No one much noticed, and no historical marker was engraved way back in 1975 when our American culture of pioneer spirit, rugged individualism and can-do grit was overtaken by a more modern ethos of comforts, conveniences and contrivances.
This was the year that McDonald’s launched a new TV campaign and global promise of “We Do It All For You.” The jingly message put a capstone on our post-World War II era where baby boomers were becoming homeowners and rulers of a suburban-style of living and raising new families.
The “We Do It All For You” tagline was about much more than Big Macs and French Fries. It signaled a final surrender to a new way of doing, well, everything.
Families had quit baking their own bread years before, ever since sliced-bread had been invented. Canning your own vegetables was just a pastime or hobby when all but a few households did it at all. (During the same time period — with deliberate contrariness — the back-to-the-earth hippies led a short-lived renaissance in self-reliance and macramé but they ended up being co-opted and dissed.)
Now, evening meals didn’t take an hour or longer to prepare; it only took a few minutes of wait time in the Golden Arches drive-thru. Way past the horse and buggy days, everybody was driving cars without clutches and only a brake pedal. Dinner dishes no longer needed washing; you just loaded up the dishwasher. Perma press clothes eliminated the weekly chore in front of an ironing board and anybody that still changed his own oil for his car was considered backward.
1975 was the same time period that the “malling of America” was taking place, with thousands of enclosed shopping centers being built on the outskirts of hometowns, surrounded by huge parking lots that emptied onto a freeway exit. (There was usually a McDonald’s close by.)
Today, the majority of those malls have been abandoned, demolished or converted to other uses like affordable housing, Amazon warehouses or mega-churches. But the traditional downtowns and Main Streets that the malls devastated still lie fallow and hollowed-out.
But McDonald’s is still here doing it all for us. Only now you order with an app on your smart phone before you arrive and pay at the drive-thru by tapping your phone on a terminal. Sometimes you barely get a glimpse of the McDonald’s people who are there doing everything for you.
Fast Food Nation
It wasn’t overnight, but it didn’t take a full generation for our American culture to lapse into a fast food nation with a throwaway, disposable mentality and a conversion from millions of proud citizens to audiences of obedient consumers.
If we wanted to, we really could blame McDonald’s for the advent of an anti-culture of fast food and fast everything else. The world’s largest food purveyor promised to “do it all for us,” but instead, isn’t it more accurate to say MacDonald’s has done it “to” us, and not so much “for” us?
We live in a culture defined by what we consume and not so much by what we create or imagine. We live in a world of things with a lifestyle and economy all plotted out with shelf-life expiration dates. Like all of our surroundings and possessions we, too, are products of “planned obsolescence.”
McDonald’s sells 75 hamburgers every second every day, according to Business Insider. That totals 6.5 million hamburgers worldwide every day. That includes 5.4 million in the U.S. alone. Last year, people worldwide also bought 64 million cars and 1.4 billion smartphones. Almost none of those cars or phones were first-time or necessary purchases. Almost all of them were “upgrades” or forced replacements.
Shiny new objects, please
Reflex consumerism has been part of our American and western economy since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, if not before. All of this planned and forced obsolescence in our appliances, cars and gadgets didn’t just start with Apple Computers, Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Madison Avenue.
Back in the 1920s, the first mass manufacturers of electric light bulbs conspired to limit the life spans of their products because the original designs had almost an infinite shelf life. To boost their sales, the light bulb makers started making inferior products that had to be replaced, just like we now have to do with our smartphone batteries, inkjet printers or SIM cards.
In 1954, Brooks Stevens, a General Motors corporate executive, devised a scheme to introduce a “new model” vehicle every year with different looking taillights, fins, front grills or chrome panels. In just a few years, GM caught and surpassed Ford Motor Company as the nation’s largest selling automobile company.
Stevens summarized his market magic as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”
A Very Gross National Product
Nobody breaks it down quite this way, but if you look at America’s annual Gross National Product (GNP), you’d find most of the sales and output is directly attributable to planned and forced obsolescence. Whatever that mass economic total might be would probably equal the exact amount of “garbage” we bury in our landfills each year. (“Want not, waste not?”)
In his 1960 book, “The Waste Makers,” Vance Packard wrote about the systematic attempt of business “to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals.”
So here we are with household appliances that are totally resistant to repairs. Even factory-trained mechanics can’t fix our cars without a bunch of secret computer codes provided by the manufacturer.
Recently, it took a federal class action lawsuit for computer repair techs to win the right to repair Apple Computer products without voiding the warranty.
Why does it seem our phones, computers and other smart gadgets are always needing another software update? Skip or forget one of these updates and you could end up with a phone, printer or Internet connection that is “out of compliance.” Then it gets worse when you have to call 1-800 tech support, which usually ends up with a new purchase of a new product.
Were the Hippies right, after all?
What if we had made a left hand turn in 1975 and told McDonald’s, “no thanks;” we’ll stick to our own home cooking? What if more than a few forlorn and half-stoned hippies had re-discovered the values and economics of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism in his essay on “Self Reliance?”
What if Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue had become a fixture on America’s coffee tables and E. F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful” had become a bible for a new age and a shrinking planet that was demanding “less is more?”
Well, obviously, none of that came to pass. But we do have a MAKER movement right now led by D.I.Y. (do it yourselfers.) Maybe they are mostly hobbyists and tinkerers but they also are asking questions, sharing tools and testing all kinds of new prototypes that are mostly anti-obsolescence and seeking a future of advanced self sufficiency and reduced consumerism and waste.
Go for a BSA Merit Badge
Christ, we could even have a better world if we only had more Boy Scouts with more Merit Badges for first aid, outdoor survival, weather forecasting, sewing, ham radio, story collecting and others.
When the first Whole Earth Catalogue was published in 1968 — a half-decade before the McDonald’s “We Do It All For You” ad campaign — the chapters included “shelter,” “learning,” “whole systems,” “land use,” “nomadics,” “community” and others. The catalogue was designed as an “access to tools” and later introduced its readers and community to early computer-assisted learning and virtual communities. The Catalogue linked forgotten American frontierism, wilderness and exploration with emerging technologies designed to expand self-sufficiency, not limit them.
It’s almost impossible to believe, but we’ve heard that there are people — likely ex-hippies — who have never eaten a Big Mac. That’s not a big achievement for a whole culture of people but it’s still a fun thought.
— Rollie Atkinson
8-3-2024
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Scouts are still earning merit badges, performing community service projects (like posting the flags on Main Street), as well as doing Eagle projects for a wide range of recipients (including Ragle Park and Hallberg Butterfly Garden). They are growing up to be responsible individuals doing daily good turns and are guided by the Scout Oath and Law. Perhaps as a community we can find more ways to support them.
Some of us became fiercely independent of the McDonald’s footprint. We became educated entrepreneurs. Never caught in the current of becoming sheep. We watched as the addictions became more pronounced, culminating in the cell phone. Presence our default.