Fast(er) Food
Oh lordy. Just when you thought that ordering your dinner on-the-go from your car just wasn't fast enough...
Outsourcing the drive thru voice? Computer systems that run algorithms to predict consumer needs? What next...psychics and soothsayers??
I just love that nothing is fast enough, loud enough, flashy enough, or big enough for this country. And by god, if profits falter because of it, bring on the innovation and meet me at the bottom line!
When did the priority really change from customer service to stuffing shareholders' clutch purses? Can we always outdo the outdone? No wonder there's so much sleep debt and corporate scandal. It's a mad-freaking-dash out there!
I don't want to go all reactionary, but stuff like this makes me take pause and thank the maker I made it out of the corporate lifestyle. I mean, I realize that necessity is the mother of invention, but ponder to yourself what is gained from a FASTER drive-thru experience? And what does that say about our lifestyles of excess and "all about me" attitudes and approaching anything we experience or do with consumer expectations (like going to school to "buy" a degree or treating people as human capital)?
In our pursuits, I think there is a balance we should strive to achieve. Excess is rarely met with satisfaction -- it fuels a quest for more. We need to think about opportunities to experience, not bits of time to save. Convenience can be damned inconvenient sometimes.
But then, I don't speak in truths. These are nothing more than me thinks.
2 comments:
Good YourThought, this one, as have been several others. I think this underscores a very important bankruptcy of our culture, that of a mature, balanced central ethic from which we derive meaning and purpose. We have instead all the encouragement you could ask for to worship mere consumption. We forget of course that consumption is not an end in itself but a means to the end of personal well being of a material kind, which has its place. But with consumption being the god instead of the human person, or more generally, life itself, we see the kinds of values of 'more-more' and 'faster-faster' that your referring to. These are values that cater to consumption; we need faster this and faster that because there is only a limited amount of time in which to consume so we better speed it up in order to consume more and more. An appreciation for consumption is healthy to some degree, but an ever increasing level of consumption is our centralmost mode of ethical reasoning at present, and the dangers of these are obvious. Why is this so and what to do about it?
I really couldn't have said it better than either of you. Too true. Too fucking true. If anything is going faster and faster for me these days, it's the rate at which my cynicism grows when learning of the next "greatest thing".
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