Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,26
one unnamed company executive sighed in 1970. “It involved too much time, it left too much room for human error, and it was too expensive.”* Each evolution of a company from a modest, handshake business built with sweat equity to an additional column in a corporate holdings ledger dragged it further away from its founding mission, practices, and recipes.
But the incorporation of these adulterations—the powders and artificial flavors, the cheap meat and shelf-stable items—wouldn’t be the biggest effect of this new lordship by the suits, shareholders, cost accountants, and profit maximizers. Despite the industry’s momentum, there was a real dilemma in Frytown, USA. By the end of the 1960s, the suburban strips, traditional small towns, and highway exits were already bloated with fast-food burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, tacos, roast beef sandos, seafood, and more. To keep growing, companies started staking out new, fertile terrain. Urban centers became the answer.
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The story of fast food’s life in American cities runs on a tense political third rail that often passes between trope and urban myth. Modern critics of fast food note the saturation of quick-service chains in city centers, especially when compared to supermarkets and grocers in food deserts, and conclude something unnatural has happened. Others focus on the years of relentless fast-food marketing efforts that have specifically targeted poorer, minority communities within cities and see capitalist conspiracy. But the origins of urban fast food are a bit more complicated. The story begins amid the domestic tumult of the late 1960s.
As we know, in the wake of the postwar boom and the expansion of the interstates, millions of Americans left the cities to settle into newly built suburbs. But as developments go, this one was not terribly equitable. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, the nation’s dozen largest cities saw the departure of 3.6 million white citizens and the arrival of 4.5 million nonwhite citizens. The white exodus (and the exclusionary zoning laws and racist subdivision covenants that followed) took crucial jobs, resources, and tax bases out of the cities. The people who remained, many of whom were minorities and the working poor, lost access to quality schools, economic opportunities, and civic services.
In August of 1965, the Watts riots erupted in Los Angeles. The largest and one of the deadliest urban riots of the civil rights era, the six-day fury resulted in dozens of deaths and the damaging or destruction of nearly a thousand businesses and, for many watching at home, brought about the terrifying specter of total revolution. In Watts and around the country, activists were calling not just for jobs, but also for the development of black-owned businesses in urban centers, where black Americans overwhelmingly lived.* At this intersection of race, despair, and capitalism, the interests of fast-food companies, the US government, and the revolution (surreally) converged.
In her book Supersizing Urban America, Chin Jou details how, starting in the late 1960s, companies such as McDonald’s and Burger King began to aggressively recruit minority owners to open stores in urban areas. These initiatives were undertaken with a mixed bag of motives in mind—companies wanted to gain footholds in new markets, please their shareholders, and avoid the negative publicity that came with ignoring the cause of civil rights.†
The potential expansion of fast food into urban centers didn’t just make great business sense for growing companies; it was an attractive proposition to would-be entrepreneurs in cities. After all, the fast-food franchises had already boomed in the suburbs. They had cachet and name recognition, along with established popularity with middle-class consumers and banks. Going all the way back to the days of White Castle, the stores and the standardized operations were designed to be easily reproducible. And these weren’t the only advantages, particularly in urban areas. “Perhaps the most obvious explanation as to why fast food restaurants tend to outnumber grocery stores in America’s inner cities is that fast food is generally more profitable than the grocery business,” Jou writes, noting the significant disparities that still exist between the two business models in their profit margins, in addition to the required real estate, onerous leases, and zoning restrictions. The table for urban fast food was now nearly set. McDonald’s, Burger King, and their ilk had their expansionist designs. Entrepreneurs in the cities who wanted in on the American dream of business ownership had their ambitions.
Only as race riots fumed across the country did officials belatedly seem to understand that economic opportunity would be a major driver of equality or, in the absence of