Larry Fisherman

Them: I like lame and Boring

Me:

Me:

1) fast food restaurants cannot advertise to children anymore, so that means no more bright colors and child friendly mascots

2) McDonalds and the like have been loosing ground to “fresh fast food” chains like Chipotle for the better part of two decades, and this style is meant to emulate that more clean, “mature” style.

3) Resale on property. See, fast food isn’t doing as well as it did in the 90s-early 2000s, and where it used to be fairly rare to have a fast food place close, now a days you might have a location close, and good luck selling the old, branded building to a completely different business. You know those closed Pizza Huts that just sorta sit there forever, very clearly having been a Pizza Hut? Well as it turns out, most businesses don’t want to buy a building that is recognizably from a different brand. You’d basically have to tear down the building and start over, a costly decision when there are plenty of plain looking spaces that you can buy/rent and put a lot less cost into renovations. So for a fast food chain now, it’s far better to have a plain “this could be any sort of counter service place, just change the signs!” In case you have to close that location and sell the building.

This article from Business Insider goes into more detail. The highlights include: 

Ten companies control more than 50 of the biggest names in the chain restaurant business, from Panera to Burger King.

As it becomes more expensive to run a restaurant, more chains are consolidating under mega-companies.

And they produced this helpful graphic:

You’ll notice that certain ‘hipster’ coffee brands which cultivate a “small business” vibe to compete with Starbucks, like Peets and Stumptown, are now owned by JAB Holding Company, also the owners of Keurig coffee, Panera Bread, and Dr. Pepper-Snapple Group. JAB also used slave labor during the Nazi regime and members of the German Reismann family, the majority shareholders, were Nazi supporters at the time. That said many of the current shareholders, still from the original German Reismann family, are descendent from a Jewish Holocaust survivor via their that survivor’s daughter, baptized and raised as Catholic, and they set up a foundation to combat antisemitism and Holocaust denial after they revealed this information during a time of controversy about their (previous) ties to Nazis. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company]) 

Additionally, past or current collaboration with Nazis, and other far-right architects of genocide, by old multinational corporations, especially European and American ones, are quite common. Starbucks, for example, faced protest this past Mayday for their role in financing the Tigray Genocide by the Ethiopian and Eritrean militaries. https://itsgoingdown.org/may-day-2021/]