In my town, the McDonald’s is attractive and immaculate, but since Covid, the service is both glum, slow, and incompetent. Part of this seems to be low unchanged minimum wage, lowering educational levels, rising income insecurity among retirees, and high employment. Now, the workers who were quicker, smarter, and more competent work elsewhere and those McD’s would never have hired in the past have jobs there.

One other thing, though: in an oblique, perhaps unintentional way, there seems to be an unfair race component to your description of the downfall. Yes, I know some white people live in “slums,” but the combination of that word and “crack den” generally signal black people in popular media (as it did among lawmakers who disingenuously made a distinction between crack and powder cocaine), just as “meth lab” has a white connotation. The incompetence I see is evenly represented among those who may never have experienced environments where good service exists.

Overall, abandoning standards that address the needs of training workers of diverse backgrounds can only make things worse, which is why I’m abandoning McD’s after decades of supporting it because, unlike old-school “dairy bars,” that had “white” and “colored” windows in my lifetime (and no, I’m not in my 80s or 90s), it was one place in the South where black customers were both welcomed and treated with respect.