in the 80s, pizza hut had sit down restaurants with multiple arcade machines, soda fountains, and it was a place to hang out for hours. usually in proximity to a skating rink, an arcade, or a mall. in some communities, some fast food joints still have the status of being "the spot" for a group of elderly people to congregate and gossip in the early hours.
once all the other pizzerias were gone, pizza hut got rid of the arcade machines and restaurants and it just became a slop serving kitchen with delivery drivers. the skating rinks and arcades also closed and the malls died. very few residential areas have welcoming third places within walking distance anymore. every place except bars seem primarily interested in getting people in and out as fast as possible.
i get why people are nostalgic for the american landscape 40 years ago. it definitely had some stupid shit and people are certainly confused about what their nostalgia is really for, but in some ways its like most of the US was carpeted with neutron bombs and we're living in the sparse ruins and scavenged detritus of a mostly forgotten machine that was once buzzing with people loitering and hanging out.
once all the other pizzerias were gone, pizza hut got rid of the arcade machines and restaurants and it just became a slop serving kitchen with delivery drivers. the skating rinks and arcades also closed and the malls died
Once porky beat the competition at their own game, they were free to enshittify it to make as much money as possible
Something about the falling rate of profit
Pizza Hut, like most corpo stuff, got completely gutted in the pursuit of some short term gains. It’s almost funny watching it happen from afar, until you start working for a corp yourself that gets a new ceo and starts trading in every bit of love for the brand by shitting it up so they can get a quick stock push. It’s fucking insanity working at the lowest levels seeing it all crumble.
My employer was the only one left in our space that hadn’t been bought by private equity. We had a massive advantage in the market with an excellent reputation. The owner decided to retire after Covid but he had no savings because he’d kinda just thrown his entire life into the company. He was no pauper but he didn’t have shit for retirement. So he sold the company for enough money to set him up for the next 30 years and bounced. Our healthcare, which was better than any healthcare package I’d ever seen, was the first thing to go. We went through a new CEO every year for 3 years and continued acquiring companies and it’s so fucking corporatized now. My job involves so much meta-job tracking and bullshit now and we’ve really just lost a certain something about the work culture that I loved.
I once walked into the old CEO’s office and yelled at him for half an hour about some bullshit policy they were trying to push that was gonna pile a bunch of extra work on my department. He took it and rolled it back that afternoon. I’d never be able to get away with that now. Everyone from the mid level managers and up is playing the dumb power games that drive me nuts where no one ever says what they mean or mean what they say. It’s like everyone’s so scared of losing their lackeys that they don’t let themselves actually give a shit about how the company works. Something something Graeber.
it's funny how most pro-capitalist simps imagine your initial experience with the old CEO as the "real capitalism" that is missing somehow. they want to put the genie back in the bottle.
..not realizing it's no different then remembering the "one good Emperor/king/dynasty" golden age between all the horrible baby butchering fiddle while it burns types and then the endless stream of royal failsons
obvious solution is to democratize it all but all of us here know what that actually means
I think this is spot on. When you put that much unchecked power in one person’s hands, it’s just a dice roll. And with the class interests of workers and owners being opposed, it’s a weighted dice roll. I happened to get lucky that my despot was able to look past the next quarter’s profits. And now that private equity has fully taken over our industry, there’s no dice roll left. Everyone’s getting fucked no matter who they work for.
i get why people are nostalgic for the american landscape 40 years ago. it definitely had some stupid shit and people are certainly confused about what their nostalgia is really for, but in some ways its like most of the US was carpeted with neutron bombs and we're living in the sparse ruins and scavenged detritus of a mostly forgotten machine that was once buzzing with people loitering and hanging out.
damn, that's good. the absence of ANY FUCKING THIRD PLACES AT ALL (besides like bars) is pretty fucked up. I hate it here but I have nowhere else to go and I don't know where it's any different that I could afford to live.
Everyone who thinks this is a bad take needs to remember what home cooking was like for white people in the 1950s
Show
you know what these healthy veggies need? to be encapsulated in a matrix of rendered animal bones!
Don't worry, agar can always be substituted in if you want to spread the misery around.
I've seen way worse in britain, scandinavia, or even other 1950s america stuff (literal mayo covered slop)
My grandmother had Gourmet Meals Made In The Microwave and it was hilarious. No, do not microwave steak and potatoes to cook them lol.
Here the local pizzarias and regional chains can't really compete with Domino's, Pizza Hut not having the same presence. Any kind of diversity with pizza is restricted to either the totally static menu of the national chains or $20-30 bourgeois pizzas with a local minimum wage of $15. There's no potential for New Jersey/New York's culture of a tiny pizzaria offering cheap slices of a peasant food. It's a dead cuisine that's entirely recuperated into terrible slop or something I'm alienated from.
Right-wingers are such boring people. Their dressing-up-for-Applebees-ass tastes are the exact same as a toddler who refuses to eat anything except chicken nuggets.
Funny you should bring this up because I only use the pizza place near me that offers a large for $11. Compare this to the boutique ass pizzeria up the road that starts at $19 and change for a large, the mom and pop place is so much better and cheaper too, they also offer by the slice.
The cheapest I can think of within a 20 minute~ drive:
Slice: $5 from a single location that I think is owned by a large investment group otherwise driving up the local rents. There are two other options I can think of which start at like $8/slice for pretentious dada pizza.
Carry-out large one topping pizza: $8 from Domino's, $9 from a pseudo-state level chain that's owned by a national company.
Domino's had a massive drop in food quality over the past two years in my country. I straight up can't eat it anymore without nearly throwing up. I only way pizzas from actual Pizzerias now.
There's no potential for New Jersey/New York's culture
The general restaurant scene anywhere outside of the NY tristate area (and maybe Chicago/Seattle) feels like the Great Depression
Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, every type of cuisine (including pizza) sucks except for BBQ. And you can get decent BBQ in the Northeast too
I'm lucky to have such variety, then. Granted, a combination of a college scene and former/current Mafia living here leaves me spoiled for choice on pizza.
The last straw was a few years ago when the deep dish pizza became a thin crust and the thin crust became a paper plate with sauce on it.
Just give me the damn deep dish, dough is cheap, there is no way your margins are that desperate.
The job I just started claimed during training they only make a penny profit off each sale. Admittedly it’s a grocery store, but felix voice no fucking way dude, what a weaselly liar
Also Pizza Hut's only selling point was their crust was basically deep-fried. Soooo oily.
Anyone with boomer parents or relatives knows they have the worst taste in food imaginable.
Capitalism breeds innovation (cheese stuffed cheese pizza with extra cheese)
I don’t think this take is saying that chain restaurants were actually exciting in the mid/late 20th century in the abstract, but rather what the perspective of the time was. Boomers were the proverbial frog thinking it was getting a gradually warmer bath and millennials/zoomers are staring at the rotting piles of overcooked amphibian parts.
Yeah congrats you are only 25% there in realizing that capitalism hollowed out everything the Boomer gens had and now we get nothing but sad depressing shit but are now trapped in some weird boomer nostalgia pit
that one is going to stick with me
