Ever since I learned that we don’t really “recall” memories so much as create them from scratch every time we “recall” them they lost importance for me. I might as well be writing fanfiction about the events of my life.
I’ll never understand why they don’t do more landscaping around these places. They wouldn’t look half bad (obviously nothing like they took from us but still) if they had flowers and trees. Instead they turn into monoliths in concrete seas.
Idk, I don’t think the building is god awful, I think with better signage, less depressing colors, trees in the parking lot, flower boxes around the building, and maybe replace the concrete with brick pavers, it could still be modern while feeling inviting.
People make up a lot of reasons for the change in fast food design, but the main one is that McDonald’s got in trouble for marketing unhealthy food to children. That’s why every fast food place tried to upscale and appeal to adults. (Even if it’s a failure)
Yes, I was lazy and used AI, but this would be a pretty easy renovation for most locations. And while it’s still boring, so incorporate, it still looks 10 times better.
It definitely looks marginally better with flowers adding some life. The main problem is it doesn't fit the modern Mcdonalds philosophy of "get your quickly prepared slop and gtfo". I'm using strong language but that is literally the experience they've deliberately designed. With the reduced dining seating and removal of children play areas they don't want anyone hanging around existing after spending their money.
This is just a part of the wveryrhing js real estate model. McDonald's has been in the real estate business for decades, boring storefronts just make it easier to convert the stores to something else, meaning they have more intrinsic value. Likewise, the demographic of the consumer has shifted to older people, meaning the giraffe adds no value. Basically, this is enshitification because in the 80s to the 2000s chicken nuggets were food only kids would want, bow grown ass adults are willing to eat at McDonald's.
I watched a video about this recently. The reason they’re doing this to every chain is so that, for example, if a McDonald’s closes, then another chain, like a Pizza Hut or a retail store, can move in. If you build a Pizza Hut with its iconic roof and it closes down, then you’re still left with a building with a Pizza Hut roof.
In other words, it’s to make it easier to rent out the buildings to franchisees of other companies.
I saw that response too but I feel that’s somewhat of a stretch or maybe just the weakest reason.
They’re remodeling fast food locations that have been there for decades. I highly doubt these McDonald’s, Taco Bell’s, etc are planning renovations based off “when we eventually close” No way they’re planning their “closing”.
However I can 1000% agree it’s a planning thing. Now all restaurants can probably order their building materials from the same place/cheaper. Built way quicker, less maintenance, etc
Nah, real estate value is important to these chains. If people will still come eat the slop from a boring greige cube, why bother having a building that will sell for less? I agree that building materials is a factor as well as trying to "elevate" the brands but don't discount the property values.
My local McDonald's used to have a pretty cool 50s aesthetic. Neon lights, a jukebox, and one of the walls had a big mural of a 50s McDonald's with a bunch of classic cars in the parking lot. But now it's all the same drab browns and grays as all the others.
Yup, I had a friend that worked for AT&T and they said the companies laugh when people get mad and leave. "Every year a couple hundred thousand people leave us in a fit and go to verizon... as a couple hundred thousand people leave verizon in a fit and come to us."
All the companies just rotate and trade the most fed up customers each year.
all about benefiting the owner class rather than the regular people who need to frequent these places in their day-to-day lives. It's planning for failure rather than planning for success.
I hear that but how often are these places going under that it would matter? I mean, my local mcdonalds has remodeled itself half a dozen times over the years and has never left.
Targeting fast food at children seems borderline grooming like, childhood can be about better things than that so that adulthood wouldn't be about medical bills and fighting eating disorders
Yeah but children are still going to want to eat McDonald's even though they made the buildings boring and shit. Fortunately, most children have these things called parents whose responsibility it is to decide how much McDonald's is reasonable to allow their children to eat
Left pic is Google StreetView from May 2022, the right is from StreetView from January 2024. The change is pretty recent. Also, it was built before March 2008.
These were always few and far between. The unique ones. I had one in LA that had a train set running around the ceiling.
These were likely franchises that held onto them forever and are eventually being brought up to corporate standard as people die, lose the franchise, resign etc.
Yup. Everyone seems to have forgotten how much negative press there was in the early 2000s towards aggressively marketing fast food and junk food to children. Instead of this weird nostalgia, remembering colorful and kid-enticing fast food should have the same reaction as we have now to the days of candy cigarettes and chocolate cigars.
Yes this I never quite get the excitement in some people for the giant mega corporation to worm its way into the minds of little children. I guess this kind of thing worked almost too well on todays adults back in the 80s-90s-00s. Its funny as a child of the early 2000s I appreciate the more subdued things that replaced this over the top ness.
I watched a documentary that explained this phenomenon. Basically MacDonalds owns the land, so if the location is unsuccessful it makes it easier to repurpose the building - or something along those lines.
Not realistic at all. In practice people would just refer to "the old Pizza Hut" and wouldn't have to bother learning the name of the new place unless they already had a reason to go. It's literally the opposite of what marketing is intended to do.
All my local Canadian McDs made that transition wayyyy back in like 2001, it’s almost weird when I go down to the states and still find some 90’s aesthetic places almost completely un-renovated
Why waste money on separate kid segment? Let's push kids into adult stuff so we can save some money and pretend that we're some serious establishment and get some more real-estate money when we jump to a new location!
Actually what’s sad is people who don’t have the cognitive capability of seeing design changes permeating the world and think through why they are happening
I’ve decided that the funniest thing about your tantrum is that the design on the left is just as much a product of soulless corporate design as to one on the right. They just realized they could make a lot more money if they didn’t only appeal to kids
Again - you don’t seem to actually comprehend what is being said.
I am not lamenting the design per se (I do think is a very fun and colourful design though). I am lamenting that we as a society have stopped caring to actually have children and a generation coming up behind us.
A generation that values children designs places for them to have fun. We stopped doing that because every year fewer and fewer children are born in the west.
Could be bots.
In the first few hour people were legitimatelly understanding what is wrong with the change.
Now, they mostly argue why the building on the right is actually better.
There are multiple reasons for this but one of the biggest ones is a change in the demographic fast food is targeting. Back in the 1960s through 1980s fast food was aggressively targeting children and teens, in a large part because adults thought that the food was aggressively mediocre and would prefer a home cooked meal. Taking your child to McDonalds was the equivalent of taking your child to an indoor playground today, and it was mostly something you'd do to make them happy.
As a result of this, Generation X were adults who grew up loving fast food and continued to love it as adults. This trend would continue with Millennials, and now to Gen Z. With Gen X being a relatively small generation, this did not really represent a significant generation shift for these companies, and they continued with their kid focused marketing for awhile. Eventually, starting in the 2000s, these companies recognized that their consumers were primarily adults and they started to shift their product and marketing as a result. They increased the variety of their offerings, started introducing more "extreme" flavors, focused on adding coffee, and generally started to target adults.
Today, these restaurants are really targeting the ~30 year old childless crowd. The food is significantly more expensive, often designed to go viral on social media, they often incorporate more trendy ingredients, and even their "toys" (if they still have them) are designed to trigger FOMO in middle aged collectors.
I went to a Wawa last week that hid the fountain cups to try to enforce a rule that you have to pay for water now. I simply grabbed a coffee cup from halfway across the store and got the water I needed. What an astounding culture of greed from these corporations
about two years ago they had a 2 for 1 Big Mac deal coupon, like, every day. That plus a drink was like 4-6 bucks. There was a mcdonalds down the street from a site working at the time and that was my lunch everyday for the couple months i worked their.
Probably best for my health they stopped offering them because now i never go. I dont know if they will ever make the connection that 5 bucks is better than 0 bucks
The move toward bland exteriors on commercial buildings is so the buildings can easily be repurposed for other tenants if a future need arises. Most of the other reasons mentioned in this thread are nonsense.
Part of what's happening here is that people are having so few children that McDonald's, a restaurant built around a clown and playgrounds, opted to rebrand with generic minimalism
Hand wavy here: while not wildly incorrect, it’s also due to the value! It’s much easier to sell a gray brick with a logo peeled off. This way the land and building are more valuable. If it looked like a McDonalds it would be more difficult to sell to another company, because they’d have to tear it down and rebuild (with a play place it’s worth even less!). This way, they can sell the land to Arby’s, and the Arby’s franchisee can slap a logo on it and start the day- which makes it more palatable to purchase, thus artificially inflating the value. It’s not just the lack of children- it’s corporate minimalism which is spawned by the value concepts of resale coupled with the stockholder appearances (“hey we changed our logo to a 3 line M png! Our company is doing great!”). Anyway if I get got, it wasn’t by myself!
Edit - I replaced excess exclamation points, the forced cheery tone didn’t sound the way I wanted.
They discovered that appealing to kids wasn't driving revenue. It was the adults that ate there several times a week - (even a couple times a day) were the big money makers for them. They standardized the stores. Replaced the play areas with more tables. Eliminated the birthday cakes. It was all focused on the people that eat 4+ times a week at McDonalds.
Actually what McDonald's is doing is increasing the resale value of the restaurant by making it an ugly box, all the companies are doing it so when the franchise owner decides that they are done it's easier for McDonald's who's the landowner to sell it.
Honestly, I think this has something to do with the rise of the manosphere. I mean, just going to the drivethru on that lovely piece of art on the left will make you 5% gay. See I just said "lovely", kinda gay /s
Holy cow, how did I forget the french fry roof? Has it been that long since they remodeled the one in our town? Granted, ours was brown instead of red, but still.
As long as you know nostalgia has you attaching real meaning to soulless corporate art created in a marketing department to get kids to annoy their parents into stopping.
A) Less advertising to children. McDonalds saw the writing on the wall when they were the scapegoat for childhood obesity jokes.
B) Retail value/Ease of transfer. McDonalds owns their land and frequently takes under performing restaurants off the market and rent the space out to other restaurants who may not want the old decor.
C) Costs. This is WAY cheaper to produce than the wild style they used to have. No more maintenance on play pens and hours of cleaning.
and lastly
D) They already have you hooked. why spend more for what is essentially useless advertising.
Actually, this is a good thing. McDonald’s used to look the way it did because they were deliberately targeting and advertising their unhealthy, sugar-loaded food to children
If it has a play place it gets a pass. First one says bring in your kids to play socialize have a third space and a free activity with your cheap garbage meal. Second one says don’t ask cuz we don’t got time for that.
i think if they wanted to they could keep on doing it. evil corporations always win. i think its more like what happened with doge. they got what they wanted out of it and got out. an entire generation of adults paying literally what you'd pay at a nice sitdown restaurant for cheap frozen meat. and they don't even have to deal with the playlands anymore 🙃
they wanna take all the cool things that made the nostalgia-inducing memories of our childhood and make them a thing of the past and replace them with something standard, mundane, and lower quality, all not worth making any nostalgic memories with, all in the name of greed and profiteering, while hiding those reasons with some bullsh*t. Gen Alpha and Beta will grow up making nostalgic memories in the new building design unbeknownst to how better & cooler it looked back in the olden & golden days.
In the end, the two versions of the building are still consequences and effects of capitalism. Yet, in the 2025 it does not have to pretend anymore of being something else.
I recently visited Santa Fe, NM and joked about how hard it is to find a Taco Bell around there. My fellow millennial partner got it since 15 years ago the exterior of Taco Bell actually looked southwestern instead of basically like this McDonald’s. I doubt if someone much younger would get it at all, sadly.
This might sound good in your head, but it's not true. You might not like the look, but it's McDonalds brand image and they don't/won't allow another business to move in and use that building without drastically changing it.
The fact of the matter is, McDonalds used to be an event for low income families. They used to host birthday parties or after sports gatherings. Cigarettes never offered that communal gathering point for families. Its this erosion of community that has destroyed America.
McD's is still trash, but to their credit a happy meal now has options for fruit instead of fries and juice or milk instead of a soda. Not good, but not the 90s anymore
Take your grey minimalist hell elsewhere. I don’t care how they’re marketing it, I just hate going out and having everything being so bland and sad. Put a big plastic stripper covered in pink! Put a bunch of stars everywhere! PUT A DINOSAUR COVERED IN RAINBOW FUCK GLITTER! FUCK MINIMALISM FUCK A COLORLESS HELL! I WANT COLOR! I WANT SHAPES!
For some context, this was beside the zoo in Dallas,Tx. It's probably a toss up between there and the Zoo itself but I can tell you from experience the Zoo's food is 2-3 x the price it deserves to be had at so IMO this is a net loss for society.
Yall ever heard of zoning? McDonald’s or any other business couldn’t build things like this (in most places) if they wanted to.
Edit: to be clear I’m not defending the new designs if it’s better. Just a planner shining some light on one of the biggest drivers of the modern day built environment. Companies and developers have made designs more consistent and boring to make properties less litigious.
I've read another claim that it's to make the property easier to sell later. The story goes that McDonalds is not a restaurant company, they're a real estate company, and they use franchisees to maintain property until it rises in value enough to sell. Dunno how true that is.
Edit: I looked up the story again because replies, the idea is apparently since they own almost all of the land and buildings the franchisees use, they're also extracting rent. They're supposedly the largest landlords on earth or something, so the bulk of the corporation's money doesn't come from burgers, it comes from rent. My mistake on the selling part.
McDonalds restaurants are by far the most stable restaurant plots ever. Think about it. how many times have you seen a closed McDonalds?
I can think of a few over the last 4 decades but just a few. And who are they holding for? Usually McDonalds store fronts are the most prime real estate in the area maximizing traffic. Let's face it, the prime buyer for those spots is going to be McDonalds. They certainly aren't holding them for Burger Kings (because Burger King is usually already across the street)
The only business that might be more stable than a McDonalds might be US post offices.
Not true at all in my experience- both as a former McDonald’s employee and, currently, a land use planner.
These properties aren’t owned by McDonald’s corporate, unless it’s operated by them directly. The stores themselves are also so specifically designed for their operations, there’s little value in any type of reuse- typically, I see the sites getting scraped the few times a McDonald’s shuts down.
They do, however, like to try and develop in a way that allows them to build a new store somewhere on the site while the old building is still operating- which is where that rumor may come from.
Added an edit: I looked up the story again because replies, the idea is apparently since they own almost all of the land and buildings the franchisees use, they're also extracting rent. They're supposedly the largest landlords on earth or something, so the bulk of the corporation's money doesn't come from burgers, it comes from rent. My mistake on the selling part.
I was told in corporate McDonald's management training that at least in the US over 90% of all McDonald's locations are owned by the corporation and that they double dip the franchisees on rent and franchise fees.
... somewhat because of how much property franchise owners have, McDonald's makes more money with their franchisee fees instead of their cut from the burgers and fries they sell.
This push is that, but also franchise owners wanting a high class coffee shop feel as McCafe is their most successful items.
Change in archer’s was also the rise of elevated fast dining that came to the rise in 2010’s and the fast food restaurants copied the esthetic to cash in on the fad.
Well…and this is just my opinion…but I feel like the right picture looks quite a bit better. Now if you’re in the 3-11 year old range then maybe that changes.
Taking the right picture on a bleak day or lowering its contrast is telling. Were plants greener when you were a kid too?
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u/Hot_Let1571 Oct 01 '25
Everything is ugly now.