How It's Going.

I don't eat fast food. 

In fact the last time I went into a QSR (quick service restaurant) was when my elder daughter gave birth to her second child and there was a McDonald's in the hospital complex. I was sent down to get her a coke.

I suppose they put McDonald's in hospitals because it cuts out the middle-man. 

In any event, QSR is a triple mis-direct.

There's no quick.
There's no service.
And I don't count them as restaurants.

But semantic anomalies are par for the course in the modern world--getting more and more glaring as I get older and older.

When I got to that post-natal McDonald's I was confronted by touchscreens. I was meant to type in my order and hope for the best.

I paid a real person, and when I asked where lids and straws were she grunted and nodded, as if I were stupid. Neanderthally she directed me left, where utensils and napkins are placed, efficiently atop trash bins. 

Not too long ago I read about the new CEO or CMO or Customer Success Doyen of some QSR or another speaking about how impersonalization has gone too far. I can't find the article or quotation, but it was about the absence of humanity in what at one time was the most-human of experiences--eating.

It's pretty obvious to me what's happened.

QSRs aren't run by people who cook food, love food, enjoy food and relish in relish. They're run, like everything else today, by efficiency experts who, quoting Oscar Wilde, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Everything is supply-chain optimized to work just great and everything sucks. I'm sure the hotel I'm staying in right now is run by people who know how to turn a room over in 51 minutes rather than 52. They save 8374 minutes a year, which nets them an extra $74,094 in revenue per room so they get promoted. Eventually they'll succeed their way toward ruining everything.

Yet, no one ever talks about the stranger's public hair in the shower.

That's an MVP. (Minimal Viable Pubic.) And they teach it in b-school.

The same thing, I see has happened and is happening in the ad industry--the ever-consolidating ad industry, which is now down to four big holding companies and zero unique brands. Consolidation, in fact, might be MBA speak for a septic system's leach field. The effluence is distributed efficiently, and that's considered success.

Just now an advertising friend I worked with in the early 1980s sent me this article from what remains of the bought-and-paid for trade press. (They report nothing that reflects ill on the decimated industry. AdAge and Adweek do more PR than reporting.)

Essentially what's happening to QSRs, ad agencies and just about everything else is simple. 

Contemporary management policy has bought them all up.    Contemporary management policy has made them efficient. Contemporary management policy has rendered them like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: "There's no there there."

Or in the words of Ed Butler, my boss at Ally & Gargano from 1990--1992, everything now is "flat as a plate of piss." And nearly as appetizing.

Everything has gotten so efficient and so well-run and so cost-effective that everything is in danger of going belly-up because everything is so devoid of humanity, kindness, decency, respect and soul.

Our spiritual tectonic plates have shifted from "Let me find out and get back to you," to "your call is important to us. Your call will be answered by the next available customer success specialist in 27 minutes."

We've gone from "Let's make it different" to "Let's not offend." Distinctiveness, point of view, ethics and philosophy has been superseded by "best-practices," which invariably is synonymous with "most-efficient practices," which is invariably synonymous with suck. And pubic hair in the shower.

It seems weird to me to spend billions on agency "consolidation," aka subsumation and then have to spend millions more attempting to return things to how they were before they were blanderized and forced to comply.

Every once in a while, when I'm in a dark mood, I think about the sort of thinking that would lead to companies delivering what they call a "minimal viable product" to their customers, who are in effect "minimal viable economic entities."

It staggers me that companies and agencies would create things purposefully sucky and offer such crap to their most valuable "asset"--their customers aka their "minimal viable economic entities." We make crap for crap while using monopoly power to drive margins being the modus operandi of most of the world.

I can imagine a manager coming out to the mound after a pitcher's giving up an extra-base hit to the third batter in a row. "Well, I threw him my minimally viable slider"

But,
george,
that's 
the
way
we
do
things.

If 
you're
ready 
to sail
with us,

we're
ready
to welcome
you
aboard.