Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,69
at a McDonald’s in Flushing sought to eject the members of the elderly Korean community who had made the store their regular meeting point, routinely for all-day sessions and, apparently, at the expense of seating for other customers during peak hours. Police officers were summoned, threats were announced, global boycotts were issued. News of the spat went as far as San Francisco, then carried all the way to Seoul before a local state assemblyman was called in to broker a truce between the community and the franchise’s owner.
The episode also triggered a host of skull sessions among urban sociologists about city resources, assimilation, demography, and the cultural nuances between the American and the Korean treatment of the elderly. But at its heart, it was a story about access, proximity, and independence. Nearly all of the McFlâneurs lived within two blocks of the store, while the local library was a mile away, and the closest senior center was even farther away and located in the basement of a church.* “It’s how we keep track of each other now,” one habitué told The New York Times of their hangout sessions. In a familiar trope, he added, “Everybody checks in at McDonald’s at least once a day, so we know they’re okay.”
One wild irony here is that the entire fast-food enterprise is built around speed: the assembly-line processes, blaring fryer timers, and hotfooted kitchen staff. The crowds pooling impatiently near the pickup counters, the cars and trucks jamming up drive-thru lines with that one back-seat driver speculating aloud about whether it would be quicker to just go inside. For many franchises, the success of every transaction is gauged first and foremost on the swiftness of the service. It’s by size and velocity that McDonald’s averages seventy-five hamburgers sold every single second of the day. Sonic, whose first slogan was Service with the Speed of Sound, was named to convey stratospheric quickness. Among the many studies on the topic, a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that speed of service (92 percent) and convenience (80 percent) were the most popular reasons people gave for eating fast food. But two other explanations were surprising: A full third responded that fast-food restaurants offer a way to socialize with friends and family, and another 12 percent said that fast-food restaurants are “fun and entertaining.”
Chris Arnade, a photographer and writer who studies addiction and poverty around the country, often makes local branches of fast-food restaurants his entry point for the communities he visits. There he’ll often encounter morning clubs, particularly featuring an older membership, who are seeking some kind of physical social network. Writing in The Guardian in 2016, Arnade chronicled his visits to a McDonald’s in Natchitoches, Louisiana, where an informal crew called the ROMEO club—short for Retired Old Men Eating Out—hold court. The ROMEO club wasn’t the only social game at the Natchitoches Mickey D’s. “On Tuesdays, there is a bingo game,” he wrote. “On weekends, a Bible group sets up in the opposite corner, and offers prayers and Bibles to whoever wants to come.”
This raises a reasonable question: Who would want to sit inside a Burger King or a Bojangles’ for hours on end? The plastic seats, the harsh lighting, and, in many cities, the semi-enforced time limits for diners. Yet, in spite of all this, people sit and stay and stay and stay. “If you give people a world of sterile fast-food places, they’ll form networks and communities within them,” Arnade told me. “People adapt. I always say that you can put me in any McDonald’s anyplace in the country and don’t tell me where I am. I can open my eyes and tell you where I am by the people. I can’t tell you by the restaurant, they all look the same, but I can immediately tell you what town I’m in because the people make the place.”
In other words, despite being designed to have no character, the restaurants have character. Some of that character manifests itself in those wholesome tableaux—birthday parties, first dates, father-daughter breakfasts, and teen hangs. Other times, it’s supervised visitations and the custody swapping of kids, the meet-ups of recovering addicts, widows, exhausted workers, and semi-homeless, and the ingathering of lonely souls.
* * *
The McDonald’s on West Florissant in Ferguson, Missouri, is an average-looking store. On the Sunday afternoon that I arrived, a few days after meeting Sara Dappen, the store was serving as a respite from ninety-seven-degree Missouri heat and what must