The Looming Fear

A few weeks ago a YouTuber I occasionally watch put up a YouTube video titled "Whats the Point?". This individual is famous around YouTube for reviewing fast food in a suit and has been doing it for 15 years. While my fast food journey has pretty much ended I still enjoy staying up to the date on the newest releases of fast food items.

The long and short of that video is he claims fast food price is going up, the quality is going down, orders are mostly wrong and its not really fast anymore. Every experience is probably relative, but I'll never forget the one time I folded due to hunger on a late night drive home. I pulled into a Wendy's and waited in a line of cars for a voice to come on and order a regular ole burger with no changes.

20 minutes later in a line I got my bag and drove the remaining few minutes home. I get home and the burger is cold, cheese not melted, fries either burnt black or uncooked. I feel pretty sad because my memory of Wendy's in Kansas and Arkansas was definitely not this experience. That was 4 years ago and I haven't been back since.

I started thinking about the title of the video - "Whats the point?" and it reminded me of reading a message why a bar/restaurant closed. The bar claimed that people don't drink as much as they used to and they closed - which fits that criteria. There is no point in having a bar if no one drinks.

So I did some quick research to try and validate that claim and it looked real. We went from 72% of Americans claiming they drank in 2022 to 54% claiming they drink in 2025. We could probably count COVID as the increase reason for drinking, but I was surprised to see the research align to this business's specific claim.

However, the more I thought the more it was completely validated, because you can go to a bar and more than likely a single cocktail will be $16-18 dollars. This is insane when you consider there is probably one shot of liquor and juice accompanying that drink. Even more insane when you consider minimum wage workers might have to work 2 hours for a single alcoholic cocktail. That's why I was so excited for 2 drinks to be $5 in Homosassa in an earlier blog post.

Though I don't think price is the main reason - we culturally traded socializing (in a drinking setting) for doom scrolling on social media with a bit of vaping on the side. We all have devices in our hands that can fill most social desires we have. The need to go out and socialize kinda evaporates with that thought process. I look at the bar I have in my house and its full of gifted bottles of alcohol that have passed years without even being opened.

So if fast food is turning bad and bars are closing from the lack of drinking - what else has a looming fear? It wasn't too long ago that I saw a news article that said young adults are not having as many kids as previous generations. Of course armed with no facts myself I set off to the web to confirm this claim.

The CDC had a nice graphic of natality trends, but said it was no longer being updated which was unfortunate, but data till 2018 is good enough for me. It was very interesting reviewing this graph for a few reasons:

• The baby boom is real - post World War II really led to a preference for normalcy as soldiers returned home.
• Teen pregnancies have tanked - maybe that's why MTV's Teen Mom show shut down.
• The 30s are increasing with children while the 20s are decreasing.
• There is a slight resurgence of kids for parents in the 40s.

Now jokes aside I'm guessing that the cost of everything plays a big part in these numbers. I wrote a blog years ago about the difference of minimum wage vs the cost of a McDonald's single hamburger. The short of that post was in 1963 you could buy a burger for 15 cents and earn $1.25/hour at work. In 2020 minimum wage was $7.25 but a burger was $1.59.

Now I got some feedback in that article emailed to me that said I never took into account the weight of the patty between 1963 and 2020 so my comparison was unfair. However in my brief research it showed that the patty in 2020 was 1.6oz per patty while that was 3.7oz per patty in 1960. I couldn't really validate that research, but it was trending in the direction to further support my claim instead of destroying it.

So ignoring that if we get back to my example:

• 1963 - $1.25 (1 hour of work) / $0.15 = 8 burgers + 5c change
• 2020 - $7.25 (1 hour of work) / $1.59 = 4 burgers + 89c change

Which basically is my leading reason for the decline of births, but ignoring any specific claim lets think about a fish tank. Sometimes you wonder why your fish dies or why they won't have babies and it generally resolves around the conditions of the water. You need balanced pH, plants, shelter and a stream of food. When fish are happy with the conditions they stay alive and might procreate. Without a functioning stable environment - they do not.

I really like that analogy as you apply it to humans, even if it simplifies the point too much. I'm sure humans have their own reasons which all can be rooted somehow in fear.