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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8643266" data-attributes="member: 18">Re: MaccyDs, I think one major factor a lot of people are forgetting is price and availability.Those two factors + branding/advertising are why MaccyD's is so successful.If people could:A) Eat wherever they wanted (say a cheap/free teleporter system)andB) Eat whatever they wanted (say we're in the TNG/DS9 future and money isn't being exchanged)andC) All restaurants has theoretically infinite capacity (somehow?)Then I think you'd seen an extremely steep decline in the popularity of a quite a few kinds/brands of fast-food restaurant (maybe the vast majority), and a very steep increase in the number of people ordering from "5 star restaurants". McDonalds wouldn't instantly vanish. It has a peculiar charm all its own and is traditional for some people, but like, about 80-90% of the times I've been to McDonalds in my life, and I think this applies to a very large number of people, the essential reasons have been:1) It was there and I was hungry.2) It was cheap. It is cheap. It's a good price.3) It's a known quantity/reliable (this speaks to a kind of quality, btw).Maybe also:4) It's pretty reliably fast - I would say this is decreasingly true in the COVID/delivery era, but KFC and a few others are hit even harder.In those cases, if I could have just teleported though, and the cost didn't matter, would I have gone there? No. Even if I wanted fast food, that is far from my top option. Most of the rest would been breakfast times and before the pancakes started being so rubbery! Even if price was a factor, if I could just teleport within Greater London I'd only be paying 10-20% more to get stuff that was like 200% more pleasant/fun to eat.So I feel like ignoring these factors and bringing up restaurants a lot is really confusing the issue. D&D isn't like a restaurant. It's actually much more expensive than most other RPGs, but who even knows that? I know normal people don't. They don't even know how much D&D costs. I've talked to normies - they're always surprised either by how expensive or how cheap D&D is! No of them guess the book prices right, and most of them don't even realize you need three books - I sure didn't when I started D&D, despite having been told about it by multiple D&D players. They missed that bit! It's so dominant and such a peculiar thing that I can't even think of comparison industry that really makes sense.</blockquote>

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