When I was a wee slip of a lad, as a treat, and boy did we have to be super-extra-well-behaved, my mom and dad would take us to McDonald's. You pulled up to the place and Dad got out of the car and talked to somebody on the other side of an order window and came back, in seemingly no more than an eyeblink, with a tray stacked with sodas, small bags of fries, and cheeseburgers and/or hamburgers.
That was the WHOLE menu. Maybe they had coffee. We were kids, what did we know. Then we discovered they had shakes and that was the extra treat.
Fast forward about sixty (yikes!) years and we have artisanal, gluten-free, beef-tallow-free fries, espresso as well as lattes, and what seems to be about one hundred and forty-five thousand items on their menu. The actual number varies not only from state to state but from Mickey D's to Mickey D's, The only constant is as will always be the case, the McFlurry machine is broken.
Now, here in the New Frontier, we are a fast-food nation, if not world. It seems to me there are few places on earth, looking at you Antarctica, where there isn't a Mickey D's and across the street, a BK or a Wendy's squaring off against each other.
But for me and my generation, the benchmark will always be McDonald's. But you can learn something new every day, or at my age every other day, and yesterday I learned that at one time in Germany, McDonald's and the German Rail had a partnership, and Ruth is stranger than Bridget because that wasn't the only oddity in that period involving the Golden Arches.
And all this time you were thinking Grimace's Birthday was a big deal? <sigh>
-bill kenny
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