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In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

theguardian.com

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Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#231

Post by dimino »

balls187 wrote: post #118
tetromino_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your kids are your kids and it's your choice how to raise them given your financial and time constraints, but teaching a 3-year-old to associate comfort and happiness with unhealthy food doesn't strike me as the wisest decision. When they are old enough and responsible enough for their bodies, they might decide on their own that they enjoy nicotine, corn syrup, salt, starch, and fry oil - but why bias them towards su…

> Your kids are your kids and it's your choice how to raise them. Full stop. No need to continue with the rest of your judgements. Parenting is a very hard job, and it's only made worse by all the parents (and even worse--non-parents) that want to make judgements. Being a parent, I now have a profound respect and appreciation for my parents (especially my mother). Things weren't always great, but they did the best th…

What kind of attitude is this, really?

Is parenting some sacred thing, immune from analysis or criticism? Does parenting happen outside the realm of logic or reason, where all decisions are good, and any attempt at measurement or objectivity is worthless?

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#232

Post by erikpukinskis »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #119

What astonishes me, is how often poor people go eating in a restaurant (e.g. breakfast in the first paragraph) when making breakfast at home (or lunch) is so much cheaper (as a fun exercise we often calculate the prices of our home lunch). Although I have a nice income, 80% of the time I bring my own food to work because restaurants are too expensive in my opinion to regularly use them. As a side note: I have the sus…

Cooking for yourself is only cheaper if you've already spent the money to outfit your kitchen. There's a big up front investment in terms of ingredients and tools.

You can spend $50 up front, and then eat for $3/meal by cooking for yourself...

Or you can just spend $6/meal at McDonalds.

If you only have $10 in your pocket you really don't have much of a choice.

This is, I think, the most important thing to understand about poverty in a capitalist system. It is much more difficult to make good investments when you have very little liquidity.

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#233

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

Karunamon wrote: post #207
niftich wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make food at home, you either need fresh, perishable ingredients and/or time to prep and cook. Even accessing fresh ingredients may be a hassle (see: food deserts), so eating off the dollar menu often feels like a better use of your money than making the trek to the grocery store to buy some perishables that you then have to cook before they go bad. It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often…

And just to add on to this, it's worse when you're cooking for one, it's far too easy to let ingredients go to waste. People never think about anything but the cash register price when making this comparison for some reason...

I agree cooking for one is not supported by - at least here in Germany - most super markets. Packaging is too big. The trick when I was cooking for myself is cook larger portions and put these into the fridge. Vary them when eating and don't try to keep raw ingredients instead of cooked food.

Cooking for two is no problem though, especially if you cook the right things. Cooking for more then 2 and you really have no problems with ingredients going to waste.

And you can buy some ingredients for cheap that last, e.g. I buy Japanese rice in 5kg or 10kg sizes, easy to keep in good condition for a long time and much cheaper than 500g from the super market.

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#234

Post by dimino »

gh-lfneu28 wrote: post #165
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not full stop. Just because raising kids, being a police officer, digging a ditch is "hard work" doesn't free someone from having that work criticized.

Actually everyone should be free from being criticized, except for the people with the authority to do so. That goes double for people doing hard work and triple for people doing work that every joe shmoe on the internet thinks himself an expert on. In other words, my spouse can criticize my parenting everyone else can go frack themselves. Full stop.

No one is free from criticism, what they're free from is being forced to listen to it. No one's making anyone else here participate in the discussion.

Performing hard work doesn't make you immune from doing that work poorly, and it's kind of alarming to me that this insular attitude is so popular on HN.

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#235

Post by dimino »

tobltobs wrote: post #103
RankingMember wrote: post #55

I remember driving through a Native American reservation in the Southwest and stopping at a McDonald's after seeing not much of anything for miles and miles. I walked in and it was like everyone in the reservation was there hanging out it was so alive with conversation and activity. I'm not a McDonald's fan, but I'm glad they exist to serve purposes like that, because I'm not sure where else the people in that one wo…

The interesting question is, if this is a sign for an achievement of McDonalds or a failure of the society?

It doesn't feel like an effective use of space; what is it about McDonald's that makes it a better focal point than a community center or a space built specifically as a gathering point for the community?

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#236

Post by the_af »

greenspot wrote: post #220
the_af wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love McDonalds and I think their hamburger is the best hamburger, their french fries are the best and all the other menu options have this typical McDonalds design--everything, every single piece and ingredient is meticulously thought through and the final dish has a perfect taste. The taste you get for the carb in-take is unmatched. Really? That's surprising. I've always assumed people went to McDonald's because…

> with hamburgers from smaller, non-franchise restaurants Sorry to disagree here. I think yes, there are definitely many non-franchise burger places doing fantastic burgers but I haven't seen any clearly superior. Yes different in taste but superior? No. And very often, they lack the perfection level of McDonalds. You often get 'over-engineered' burgers, too thick, to much salad, too sticky whole grain non-typical bu…

Well, obviously this is a matter of taste, and by definition subjective, so I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, but...

...I'm speechless at our level of disagreement. This truly surprises me, to the point I've always assumed everyone acknowledged McDonald's food was trash, it's just that it's sometimes so damn convenient. To me, McDonald's burgers taste like cardboard. They definitely don't taste like meat. A guy I know who admits he likes McDonald's burgers says it's precisely because they don't taste like meat (in his words: "I don't like ground beef, which is why I like McDonald's: their burgers don't taste like beef.")

In my experience, almost any randomly chosen non-franchise burger place will make a superior burger (I mean, the ones using actual ground beef, and not frozen patties like McDonald's). From that basic standard, you can only go up. The ground meat is immediately superior, it doesn't look like that pre-frozen brown-grey stuff McDonald's uses. The dressings of good burger joints (sorry, I don't know the proper word in English.. toppings? dressings? you get the idea) are almost universally superior to McDonald's. You get a vast variety of sauces to go with your burger, whereas McDonald's only has a couple, and they are disgusting, something straight out of a cheap bottle.

As for fries, I also disagree. McDonald's uses, at least in the countries I know, pre-frozen fries of brands such as McCain's (if this particular brand doesn't exist in your country, I'm sure you'll get the idea anyway), instead of actual, freshly made french fries. I understand why: their logistics don't allow them to make proper fries. But almost by definition they are inferior. Again, not comparing them to other fast food burger chains -- which in my opinion fare similarly to McDonald's -- but with what I can make at home or what gets made in small, non-chain burger joints.

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#237

Post by keithpeter »

xeromal wrote: post #79
stevecalifornia wrote: post #46

I recently went to a McDonald's in Austria. I was blown away by how they were going exactly for the community center vibe. There was a bar with four or five internet connected tablets a half-basketball court next to the jungle gym and patio seating like you'd find at an upscale resteraunt. It also had a dedicated coffee and desert bar. Also, the cash registers were gone and in their place were four huge touchscreens…

There are a few in the US. They are just in select locations. I wrote software for McDs a while back and they were always coming up with high-tech initiatives. Too bad the environment was cut throat or I would have enjoyed working there.

What was the cause of the cut-throatness if I may presume to ask such a thing? Some form of performance related pay or just heavy headquarters politics?

(in UK McDonalds is a franchise operation I think, not too sure, so each restaurant is its own little enterprise with standardised training &c)

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#238

Post by ecommerceguy »

Most people don't realize it, but McDonald's is not a burger-flipping restaurant chain; it is one of the world's best real estate portfolios. Franchisees flip the burgers. McDonald's simply owns the best commercial property all over the world. Think about it, every town and city in the Country and many of the world, who owns the best lot on highest traffic intersection? McDonald's.

Re: In poor neighborhoods, McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers

#240

Post by gyardley »

This happens everywhere, with the establishment varying with the culture.

In much of Canada, the local community center is the Tim Hortons. My labor studies professor back in the day wrote his doctoral thesis on this and (unfairly, in my opinion) won an Ig Nobel for it:

http://ig-nobel.silk.co/page/Steve-Penfold

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