I've been to McDonalds less than half a dozen times in my life. A couple of times was when I was with my sister and her then-husband when we were in Amarillo. He loved the franchise and I never understood why. OTOH, he thought macaroni grew on trees, so.... Another time was after work and a co-worker asked if I wanted to go eat breakfast and that he'd buy. I jumped at the chance, but would have turned it down if I had known he wanted to go to McDonalds. Another time was when I was going to go the the movies but knew I didn't have time to eat anything but fast food. The McDonalds was just a few hundred yards from the theater so I got a burger there and wolfed it down in time to catch the flick.
I also ate there a few months ago when I got a craving for french fries and a chocolate milk shake. (I like to dip the fries into the shake - better than ketchup!) They DO make good fries and shakes, but I prefer burgers from just about anywhere else. Pampa has a couple of locally owned hamburger joints that make MUCH better burgers than McD's. I stopped at Sonic the other day and asked the girl who brought me my food if they were always that busy. She mentioned that McDonalds hadn't finished their new building - I then remembered they had torn down the "old" one (probably ten years old or so) and was building another one. It looks like the same size as the last one. Hmmm....
It wasn't the quality of their food that kept me away from McDonald's, though, but rather a political reason. It was the early 70's and I was becoming politically aware. Nixon was President and I was starting to work my first real, paying jobs. When I first started working, the minimum wage was $1.90/hr. then it was raised to a whopping two bucks an hour. Whoopie! I worked for the county mowing the graveyard and courthouse lawn- we were allowed to put in 50 hours/week, but the county, being a govt. entity, was exempt from having to pay overtime. That meant we could make a hundred bucks a week. Even back then that wasn't a lot of money. (At least it didn't seem that much then, but it could probably buy as much as three times that amount now. Gasoline was .28 cents/gallon and you could rent an apt. in my home town for fifty bucks/month)
I was in the school library during study hall and was reading the paper and read an article about Ray Kroc having Nixon on his yacht. The article said it happened quite often and questioned their relationship. It made me question it too and made me do some more research.
This was long before the Internet, so I had to dig through all sorts of periodicals, but I eventually found that Nixon had vetoed several minimum wage increase bills sent to him by Congress. I also found out that the largest employer of young people was McDonalds...young people who also comprised the vast majority of minimum wage workers. It didn't take a genius to figure out that there was more to the Kroc/Nixon connection than appeared on the surface.
Since that time, however, I've come to conclusion that the min. wage isn't necessarily a good thing. A free market should set wages, not Congress or unions or Presidents. Even if there has to be a minimum wage, I think there should be a provision for training wages and an exemption for the youngest workers. (the young me would be furious at the me I am now) The best thing of all would be for government to stay completely out of regulating prices or wages or subsidizing any industry.
