Speaking of sun-deprived depression. According to the AV Club website, grease and talo-scented employees at the four McDonald’s restaurants in London’s Olympic Park and Athletes Village will be wearing new uniforms inspired by the television show Mad Men.
While the uniforms don’t look vastly different from McDonald’s usual duds, there are a few mod flourishes, courtesy of British designer Wayne Hemmingway, such as pencil skirts, mustard-coloured skinny belts, checkered skinny ties and tighter fitting plaid tops. Think Pete Campbell at a picnic before someone punches him in the face for being obnoxious.
Apart from building up the self esteem of fast food employees, who’ll no doubt experience a more international flavour of rude customers during the Olympics, we’re not sure that dressing workers like a New York City ad agency in the ’60s is such a good idea.
For one thing, extra-marital affairs will sky rocket. Same goes for drinking and smoking on the job. Plus we’re not sure if customers will have the patience to wait for their order when someone manning the cash register pulls a Don Draper and says, “Grease is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond the deep fryer. My first job as a sandwich artist at Subway was with this old pro named Jarrod. And Jarrod told me the most important idea in fast food is ‘cheap fuel.’ Creates an itch. You simply put your fuel in there as a kind of… calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond: heartburn. It’s delicate… but potent. Jarrod told me that in Greek, ‘heart burn’ literally means, ‘fire in your chest caused by eating too quickly.’ It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This little piece of chicken-like flesh isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards in your esophagus. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called a filet or a tender. It’s called a McNugget. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Recklessly… to a place where we know that hunger can be soothed in an instant… in a nugget of time, if you will.”
