a free country when it forces you to die for, in most cases, bogus reasons for bogus wars.
The existence (even prevalence) of bogus wars, doesn't make all war fighting bogus. Usually the bogus wars are on the offense side to begin with.
The US didn't have any reason or right to be in the Phillipines or Vietnam for example. But they did have a reason to fight the British. Or the Japanese for that matter.
Conscripts are forced to serve in the military. Sounds like slave soldiers to me.
People who uphold freedom as a dogmatic concept, a holy word void of context that can be attacked by outsiders other than some invading nation as if it is not a product of the systems and society that is free.
It is no accident that "we had to destroy the village to save it" came from a conscript army. Your choice doesn't matter but you have ordained responsibility and not those with power.
Somehow it still exists, despite military service having been abolished more than 15 years ago. I have no idea why one would ever ask to join, but Italy being Italy, there is probably some bureaucratic reason for organisations to shove volunteers under that umbrella to get free money from the state.
That should never be the case. There's enough bad things happening to people forced to be in some environment. Let's not create more of them.
Yes, those environments may be useful in many ways. But if you can't get away from potential abuse, they're not worth it.
My parents basically wanted me to experience a “crappy job” at least once (it really wasn’t that bad of a job, plus 50% employee discount which was a great deal for a teenager and McD lover), and told me that people who are versatile and are able to endure hardship will be able to make it through and pick oneself up even when life becomes difficult for whatever reason.
And another quote from my McD coworker, who was an aspiring music composer, changed my view on money, I had a problem with hoarding money (still kind of do) and he said to me “money is not the goal, it’s something to help achieve your goals”. Didn’t understand that until I was older but it eventually struck me.
Great place to be for teenagers looking for their first work experiences really.
Betty Ryder from this article is a big example. You can tell she has a place to stay in at night but what about her days? It's not like days are much friendlier to homeless people when it's cold out and the fact that the employees are nice enough to not kick her out even though many would... it's both life-affirming and incredibly sad. How many Bettys is the system letting down, both in my country and the USA? How many of them depend completely on the manager of their local McDonalds not being a jerk?
As everything gets commercialized and privatized, community can become a lower priority and thus taking care of people who don't pay for anything is no longer something those centers do. Eventually many towns ended up with nothing public at all, and it sounds like McDonalds is filling the need that these places used to do.
An interesting microcosm of this issue is public outdoor seating out the front of businesses being introduced in some city squares. The seats are public, provided by the city, yet because of their positioning it's easy to mistake that they are for the business. When people think the seats are for businesses, they don't feel comfortable utilizing the space unless they're paying the business.
Would you go to a pub without buying a beer? Probably not, so they're no longer Public Houses for the public, and not everywhere has a place that's filled in the need.
Frankly, I think communities are scared of who would show up, and that's precisely the problem. We have cordoned off and alienated our communities into The Paying and The Poor. You don't get to be part of the community unless you're the former.
Bars and clubs used to be the community "third places." Then it was shopping malls. Then it was Starbucks, until Starbucks stopped caring about its communities and focused solely on moving customers thorough as rapidly and profitable as possible.
Now it's McDonald's, and similar outlets. All this shows how important having somewhere to go other than work and home is to a society.
Often I'll be sitting at home thinking "I want to go out and do something but it's too hot and I don't want to go shopping/spend money"
Maybe these services do exist and I just don't know about them. In that case I wish they were advertised better.
Depending on your hobbies, there are other similar things: I have a membership to a local community motorcycle garage, where you can hang out and work on bikes. Or just hang out.
I know you're probably not talking about bars, deliberately, but a lot of bars have pool tables and darts and you don't have to feel obliged to drink too much while there.
I see these around the city but unfortunately I'm living with my parents stuck in the suburbs and it seems like there is nothing around.
All of the bars I have been too have been loud and packed, I feel that there is essentially 0% chance of meeting someone there. It has only been useful if going with a group and getting food/drinks so we can take one of the outdoor tables.
When I lived in Seattle, the State of Washington had a set up for just this sort of thing at the convention center.
If you needed someplace to go and bang on your laptop, it offered free space with free electricity and WiFi. Instead of being a formal co-working space, it was just large chairs with built-in desks, like we used to have in elementary school. Except that they were comfortable, wired with electrical outlets, and scattered around a nice hallway with good views of the city.
Very inviting, but almost nobody used them in part because they weren't promoted — you just had to stumble upon them. And also because at the time, they weren't necessary. Finding tech office space was as easy as striking up a conversation in a coffee shop. I landed a squishy office on the 30th floor of a downtown skyscraper with views of Puget Sound for free just because the startup guy I bumped into at Tully's liked the sound of what I was working on.
Alas, with the arrival of VC money into the tech sphere, the days of bootstrapped cooperative entrepreneurship appear to be gone. I wish someone would write a book about that era of tech. It was really something.
I really wish there were more options, but it's nice that at least this is working so far.
That said, the alternatives are also poor. Bars are small, obscene and focused on drinking; "serious" restaurants are exclusionary and expensive; parks are, well, open to elements.
Where I live, we have many anti-cafes. Some are highly thematic, quiet, stylish, with comfy rooms for groups which want privacy, and time there is cheap enough to make food joints non-competitive. Then there's libraries (though in the US, it seems, they've come to serve another community function, for an even lower income demographic).
The sentiment that this is "a new low" is not nearly as damnable and undemocratic as some here try to signal. It is possible to do better than having a gaudy corporation's food joint serve as the core for modern community.
Not to discredit your argument, but in some places (countries) McDonald's has changed their "look" to something more akin to a restaurant, with less cartoon-ish colors, quieter-ish music (or no music at all) and different ambiance lighting to actually resemble a place a family would go. I've heard before that in the US there's this big disparity where in one state/city McD has a completely different "look" than others from other regions, sometimes making it look like a completely different brand only having the trademark M to identify it.
That’s how a lot of the recently renovated McDonald’s look around here too (bay area.)
I don't know much about how they looked in the past but currently they have sober colours. This is what a current restaurant looks like: https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/RxMy6l6HjBZujf7pHjtR... Seems like mostly hamburger colours? Mustard, lettuce, tomato.
It's not a deluxe restaurant but it's not horrible. The coffee they serve is perfectly fine as well.
My mom goes to her local Tim Horton's every week to meet up with some of her friends. It's an informal drop-in social event, basically.
They sure aren't going because the coffee's good. It's because that's where their friends are.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566661/dignity-by-c...
The book even has a McDonalds chapter.
Econlog interview for the non readers: https://www.econtalk.org/chris-arnade-on-dignity/
>Last thing: I visited the first location of the California gold rush. It was a tourist town filled with vacation homes set aside a picturesque lake. You know what you did not find there? Any of the families of the old gold miners now trapped in despair or drug addiction or boarded up homes. Once the gold dried up, those settlers moved. Unpleasant to be sure, but they did. And I have to think they also liked living there and found it a difficult choice to move. Just as the migrants from mid west moved during the dust bowl. But they did it. What has changed? I have to think government policies that have subsidized the pain of economic competition have made the tradeoff between moving and not moving easier. Is that the world we want?
A McDonald's I visit once in a while has senior citizens packing one side, and laptop users on the other.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/food/the-plate/20...
People turn their noses up at fast food restaurants, but they are ubiquitous and there are no political arguments over how to fund them. They have the familiarity of a major brand and everyone has been to one and knows how it works.
This is probably how it should be. As long as people have a safe and clean place to meet socially, it doesn't matter where it is. And we can be confident that the free market will keep McDonalds around pretty much no matter what happens
> we can be confident that the free market will keep McDonalds
So part of your argument against government-run centers is that... government-run centers are unreliable because of people against them?
The business on the other hand, does not suffer at the hands of a poorly designed political system.
The trade-off being that establishments like McDonalds adversely affect the eating habits of people starting at a young age. The trade-off for any business as a community center, is that they must profit from the people, irregardless of the adverse effects. Facebook is another example.
> People turn their noses up at fast food restaurants, but they are ubiquitous and there are no political arguments over how to fund them.
The success of government welfare efforts in a democracy are culturally dependent. Social Darwinism is encoded into the DNA of American society. So people with privilege will often veto the establishment of social goods, as it is regarded as an unnecessary expense - maybe it means higher taxation, maybe it affects their land value, etc. In other countries, libraries, parks, community centers, galleries, campgrounds, etc. get adequate funding from the government, and with consent of the people.
So it's not so much that the free market provides the best possible outcome, it's more that the culture has constrained the best social outcome to places that increase the net caloric intake of the population, while decreasing their health outcomes. A lack of a public health system means the government is not incentivized to tackle these adverse health outcomes either.
the centers are run almost entrepreneurially, with a blend of public funding (based on service metrics) and direct revenue (by charging for activities). it works great.
Seeing this made me think of Hemingway’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place.
Contrast that with the one in FiDi in San Francisco which always feels dystopian to me walking in. It’s old, grimey, has a tiny seating area on the ground level with a dark musty basement area. Seems like most office workers avoid it like the plague and patrons are a weird mix of tourists and homeless people. It depresses me every time I walk in.
I'm also deeply sad that this is made necessary by insufficient social resources and poor land use. It's even nicer to have community centers and parks that can serve this purpose without the need for purchases.
It's also nice that they provide employment for cultures without apprenticeship opportunities but, again, a bit sad that it's necessary.
In summary: nationalize McDonalds! ;-)
I grew up eating there frequently, have since learned and avoid fast food, but never had that sense
There's not much substance in that video (its comedy) but it opened up my mind a bit that a place like that could have an impact
Fighting a McDonald’s in Queens for the Right to Sit. And Sit. And Sit. https://nyti.ms/1iRd1V6
I have a niece who's been a manager at McDonald's for many years now, who also trains new managers. Despite the fact that she's been a dependable, full-time employee of McDonald's for decades, taxpayers still have to subsidize her family so McDonald's can keep their profit margin high and they can bulldoze yet another unique, local business, and replace it with yet another airport-inspired architectural monstrosity with a line of kiosks, happy to take your order via touchscreen. It warms my heart and moves me to tears.
Without downvoting can someone explain to me how we are sure this article is not sponsored by McDonalds?
Why are we all of a sudden being so positive about a food chain that has a long history of making things more difficult for non-industrialized food sources that were a source of income for poor communities before McDs expanded everywhere?
These are genuine intellectual questions, and non-emotional responses would be appreciated.
I downvoted a couple of comments in this thread, and flagged one of them. (A number of other people must have flagged that one too, as it is now "[flagged] [dead]". Turn on "showdead" in your profile settings if you want to see comments like that.)
In neither case was my downvote because the commenter disagreed with the article. It was because the comments were just plain nasty and disrespectful, both to other commenters and to the people who find community in places like McDonald's.
I don't have an answer to your question about sponsorship of the article, and I can't speak for anyone else, but I did want to explain the reason for my downvotes.
I would be glad to entertain comments like the ones you have described. I just don't see them here.
The moderators have created guidelines about this type of post and instructions to address this sort of concern:
> "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."
> Arnade’s work has raised the ire of a variety of people: photographers, journalists, advocates and community members. People have called his work exploitative, and much worse. Arnade tends to photograph mostly women; he has photographed them when they’re high and given them money they’ve used to buy drugs. He claims he’s built a relationship of trust with them. Critics, including some prominent photojournalists, say he exploits that trust to distribute photos of his subjects at their most vulnerable to a fan base of online lurkers.
Well, if you follow Chris' work or have read his book, that's a pretty fucking hard ask.
I saw this first hand when I met him outside a McDonald's in Portsmouth, Ohio. Portsmouth is ground-zero for the opioid epidemic.
I met Chris Arnade in Portsmouth on a whim. I drove into town. Navigated to a McDonald's and spotted him outside photographing what appeared to be a homeless family. They had been right outside the McDonald's begging. They were all filthy and pushing around their toddler in a shopping cart. It was late fall and getting cold.
Once Chris finished interviewing them and taking their picture I walked up and introduced myself. He was on his way inside to buy them some food, which we did.
Then we went back inside together and talked. He was shook. This guy had been all over but it was the cold and the kid that really got to Chris. He goes to the places most journalists don't--like his first stops are children's services and McDonald's in areas he visits. He talks to the people. He knew already that Portsmouth's children's services was beyond overwhelmed. They were underfunded ten years ago. Now they were barely treading water and the opioid epidemic had flooded them. I had been a teacher so he asked my opinion of what I saw with the toddler. Was this neglect and if so what would I do? Teachers in Ohio are 'mandatory reporters' meaning we are legally obligated to report anything with our students that we think might be neglect. From my training, this was unequivocally neglect.
He was torn. The journalist's code says "do nothing."
I had a two hour drive home that night to process this. It was fucked up. When I got home I e-mailed him my thoughts and said I thought we should alert children's services. I didn't have the families names though.
He e-mailed back and said he had been thinking about it too and agreed. But he didn't pass the buck to me. He made the call himself.
That night I saw Chris Arnade interact with people the rest of the world overlooks. I saw him treat them as people. Listen to them. Worry about them, give a few of them a meal, and ultimately wrestle with morality, ethics, and being a human being.
Those are my words. Chris' words are here about how he grappled with his time in Portsmouth. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/17/drugs-opiod-...
Even if there were such a code it would say no such thing. Journalists aren't scientists who need to protect the integrity of the research by trying not too influence results. Many fine journalists get actively involved in the lives of their subjects.
From the article you linked: "I called for the expertise of child protective services. Not calling would have been denying what I saw."
If you have a perspective that's different than that of other commenters, that means you have something valuable to contribute here, if you'd be willing to share your information and experience. But it needs to be done in a thoughtful way, not a lashing-out way—please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Quite apart from the rules, it's also in your interest to do that, because then your point of view (and perhaps also the people you're close to or identify with) get represented in a dignified and solid way.
All this to say, however, that I agree with you that formula retail shouldn't be demonized by SF as much as it is.
Community and culture requires friendship and comradery, something the poor hold in droves and the rich spend their entire lives trying to find. It really must be lonely at the top.
If this revolts you on a deep level, then you could try putting some of that energy towards building the community places not owned by mega corporations that those people are lacking.
This is a long lunch, nominally from 11:30 to 3, but sometimes they stay into the late afternoon. Apparently the turnout is typically 10-15 people.
Now, the Black Bear Diner is not a fancy kind of place where you might expect to find "culture", but maybe community?
I haven't been to one of these events, so I can't speak from personal experience. But I can tell from the ham operators who talk about these Wednesday Luncheons that they look forward to meeting up with their radio buddies in person, and they really enjoy the conversations and camaraderie there.
Is that a new low?
And an article that could have very well been sponsored by said "community builder" is not proof of being such.
Anecdotes are not validation of a pattern.
And if that's too slow for you, there's always the Pork Store Cafe on Haight Street in San Francisco, but they're too busy serving hoards of self destructive people to let them hang out for hours after poisoning themselves.
If anything hanging out at McDonald's is a positive development compared to hanging out at the bar
And "slowly killing people" is vastly over-dramatizing McDonald's effect on the vast majority of its customers. It's actually healthier than many similar options.
- The Guardian is not known as a satirical publication. - This post has several descriptions of personal experiences for whom McDonald's is what was described in the article.
The entire article lists several examples of this happening, and you believe it's all false just because?