Tuesday, June 27, 2023
a thing, falling apart
(Context: American west, Great Plains, midwest.)
Here’s something I notice: Buying a fast food hamburger is borderline impossible a lot of places.
You walk into let’s say a McDonalds situated at an interstate exit. There are giant touch-screen kiosks you’re supposed to order from, but even if they’re turned on they don’t really work. No one is at the counter, although if you wait long enough a teenager who doesn’t know how to work the register may appear. Don’t try to spend cash; it will snarl the transaction. (Unless the card reader is down, in which case you will have no choice, but the transaction will still be snarled.) Wait longer and you may get food, if not exactly the food you ordered. Odds are it will be grimly inedible: Appalling even by the standards of early 21st century American franchise burger joints and quite possibly unsafe to eat.
I hold no brief for the American chain fast food restaurant, but there’s something unsettling about this experience. Like a kind of implicit contract has come unraveled.
You expected that these institutions were, at root, evil. You knew that they abused animal life, the environment, the labor pool, and the economy as a whole to deliver a product which was harmful to its consumers. On the other hand, you had a feeling that they were functional. Whatever the externalities, they worked in a sense that would be recognized both by a person in a minivan at a drive-thru window and a stockholder in an evil megacorporation.
You would be somewhere that might well be a food desert and you would need calories. A local outcropping of an efficient corporate machine organized — ruthlessly and immorally — by competent people would take some of your money and give you a paper bag full of food-shaped objects in exchange.
I’m a pragmatist about roadtrip utility, and I have spent a substantial part of my life on highways, subsisting on trash from chains and truck stops. Still, I didn’t quite realize how fundamental this system seemed until I found it in tatters with a carload of sobbing toddlers and exhausted, sleep-deprived 30-somethings in tow.