McDonald's

The McDonald’s floor - matted white - is clean but never spotless, the same way the place is usually tidy (and always in the process of being tidied) but always with rubbish dotted around. The same way the place only ever feels half filled with customers - half filled or half empty depending on the temperament of your visit. A place that only half achieves the goals it sets itself. Not that this would ever come across as a problem: everyone who visits a McDonald’s has already resigned themselves to accept whatever product is handed them. There’s no “complaints for the chef” at a McDonald’s, no angry customers; only the most self entitled and ill-advised would decide they deserve more from their maccies, at least enough to bother making a complaint.

A McDonald’s in a student town, as the McDonald’s in Ormskirk is, is a unique species: students make up the majority of customers and staff, and the maccies takes on the life that a lighthouse might, providing the sole source of direction on a moonless night, only instead of for sailors it is for the drunk and the hungover, the lazy, and after a few weeks of frozen meals simply anyone hungry and without the ambition to cook for themselves. And McDonald’s holds a monopoly on this in Ormskirk with (strangely) few other fast food chains in town.

The staff are mostly young, chatty, all with the air of people who will soon pass to a different job, or at least hold such ambitions dearly; there is the odd held up queue and forgotten burger but nothing that would warrant real complaint. I guess what I’m getting at is that the averageness of McDonald’s, the half achieving nature of it all, isn’t just the side product of a place as big and busy as McDonald’s, but is actually part of its selling point: a venue in total opposition to the fancy restaurant and the “special occasion” food place.   

The music inside is a strange jangly jazz soundtrack that feels arty and out of place inside a building which is frequently held up as a symbol of capitalism and consumerism. The jazz is hypnotic, sounding like if you listened too intently it might start to brainwash you, possibly to buy more Big Macs. “It’s because McDonald’s doesn’t have the licensing to play chart music in their stores” someone is always eager to say whenever the topic is brought up.

The weirdness of the music is enough to remind you you’re in a real place, situated in a specific location, not just one of the thousands of copies of McDonald’s found anywhere in the world. On weekends the doors are kept open 24 hours, becoming a haven for the drunk, McDonald’s for once escaping the sameness. That old cliche: “if these walls could talk”. What would they speak of? Drunken brawls, sudden breakups, reunions, first kisses, first and last kisses, ecstasy-filled students blurting out hollow marriage proposals. In these hours the real world creeps in. What a strange place it can be after all.