Welcome to the Monoculture

[Jayna]

Remember the time I decided to eat only potatoes and dairy for a month, to see if it's true that you can get almost all of your nutrients that way?

Wasn't that the time you farted so foully that you made the cab driver retch?

That was a thing of legend.

Little curly-haired girls still can't get a cab around here to this very day. They take off with wheels squealing if they see anyone who resembles me come out of the building.

This is why we can't have nice things, Jayna.

I gotta be me. 

[Bluenose]

Wasn't that the time you farted so foully that you made the cab driver retch?
That was a thing of legend.

Little curly-haired girls still can't get a cab around here to this very day. They take off with wheels squealing if they see anyone who resembles me come out of the building.

Well if we're going to boast about such things, I once had one mistaken for a low flying aircraft - at an Air Force base!

[Aggie]

LOL, when we used to live in a basement suite, the (now) wife let such a good one go in bed that she woke up the landlady upstairs!

Another time, she let one go that woke me up, because I thought my cell was ringing on vibrate (brrrrrrrrt!  brrrrrrrrrrt!) and reverberating on the bedside table. I think I actually answered the phone...

OTOH, I am the strong, silent type and once (after many field days of travel irregularity and poor food)  had one mistaken for sour, heavy hydrocarbon contamination.  Not surprising, as I've clocked them on a sour gas meter at 110 ppm H₂S, a level considered immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH).

[Jayna]

Yoo-hoo, Zan! http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/mcsparseness-usa/

Terrifying!

[Zan]

Yoo-hoo, Zan! http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/mcsparseness-usa/

Terrifying!

Oh.

My.

God.

This is how the world ends, Jayna...not with a bang but a belch.

[Jayna]

Yoo-hoo, Zan! http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/mcsparseness-usa/

Terrifying!

Oh.

My.

God.

This is how the world ends, Jayna...not with a bang but a belch.

Yes, yes exactly. A satisfied belch, and increase in Alka-Seltzer sales, and a population overfed into apathy.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Yoo-hoo, Zan! http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/mcsparseness-usa/

Terrifying!

My reply?

If McD's were 1/2 as terrible as some would have us to believe.....why, oh, why are there more than 13 thousand successful locations in the US alone?

I dunno-- they seem to always have an excellent bottom-line on Wall Street, and whenever one goes into a small town, the locals typically cheer-- and flock to it in droves.

If anti-monoculture was as wondermous as all that?

McD's wouldn't have a snowballs' chance in Hawaii.....they'd close for lack of clients.

The only way to reverse what you clearly perceive to be an abomination, is to offer Something Better.    People have demonstrated they are about as brand-loyal as flies are to specific output.   I.e. none whatsoever-- especially if $$ is involved.

So far?  I find that national brands such as McD's offer consistency:  they are always more or less the same, no surprises, no hideous disappointments either.   Case in point.  Years ago, I had a client in Muskogee-- about 90 minutes from Tulsa, wherein I lived.  Between the two, is a Classic Small Town USA:  Porter, OK.  It's one claim to fame?  According to Porter itself, it was "The Peach Capitol of America".  Unless you were blind, you couldn't miss this claim, if you passed through the town.

On one of the main corners (of which there were perhaps a dozen total intersections) was a Joint.  It advertised "The Best Peach Cobbler Anywhere".   Peach capitol?  Once, during the height of peach season, I decided I had to sample me some of the "best peach cobbler anywhere". 

Know what I was served?   Dreck.  Absolute rubbish.  "The Best Peach Cobbler Anywhere" consisted of canned peaches folded into a recipe meant for fresh.... It was hideous.  Mush-like consistency so very overly sweet that hard candy was sour in contrast ...... in the midst of the "Peach Capitol" they had the gall to serve me canned peaches...

...For the first time in my life, I seriously considered not paying for food I ordered...

But.  I paid.  I never went through Porter, OK again.... a pox on the entire town, says I.  Such "quality" deserves a McDonalds-- the quality of the national chain was one hundred times better than the rubbish the local mom 'n pop diner.

And, ordinarily, I love local Joints..... I like the color, I like the people (usually) and typically, someone owning/running a diner is doing so out of love-of-cooking; certainly there's no serious cash in one.  Unless you happen to own 3 or 4 McD's in an area, that is....!

Sometimes, the monoculture creep is because what it replaces was absolute rubbish.   In fact?  I'd hazard a guess, bettern' 3 of 4 times, the monoculture offering is superior to local color.

South Park (that obscene mirror of US culture) had a very excellent episode on StarBucks versus the Local Color.    Starbucks coffee may be a bit pricy, but it prides itself on "pretty good coffee", consistently, time after time:  pretty good coffee.

Same thing goes for McD's:  It's not New York Fifth Avenue, but it never claimed to be other than what it is-- reasonably edible food, consistently visit after visit.  For cheap.  Another thing McD's prides itself in:  clean.  This basic not-negotiable clause goes back to it's founder, Ray wos'is'name:  he took great pains to clean his first McD's from stem to stern, and brooked no excuses.   McD's to this day is fanatical about cleaning their store.  (I know-- I occasionally do A/C service work for several in town).   They are always cleaning stuff-- the grilles, the floors, the counters, the bathrooms, the walls, the windows-- rarely do I go in to service, when I don't see *something* being cleaned.   

There's usually a reason why monoculture replaces the local stuff, if you look.  And?  It's rare that it's entirely about greed...

[Aggie]

I must admit while I don't eat any of the rest of their menu*, McD's does a pretty decent breakfast.  I might start asking them to hold the processed cheese on my Egg McMuffin (where most of the fat and much of the salt probably hides), but it's a significantly less greasy beast than most fast-food or even sit-down breakfasts.  The choice of an English muffin as the sandwich bread is pretty brilliant.  I had one of their hashbrown patties for the first time in quite a while recently, and those things are unmatched by any competitor's fried-breakfast-potato-puck. Their coffee has gotten passable (I like mine dark and very strong, so it's not quite there, but it's WAY better than Tim Horton's much-overrated sour gutrot**).

Interestingly enough, one of those potato pucks from McD's has less salt than an Everything bagel with cream cheese from Timmy's - and a Big Mac has less salt than a 6-inch Subway club sandwich. This is good for an eye-opener:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/special-reports/hard-to-shake/how-salty-is-your-food/article1184281/

I largely agree with Bob - and can give additional anecdotal evidence from Glendon, AB (which has the BEST breakfast I've found yet, at the sub & pizza shop of all things); despite having the World's Largest Perogy:

it's impossible to find a fresh-made perogy in town.  The Pyrogy Park Cafe serves what is obviously frozen Cheemo perogies.  To be fair, the Perogy Cafe is a Chinese and Western joint (Licenced) as previously mentioned and serves 'Chinese Perogies' (dumplings) too, but this is in a very, very Ukrainian area of the province and there must be hundreds of Babas around who could make 'em for the diner. ***

There's one other factor that I've been contemplating on regarding the bottom-end chain restaurants: I think for a certain segment, it pays to serve consistently crappy food (Humpty's sparked this contemplation).  While they cannot compete in terms of quality with better places, my theory is that provided the price is cheap enough, they will tend to accumulate people who really can't discern and are not inclined to try anything remotely challenging.  This segment of diners is hypothesized to be happiest eating the same menu items at the same place (and probably the same time) over and over, making them a very loyal bunch.  People who demand very good food also tend to prefer variety (and thus visit any particular restaurant infrequently), so it takes a much larger customer base to support excellence than total crap.



<sub>*I've totally sworn off ground meat that I didn't grind myself, unless it's from a VERY reputable source - which excludes most supermarkets and nearly ALL burgers - and have stuck pretty close to it, except occasionally for the sake of politeness i.e. homemade lasagna.  I'm on the road far too much to allow myself the option of grabbing a burger.

**I must admit after many years of resisting, I'm starting to develop a taste for Starbucks, because they are the only place (short of Middle Eastern cafes that do Arabic-style coffee) that make it as strong as I like it.  OTOH, I'm utterly horrified that they still use methylene chloride (nasty solvent) to extract the caffeine in their decaf when alternatives like the Swiss Water Process and supercritical CO2 extraction are available.  MIIIGHT try out their new instant brew, provided it's reasonably cheap per serving, because I have a portable 12-V kettle for the truck.

*** http://www.tastereport.com/TasteReport.com/travel/Entries/2006/12/16_Traveling_the_Perogy_Trail.html indicates otherwise; strange, because I was probably last there around that time. One of my (half-Ukrainian) friends insists on including instant cheese sauce powder (from Kraft Dinner) in her perogies, which gives them that processed food taste - yuck! - but I would think Iris Drapaka would know better. For the record, the big sausage statue in Mundare is painted an unfortunate shade of brown, which probably explains why it's not depicted in the article.</sub>

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

"Pyrogy"?  I think back East, in the US, they call those "pot stickers".   I think... yes?   

I saw a whole show on it from "America's Test Kitchen's", about how simple it is to make your own superior item.   Although, all the one's I've had, were either veggie or meat-filled.  I've not had, nor heard of a cheese one.... sounds yummy.

[Jayna]

McDonald's is thick on the ground even here, where we have more restaurants per capita than any other city in the world, and most of them are excellent (they have to be, to survive).

Monoculture isn't about McDonald's, it's about a culture that embraces sameness as a virtue. I find it frightening based on that aspect alone. McDonald's didn't create the monoculture ethic, it merely occupies a niche created by it.

[beagle]

Monoculture isn't about McDonald's, it's about a culture that embraces sameness as a virtue.

Isn't it just overhang from the industrial revolution? If the price of having your first bone china plates, your first cast iron bedstead, your first W.C., bicycle or car was that it was the same as everyone else's, who cared? And if you're going to ship steam trains to India you'd better be sure you can make the same bolt thread this week as last week. Reproducability of production has just extended into the service sector too, succesful techniques are cloned as fast as widgets. 

It's only when the population has serious excess income that people have the means and inclination to buy the farm shop food, the handmade furniture, the custom-made jewellery, the limited issue designer clothes and so on.  You can see this in English towns. It's the prosperous ones that have the Ye Old Tea Shoppe, traditional toy shops and farmers' markets instead of Starbucks, Toys R Us  and Tescos.

[Zan]

Monoculture isn't about McDonald's, it's about a culture that embraces sameness as a virtue.

Isn't it just overhang from the industrial revolution? If the price of having your first bone china plates, your first cast iron bedstead, your first W.C., bicycle or car was that it was the same as everyone else's, who cared? And if you're going to ship steam trains to India you'd better be sure you can make the same bolt thread this week as last week. Reproducability of production has just extended into the service sector too, succesful techniques are cloned as fast as widgets. 

Um, I wasn't talking about standardization of bolt threads.

[Zan]

McDonald's is thick on the ground even here, where we have more restaurants per capita than any other city in the world, and most of them are excellent (they have to be, to survive).

Monoculture isn't about McDonald's, it's about a culture that embraces sameness as a virtue. I find it frightening based on that aspect alone. McDonald's didn't create the monoculture ethic, it merely occupies a niche created by it.

I think I'm gonna stop ranting.  It seems to be followed by threadjacking, and then me being asked 3 pages later to defend things I didn't say.  Also, giving each person's posts individual attention is now somehow equal to me saying I'm "better than someone", so I have to mash everyone's answers into one post, where it's really hard to read.

I'm really upset about the strawman thing.  I was told this place was different.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

McDonald's is thick on the ground even here, where we have more restaurants per capita than any other city in the world, and most of them are excellent (they have to be, to survive).

Monoculture isn't about McDonald's, it's about a culture that embraces sameness as a virtue. I find it frightening based on that aspect alone. McDonald's didn't create the monoculture ethic, it merely occupies a niche created by it.

Again?  Most folk *prefer* routine; *prefer* the same thing day in and day out.

It helps create a comfort zone around their lives, insulating them from the less pleasant aspects of being a human.

I'm not 100% certain this is entirely a bad thing, myself.

Sure change is inevitable, and variety is spice-- but not everyone likes change, and not everyone has the constitution for variety.

And no, I am not bothered in the slightest at the concept of monoculture.   I have more faith in human ingenuity, myself. 

And what *is* ingenuity, but someone who has a New Idea?   

Something outside the pale, something not provided by the monoculture.

At least-- not until that idea becomes a fad, and is assimilated. 

iPod anyone?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I hate McDs and wont go into one unless there is no other option. I don't own an iPod (or any other Apple product for what matters) just on principle, my mp3 player is Creative and I'm even using my phone for that purpose more and more.

But I get what you say Bob, besides, is there a real difference if I go to Wendy's instead of McD's? The fact that we can have a lively and civil discussion regardless of our different backgrounds in different parts of the world proves that there is a common cultural ground and I see that as something generally good.

True, certain things will be lost in the process (just look at the number of languages dead or dying in the past hundred years, to name just one example) but that is for the most part inexorable.