Touchy! Sheesh!
If anyone personally created what I object to, then my sincerest apologies for offending anyone. If not, then buck up and put it in context, eh? I just dont want to start up Word and have it underline words like 'favourite' in red, because it is spelled incorrectly. I've set my MS to English (Australian) which is it's own bastardisation of the English language, but I dont want to go through 2 lots of changes to get it spelled correctly for here. I dont want to 24 hour donut shops. Who in their right mind would want a bloody donut at 3am? On the subject of the latest invasion, Kripy Kreme, who in their right mind would want to buy a box of 12? Unless you have a family of 10 kids and it's a treat? It's excessive. And yes, I do avoid it. Like McDonalds and other fast food. On fast food though, Subway! What the hell is the deal here? A novelty healthy fast food place? It's famous for simply being healthy. That is sad. Countless sandwich bars already sell, and have done for as long as we've all been alive, healthy simple sandwiches. And they're a lot cheaper too. But in railing against (admirably) the stronghold unhealthy fast food has on all our societies, Subway has become something to bow to. This appreciation speaks more than the mere presence of Subway. I wont believe that America has never seen healthy food before. It cant be all that new and exciting, surely? Yet in it's protest against affordable convenient food, it took another giant chain to get people to eat well. Starbucks and their counterparts. Isn't this a bit excessive too? Can people not surive a few hours anymore without a coffee when they're out and about doing their errands? Our parents used to, and I'm sure they all drank a lot of coffee as well. Sure, it wasn't any swanky mocha latte frappacino with skim milk, but it served it's purpose of a caffeine hit for those in need. People survived a great long time with having coffee at home and not needing to spend the cost of half a jar of instant while 'doing the shopping' or whatever. Same goes for bottled water. I'm old enough at the ripe old age of 28 to remember the days when people drank it from a tap! Imagine that. But in our increased times of excess and expediency, we want instant clean water, instead of boiling it ourselves or buying an at home purifier. It's moved beyond being a handy product or service to make life easier, and become something we now rely on, and it's made us lazy as a result.
Is this all America's fault? Certainly not, and not in the case of 'blame' either. I'm sure all these businesses and concepts began as a way to help a rather large nation by offering things which helped make life a little easier. Consumerism took on a new face as time went on, with everything being throw-away and instant. And like all good businesses, they wanted to expand to where ever would adopt them, including here. So we lapped it up, and it kept getting fed. Here was yet another willing market for this change to spread to.
Something similar happened with television. 7,9 and 10 look at ratings for American sitcoms and realise it's cheaper to buy the rights to a season of already established popularity, than to try and create our own. Your networks utilise that popularity to sell it to overseas markets. And so when we turn on our tellies, we have a choice of American sitcoms or the latest imitation of an American based reality tv show. As for how much our industry suffers is probably debatable, but it seems the only shows here which get any run is Home and Away & Neighbours, or gardening/lifestyle programmes. Our movies have moderate success here, but how many of ours make it over there? It's not a form of cultural or social exchange when all of this is one-way. It reaches more than movies, tv and food. The fact that all of this reaches our shores is not the problem, nor whether it is quality or not (as that is subjective), but the volume of it, the saturation, is.