I may have missed a few, as I didn’t get to start watching the game until near the end of the first quarter, but of the ones that Forbes included in their round-up, I recognize only the Doritos, Coca-Cola (ugh!) and #LikeAGirl ads. We certainly got more than our fair share of Ford F-150, Nissan, and The Keg ads, however. I’d show more, but a surprising number of the ads now show warnings similar to this
I’m sure they’ll eventually clear the border, but part of the point of the advertisers paying the big bucks for the Super Bowl timeslot is the immediacy.
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The old burger wars were between McDonald’s and its similar-but-slightly-different competitors like Burger King and Wendy’s. Peter Suderman says the new burger wars won’t follow the same pattern. The new battle will be more like plucky bands of humans hunting down woolly mammoths, as the smaller-but-nimbler chains start to encroach on the big chains’ traditional territories:
Hamburger fans, rejoice: Better burgers are winning the fast-food wars.
On Wednesday, McDonald’s — the biggest and most successful brand in fast food — announced that its current CEO, Don Thompson, would be stepping down. The departure comes on the heels of a lackluster earnings report and a steep drop in overall sales as competition from new entrants has increased.
This morning, shares of Shake Shack, a rapidly growing burger chain that grew out of a hot dog stand in Manhattan, shot up in price during the company’s first day of public trading. The restaurant chain has just 63 locations, but it’s now worth an estimated $1.6 billion.
The problems facing McDonald’s are obvious: Because it is so well known and so dominant, it has a hard time changing in response to market demand. Its success gives it access to tremendous resources, but its all-things-to-everyone approach, and the inevitable bloat that tends to accrue at any successful legacy business, leaves it vulnerable to new players that can do fewer things better — like, for example, Shake Shack.
It’s hard to imagine the fast food market without McDonald’s, but it was a very different world then. Here’s Mark Knopfler’s tribute-of-sorts to Ray Kroc, who turned the McDonald’s brand into one of the world’s most well-known and profitable companies:
i’m going to san bernardino ring-a-ding-ding
milkshake mixers that’s my thing, now
these guys bought a heap of my stuff
and i gotta see a good thing sure enough, now
or my name’s not kroc that’s kroc with a ‘k’
like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, yeah
it’s dog eat dog
rat eat rat
kroc-style
boom, like that
the folks line up all down the street
and i’m seeing this girl devour her meat, now
and then i get it, wham as clear as day
my pulse begins to hammer and i hear a voice say:
these boys have got this down
oughtta be a one of these in every town
these boys have got the touch
it’s clean as a whistle and it don’t cost much
wham, bam you don’t wait long
shake, fries patty, you’re gone
and how about that friendly name?
heck, every little thing oughtta stay the same
or my name’s not kroc that’s kroc with a ‘k’
like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, now
it’s dog eat dog
rat eat rat
kroc-style
boom, like that
you gentlemen ought to expand
you’re going to need a helping hand, now
so, gentlemen well, what about me?
we’ll make a little business history, now
or my name’s not kroc call me ray
like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, now
it’s dog eat dog
rat eat rat
kroc-style
boom, like that
well we build it up and i buy ’em out
but, man they made me grind it out, now
they open up a new place flipping meat
so i do, too right across the street
i got the name i need the town
they sell up in the end and it all shuts down
sometimes you gotta be an s.o.b.
you wanna make a dream reality
competition? send ’em south
if they’re gonna drown put a hose in their mouth
do not pass ‘go’ go straight to hell
i smell that meat hook smell
or my name’s not kroc that’s kroc with a ‘k’
like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, now
it’s dog eat dog
rat eat rat
kroc-style
boom, like that
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Why pay for therapy sessions, when Wine Folly can tell you all about your inner self just by finding out what kind of wine you prefer:
If you love Pinot Noir…
You’re the person who loves the idea of the beach but hates sand in between your toes. Pinot Noir is the ideal wine because it’s not too fruity, not too herbaceous, not too tannic and not too bold. Your go-to color to wear is gray. You have a silver car.
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James Lileks on when gaming stops being fun … because of the damned controller:
My wife asked if we had an xbox 360, and I said we did. She said that someone on the neighborhood mailing list wanted one and could we sell it. I balked. I haven’t played it for some time but there were two games I wanted to get back to, some day. Why had I stopped? Because I can’t play console games. I can’t aim. I can’t figure out the buttons. Once upon a time I was an ace at Halo, but that was long ago, and now there’s just TOO MANY BUTTONS. I’m a keyboard-mouse man and so it has ever been.
I will never finish those games. The reason they were unfinished was because my characters had walked into walls and fallen off horses and the controller felt like a ceramic croissant in my hand. One of them started out interesting, but turned into a driving game as I chased a suspect. My inability to drive had no bearing on the story; even though I rammed the car into phone poles and fire hydrants and mowed down pedestrians by the dozen, all I got was a “be careful!” from my partner.
Every standard image of console gamers shows them sitting back on a sofa, right? Plinking away, trash-talking, relaxed. Every good game I’ve played on a computer has had me on the edge of my seat. Literally. Tense. It’s the difference between playing and inhabiting, between popping in a game disk like you’d put in a movie or turn on the radio, and entering a world. It’s odd, really: the computer screen feels interactive, responsive, an immediate field of action, perhaps because it’s a couple of feet from my face. When I’m sitting in front of a TV, it feels peculiar to interact with it, because it’s supposed to be doing all the work. ENTERTAIN ME! If you do nothing during a game your character stands there, and that makes the TV screen like the real world. It’s like walking away from the TV for a few hours and coming back to see the news anchor is sitting at the desk eating a sandwich.
So out it goes. It’s a relief, really. When entertainment feels like obligation it’s best to look elsewhere.
I wonder if James was playing L.A. Noire, as that was pretty much the point at which I stopped trying to play the game … and my partner said something remarkably like “Be careful!” before I put down the controller and turned off the console.
I guess what it all comes down to, for me, is that social liberalism was once an alternative that enabled people to pursue whatever types of consensual personal behavior they wanted, and thus was a movement that increased individual freedom and happiness. It was the antidote to Jerry Fallwell telling you that you were going to hell, to Nancy Reagan saying “just say no,” to your conservative parents telling you not to be gay, to Pat Robertson saying don’t have sex, to Tipper Gore telling you that you couldn’t listen to the music you like, to don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, don’t wear those clothes, don’t walk that way, don’t have fun, don’t be yourself. So of course that movement won. It was a positive, joyful, human, freeing alternative to an exhausted, ugly, narrow vision of how human beings should behave.
It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing, or if someone decides to misrepresent what you said as saying the wrong thing. There are so many ways to step on a landmine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks. The hundreds of young people I teach, tutor, and engage with in my academic and professional lives teach me about the way these movements are perceived. I have strict rules about how I engage with students in class, and I never intentionally bring my own beliefs into my pedagogy, but I also don’t steer students away from political issues if they turn the conversation that way. I cannot tell you how common it is for me to talk to 19, 20, 21 year old students, who seem like good people, who discuss liberal and left-wing beliefs as positive ideas, but who shrink from identifying with liberalism and feminism instinctively. Privately, I lament that fact, but it doesn’t surprise me. Of course much of these feelings stem from conservative misrepresentations and slanders of what social liberalism is and means. But it also comes from the perception that, in the online forums where so much political discussion happens these days, the slightest misstep will result in character assassination and vicious condemnation.
[…]
If you are a young person who is still malleable and subject to having your mind changed, and you decide to engage with socially liberal politics online, what are you going to learn immediately? Everything that you like is problematic. Every musician you like is misogynist. Every movie you like is secretly racist. Every cherished public figure has some deeply disqualifying characteristics. All of your victories are the product of privilege. Everyone you know and love who does not yet speak with the specialized vocabulary of today’s social justice movement is a bad, bad person. That is no way to build a broader coalition, which we desperately need if we’re going to win.
