This gets on my nerves because literally everyone gets this wrong as nobody really knows or cares about the history of McDonald's architecture. Yet the argument relies on a historical narrative. This is not new. In the 70s they did this exact same thing. They got rid of the bright and flashy style they had used throughout the 50s and 60s. They used more earth tones and natural materials. Their goal was to make it feel more homey rather than oriented at kids/young people. Imagine going from white, red, yellow with space-age curves, almost Googie architecture, to beige and brown.

There is no woke architecture crisis. The difference is how we react to any change. It's all driven by social media outrage and flat-out manufactured bait. Every minor change anyone makes is amplified and blown up and added to some kind of culture war narrative instantly. Then it's repeated so much that even leftists will be like "this is true but because of dialectical materialism." It's not even true. Your 80s/90s McDonald's that you totally remember accurately was colorful because some franchises reverted back to white/yellow/red for the same reasons. People thought the 70s retool was too drab. Some were repainted. It's not a linear decline in aesthetics it, get this, changes over time. Something you like may come into style but then it will go out of style. It may come back into style again.

I know we are desperately grasping at any canary in a coal mine for the fall of capitalism, but I don't think it's correlated to the appearance of McDonald's.

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago

When I took marketing in college pretty much every expert blamed the brownification of McDonald's and other restaurants on the success of Starbucks. Bright colors encourage people to keep moving, earth tones encourage people to relax. Starbucks showed the value of making your restaurants into places people could meet up and hang out at instead of just a stop to get food, especially relevant with the proliferation of wifi devices, and the fact that the customer base was self-segregating with the people who wanted to eat and run increasingly choosing the drive through. Lots of restaurants, although this is far from universal because it's expensive, now have a table or two with more comfy chairs instead of the traditional booths and metal ones, following the logic through to its conclusion.

Now we're seeing cultural pushback on the brown, if it keeps picking up steam we'll see a response from McDonald's corporate, and the cycle will proceed to its next phase of appealing to millennial nostalgia. But the logic of "make people want to stay in the restaurant" will still be the same.