Chandler’s overarching theme is that fast food need not be seen, or at least not only seen, as an exploitative industry but as a passable alternative to mom-and-pop establishments and a legitimate piece of American culture. For example, he explains that while the prevalence of fast food in poor black neighborhoods is often viewed as vaguely conspiratorial, it began as an honest way to promote black ownership and opportunity. (Franchisees are technically owners, not managers of a corporate-owned branch.) At least to some extent, the problem of poverty, race, and food deserts is emergent, not intentional.
In a similar vein, Ray Kroc of McDonald’s looked for ordinary franchisees who could “credibly serve their working-class customers.” Because fast-food restaurants have a very minimal financial barrier to entry, no dress code, and no expectation of proper etiquette, they are open to all and provide a “sense of affiliation” that is second only perhaps to religion (a long discourse on brand identity and social media drives that point uncomfortably home).
Chandler quotes one author who spoke thus of the midcentury arrival of Dairy Queen to America’s small towns: “Before the Dairy Queens appeared the people…had no place to meet and talk; and so they didn’t meet or talk.” Why not just go to the tea room or one of the fair-trade coffee shops? As much as it may surprise us, such establishments did not exist, and fast-food outlets were, aside perhaps from bars, the first “third places” in many towns.
These bland, identical, corporate buildings are places where genuine community takes place and unfolds; “customs can still be meaningful and intimate even in generic plastic booths and beneath generic fiberglass ceiling panels.” The fast-food restaurant is not an imposition upon some unspoiled urban fabric but is, sometimes more and sometimes less, an integral part of it. This may not be ideal, but it is true.