Happy Meals and Hard Truths: The Fast Food Collapse and America’s Middle-Class Extinction

Fast Food: The Last Bastion of the Poor, Now Out of Reach There was a time—before Wall Street liquefied the bones of Main Street—that fast food was the poor man’s buffet. Dollar menus gave folks a brief illusion of freedom. You couldn’t buy land. You couldn’t afford a doctor. But by God, you could afford a burger. That was the last thread tying the American worker to a sense of normalcy. That thread just snapped. Now McDonald’s suits are whining that beef costs too much. That labor costs too much. That "inflation" is driving away their base—the poor. The same demographic they milked for decades is now too broke to buy a clown-branded cheeseburger. Wendy’s is shuttering hundreds of stores.…