blackwater wrote:

I didn't really think about it until now but COVID kind of broke fast food.

A lot of local restaurants died off because of the COVID-era restrictions forbidding dining in. Fast food places were the big winners because they already had drive through windows set up and ready to go when the restrictions hit.

In parallel with that, welfare terms were lengthened again and again, we had several rounds of stimulus, and minimum wages got increased a lot. All of that meant that hiring burger flippers for low wages got much harder.

Once people increase their prices and people get used to the new prices, they don't tend to go back down. So an $8 fast food burger is the new normal.

While I'd love to say that they're doomed and they'll get their comeuppance and etc. etc. I think probably people will just continue to pay for their clown burgers.

It's sort of interesting to think about how accelerationist COVID was. It moved forward things like self-checkout, self-serve touchscreens and so forth by at least a few years. I suppose fast food robots will arrive a little sooner in this timeline than one in which the minimum wage for fast food workers in California wasn't $20 an hour.