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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite places in the world is this one particular McDonalds in Camberwell that's open 24 hrs.

On a Friday night at 2am, its full of people from all walks of life - from delivery workers taking a 5 minute break, to wedding party socialites looking for a quick food fix since everything else is closed - and they're all there for the exact same reason and are sitting next to each other without any tension or fanfare.

There really is a certain community magic to it.

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Sounds like a Waffle House an hour after last call except replace "without any tension or fanfare" with "overwhelming aggressive unpredictability" hah.

In my home town the joke was waffle house is for when you want denny's but don't know how to fight.

McDonald's functions as sort of public square, which is missing elsewhere in society, as the employees are to detached or inattentive to care if people are loitering too long. Same for Starbucks.

I walked by the Starbucks in my neighborood recently and there were about 30 customers inside sitting at long tables. Every single person was staring at an electronic device. Maybe that's how a public square works nowdays.

The author suggests the opposite, at least for McDonald's - the employees do care and are attentive to the needs of the people in the restaurant, and that's part of why the community springs up there. I'd expect McDonald's corporate policy is to hustle people along, and it's inattentiveness to that policy that enables the public square, not inattentiveness to the people in the square.

for what it's worth, I have not seen this at any McDonald's beyond the expected service of preparing the food.

The author of the article is a published author who writes about poverty and addiction - he links to a good excerpt from his book in the Guardian, which might better establish his bonafides for these kinds of claims: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/05/america-dign...

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