Love it or hate it, fast food is one of the cornerstones of American society. This cornerstone though, I think has been in the process of deteriorating since the turn of the century. Recently I’ve been seeing a bunch of clips on Tik Tok from the 2016 movie “The Founder,” a film depicting how McDonald’s gained traction and established itself as one of the first fast food chains. The accuracy of this film has been highly debated online, but nonetheless, it does get the point across that people loved fast food. I say loved, because I don’t get the sense that people love it nearly as much as they used to.

I think the main reason for this disenchantment is because fast food has lost its own identity in the whirlwind of 21st century American capitalism. This is really ironic in my opinion, because the fast food business model was created to save time and make more money, the epitome of capitalism. Even just in the time since I was, say, six or seven, I feel like fast food has really fallen off. I remember some late nights at school with my dad waiting for whatever he had going on, and going to McDonald’s or Wendy’s for dinner before the highschooler’s musical that night. It was so fun, choosing two or three items off the one dollar menu (which was discontinued in 2014), and that being a satisfying meal for the evening. Was it satisfying because I was young and eating a lot less than I do now? Or was it satisfying because it was a good amount of food for how much got spent?

I am inclined to think that it was the first of those two options, but I talked to my dad who was a fully conscious human during my more formative years and he agrees that there has been a definite fall off since then. In my opinion, all of the problems that I can identify with the fast food business model today stem from issues with staffing. We’ve gotten to the point as a society where nobody wants to work in the fast food industry because there are so many other opportunities, but people can’t find this other work and so they get stuck in the industry because of the demand for such workers. I especially noticed this shortage in staffing during my stint as a Doordash driver last spring, when I spent time at probably all of the restaurants around Harrisonburg. There was a very clear dichotomy between fast food restaurants and more traditional sitdown restaurants in who had enough staff to operate and who was able to have the food ready to go in a shorter amount of time. I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t the fast food restaurants.

The fast food restaurants had notably less staff, took much longer to get the food out, and had extremely high tension all around. I felt really bad for the workers, trying to work under extremely stressful conditions. The customers were far higher strung, which could be attributed to the fact that they were paying a lot of money to wait a while for underwhelming food. The price jump that fast food has seen, I would imagine is also a direct result of a lack of staffing. Raising food prices could be an attempt to create more room for higher wages in order to attract more staff, but with the portion sizes shrinking at the same time it just aggravates customers.

All this to say, there are some fast food chains that are doing something right. Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, Five Guys, I would say these restaurants consistently leave customers happy. There must be something that they are doing differently than the standard burger fast food chains that is successful. When it’s nine at night, there is a long line of cars out the drive through, five Doordash drivers are impatiently waiting for their order, and two workers are covering the whole operation, clearly something wrong is happening. I don’t know what the future looks like for this industry, but I think that the growing disparities between successful and unsuccessful companies will end up pushing the ineffective models into the ground.