For several years, I was commuting nearly daily from Louisville to Lexington, Kentucky, and always tended to plan a pit stop at the McDonald’s closest to the midway point, largely because it had both the cleanest public restroom along the route and surprisingly decent coffee. Most of the mornings I came in, there was a corner table of older men in their 70s and 80s who would meet up mostly to nurse their own cups of coffee and complain. “It’s a group for ranting,” one of the participants told me with a sly smile.
And rant they would: about politics, about the daily news, about the dry growing season and any number of personal grievances. One of the most popular was the price of the food on the menu board across the restaurant dining room. As one of the men once bemoaned while tapping his receipt with his thumbnail, “Fast food just isn’t cheap anymore.”
