beamed out from Fifth Avenue. And from the world’s most exclusive mahogany haunts it went out to the greasy Greek diners of Joseph Mitchell, Greenwich Village, and beyond. The Benedict and its countless variations remain a hangover staple for anyone armed with a fork, a knife, and a napkin.
But for those looking for something cheaper and tidier, there is the McMuffin, a more portable analgesic wrapped in its trademark yellow paper. By 1985, the McMuffin comprised 15 percent of the annual company sales. And in 1987, roughly 25 percent of all breakfasts eaten outside American households were served by McDonald’s.
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With Americans using drive-thrus to eat, bank, be joined in holy matrimony, and pay their respects to the dearly departed, the auto industry rose to match it. It all started with Chrysler, which released the first successful mass-market minivans in 1983—the Dodge Caravan and the Plymouth Voyager. The two praiseworthy, slow-accelerating boxes almost certainly helped save Chrysler* from the doom brought on by the effects of two recessions in the early 1980s and intense new competition from automakers abroad.
Bigger than station wagons and small enough to still fit in garages, minivans became the ultimate family ride: a spacious, affordable, low-to-earth mark of authenticity in fake-looking, fabricated suburbias. After selling an impressive two hundred thousand–plus minivans in their debut year, Chrysler would achieve Peak Minivan in the late 1990s with six hundred thousand of them clunking off lots each year. The Caravan and Voyager were also the first two vehicles since the drive-in era to come equipped with cupholders, a profound wink at their domestic nature.
The cupholders in early-model minivans were really just two dorky circular impressions on the center dashboard console. But as the minivan life swung into the mainstream, consumers went as wild for the innovation as they did for Walkmans and Umbro shorts. When Chrysler designers set about redesigning its popular minivans in the late 1980s, they paid special attention to the cupholder, adding a pop-up mechanism that made it more functional for use while driving. “When we began doing the new minivan, we evaluated all the letters that we got,” Trevor Creed, a Chrysler interior design chief, told the Orlando Sentinel in 1992. “That’s when the cupholder thing really began to take off. It was one of those crazy little things that people thought were really neat.”
As with most new things, not everyone was smitten. Like the artificial subculture of “minivan and soccer moms,” Chrysler’s investment in cupholder technology divided industry observers and purists. In 1989, the newfangled scourge of “crannies for drinking cups” was derided as a “future frill” by U.S. News and World Report. Chrysler’s competitors released their own minivans with their own cupholders, but it would be years before the feature would become a standard in cars built for American markets. Among the more stubborn holdouts were European imports and luxury sports cars. In his book Small Things Considered, the writer Henry Petroski marvels at the sophisticated amenities of his mid-1990s Volvo sedan, only to fret at its mostly symbolic cupholder: “In a car that has so many thoughtful design details, like a left-foot rest in a car without a clutch, this was a mystery. Cup holders in automobiles were not part of traditional Swedish culture, however, and Volvo seems only reluctantly to have developed a retrofit for the American car. Whether the company liked it or not, increasingly in the 1990s, American car buyers were expecting something to hold their drinks.”
For a while, basic domestic cars delayed getting in on the action, too. Most Ford Probe hatchbacks sported a curved dashboard and no cupholders, including the 1989 model driven by Stella Liebeck’s grandson, which left her to balance her ill-fated cup on her seat as she precariously added her customary cream and sugar. One disregarded and sadly ironic grace note of the public disparagement that accompanied Liebeck’s saga is that, following the hot-coffee lawsuit, the tide of cupholder adoption turned forever. By the mid-1990s, with a few sporty holdouts, cupholders more or less became a standard feature in American cars.
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The busy marriage of minivan mania, dirt-cheap oil, Detroit savvy, and prosperity would pave the way for the rise of the oversize sport-utility vehicle (SUV). The SUV took the necessity-driven, house-on-wheels spirit of the minivan (and flourishing, on-the-go American life) and souped it all up. The SUV remains one of the more enduring emblems of 1990s indulgence, often weirdly coupled with fancy, upmarket coffee in tall cups with sculptured lids and