America has fallen.
(midwest.social)
Yuritopiaposadism [none/use name]
ChapotraphouseEnshittification of the core of American culture. The treats are under threat.
Fast food businesses are looking to trim costs any way they can. Due to their location, many have become default loitering locations and social services for people who have nowhere else to go (unsupervised minors, the unhoused, and the mentally ill). the fountain drink and sauce stations become liabilities for the understaffed employees to keep clean and functional. This is why Burger King puts the drink machine access code on your receipt, so the poor can't get a water cup and fill it with pop. The neoliberal model has gutted the social safety net, so people who need services find the next closest thing: businesses with long open hours, shelter, food, drink, and implied permission to hang around.
from https://hexbear.net/comment/7130320
"We get rid of third locations that people can spend time at for free, which will force them to come to our business!"
"What?! Why are all these poors coming to our business, don't they have anywhere else to be? How dare they only spend enough for us to get a small amount of profit off of them! Get out of here!"
I still maintain that grocery stores (particularly Wal-marts) are going the way of last-mile warehouses for pickup orders and delivery. That means fast food will follow suit and gradually shut off the kitchen from the outside, and eventually dining rooms. Then a real estate sell off because you don't nee as many locations if you're just a hub for UberEats. McDonald's will be the first on that considering their holdings which features some prime spots they picked up decades ago.
Capitalism killed the town square, the town market and there is little left. If people can't go sit in public without buying something and the places that sell stuff all close and stop allowing people onto their property, where is there to go? This will put pressure on any remaining open businesses that rely on the in-person model, and the first-hand experience of being there. So that probably means gated shopping centers where only customers are allowed to enter.
The physical world will be completely anti-social in all aspects. School is online. Work is online. In-person jobs pit workers against customers. Physical labor jobs will be terrible robots and isolated workers to keep them from socializing. Government buildings will be cordoned off behind Greenzone-esque walls. Libraries won't exist. You have to be a paying customer to get a code to enter any establishment or private business premises. Parks will be heavily policed by drones for loitering. Just force everyone to socialize online so you can control what content they see and read their thoughts from their posting habits. Cyberpunk future is going to look less like a bunch of cyborgs hanging around an alley and more like some kind of hollow, mostly empty military zone while people rot inside their whole lives.
you summed up a decent amount of the source of my panic attacks when I'm seeing possible futures in the spice trance (too much weed).
I still maintain that grocery stores (particularly Wal-marts) are going the way of last-mile warehouses for pickup orders and delivery. That means fast food will follow suit and gradually shut off the kitchen from the outside, and eventually dining rooms. Then a real estate sell off because you don't nee as many locations if you're just a hub for UberEats. McDonald's will be the first on that considering their holdings which features some prime spots they picked up decades ago.
My local dynamic is that people who need food want it in an hour from placing order, hot and fresh. Delivery people aren't occupied exclusively by one client, they chain at least a couple of orders at all times. Local kitchen, although overwhelmed with delivery orders, would stay, and it'd die long after dining rooms, IMHO. There's the option to move into random buildings instead of taking visible locations like what eateries try to do, and it works great for a lot of delivery-only sushi gigs I ordered from, but it greatly depends on the time window of order2delivery, building codes and cooking standards, etc. For them, the last mile includes cooking locally for it to be swift enough, even if "cooking" can be completely robotized. The most critical problem keeping local kitchens inescapable is that a cold burger won't make a good burger if reheated, same with many other fastfood things, and before that's taken care of, I believe fast food chains wouldn't be able to drop kitchens close to the client, they'd only be dismantled if they and their neighbors comfortably exhaust the demand thus triggering areas consolidations.
McDonald's costs like $15-18 for a single combo meal, and now it looks like the free drinks and ketchup are going away. Who is this chain for besides the white house?
McDonalds and all other fast food have pretty much transitioned to Door Dash/Uber Eats as their main revenue source.
ahh see that makes sense
People driving or waaaay too exhausted to cook after getting off work.
Or drunk/high/intoxicated people
It's fucking sugar water how expensive can it be to just give the hogs more sugar water while you're charging them $20 for borgar and fries
: “AnD lEaVe MoNeY oN tHe TABLE!? Where’s your business sense?!”
the margins on soft drinks are already insane this is clearly not a “we’re losing money” situation but definitely a “we need to nickel and dime even more”
Shit like this should be why no one trusts porky anymore. The pigs have everything and logically, they should be making good on their promise to trickle down?
Turns out pigs are like addicts for money, they have all the power and now they can steal as much money as they can. It’s ok though, at least the heckin’ wholesome property rights are being respected.
The largest cost when serving a fountain soft drink (by an order of 2-3 times, minimum) is the cost of the cup/lid/straw.
Or at least that’s what it was a decade ago, can’t imagine it’s changed
I think it's more about keeping the "riff raff" away and taking out a part of the experience that is always grimy and unclean. But also they probably increase profit margins by more than few % from all the people who don't bother to walk up and bother an underpaid overworked cashier for more drink.
Oh for sure, I’m just making it clear that nobody is running their business off a cliff cuz the soda fountain overages, it’s a almost pure profit
The great experiment in democracy has shipwrecked on the jagged rocks of contradictions.
for the non- folks:
::: spoiler spoiler a "shipwreck" is when you mix all the different soda/cola flavors at the drink station in one container :::
I've only ever heard that called "you're going to drink all of that now" by my dad. Joke was on him though because I threw up in the car on the way home.
It's called a graveyard here
we call that a suicide where i live
Yeah I've never heard it called anything other than that.
I've heard both, but I definitely heard it as a suicide first.
That's even more poetic in this case.
It's a shipwreck suicide sugar rush death drive!
I always called it swamp water, must be a regional thing
it's joever
