i hate usamericans and their one billion different regional fast food chains that they insist are all vastly different. im sorry i just dont believe you that Chunks and Yakko's and Slutty Dan's all provide different experiences and im not in one million years going to rural northeast ohio to check if the Quirko's Cumdump Meal really has better fries than the Burger Cossack Grease Box. all fucking ham burger the same
notes of this post have taught me:
- usamericans are bushido-style loyal to their own state's Slutty Dan's. it is like a religion to them
- usamericans don't know the difference between the uk and europe or between europe and the rest of the world
- all fucking ham burger the same
the thing about the US regional chains -- OK, they are all subtly distinct in ways that you lose out on when everything is replaced with McDonalds, but that's not it except in the sense of, like, the sense of lost youth in being unable to recreate the sense of being home
the point of these chains is that they're the standardbearers of a kind of balkanized mesh of regional cultures, a sense of local specificity that's been eroded by the gradual expansion of federalism and centrally-produced media as the structuring framework of civic life
All this stuff about, how, like, real North Florkansas kids remember pulling into Splorp Shack at 2 AM for a Splorp Burger is a way of expressing a sense of both loyalty to and alienation from local/regional cultures in a country where regional pride is increasingly thin and weaponized and much of the population migrates to a handful of urban hubs for work and school. It's a standard story about the relationship between modernization and alienation, and it's playing out in the medium of postwar burger chains because this is the United States and what could possibly be more American than that
