/ck/ - Food & Cooking

people here have the wrong idea about "nostalgia". it's not nostalgia for pizza hut or subway or a fast food chain.

it's nostalgia for when people gave a damn. when there was a basic expectation of quality and decency in consumer goods, when it wasn't the most cheap shit possible in the most soulless, industrial box prefab "decor" possible staffed with immigrant J-visa foreign workers who don't speak English. it's nostalgia for when things actually worked and corners weren't cut at every possible fucking turn and things like clean bathrooms weren't a rarity.

recently I went to an ihop that I hadn't been to in 10 years. It used to be clean, no weeds in the parking lot, vacuumed floors, hostesses and clean bathrooms. The place now was a fucking dump. One of the doors was basically hanging off the hinges, dirty plates everything, floor covering shit. Toilet out of order. Menus sticky, even some lightbulbs were out. Everyone "working" there was an Arab immigrant who didn't even speak English - I had to point to order something off the menu.

And it's not just ihop. Everything is fucking shit. Nothing works. No one gives a damn shit breaks and no one fixes it, or there's trash on every street, or every public bathroom hasn't been cleaned in years even if you're a paying customer. There's a decline in basic living standards. Subway and Pizza Hut are just a symptom of the hollowing out of civic society in America, the utter collapse of communal investment, social capital, and simply giving a fuck, both from the ownership class and from the common man. That's what it's about.