Okay but there are several reasons that are kinda interesting
1) fast food restaurants cannot advertise to children anymore, so that means no more bright colors and child friendly mascots
2) McDonalds and the like have been loosing ground to “fresh fast food” chains like Chipotle for the better part of two decades, and this style is meant to emulate that more clean, “mature” style.
3) Resale on property. See, fast food isn’t doing as well as it did in the 90s-early 2000s, and where it used to be fairly rare to have a fast food place close, now a days you might have a location close, and good luck selling the old, branded building to a completely different business. You know those closed Pizza Huts that just sorta sit there forever, very clearly having been a Pizza Hut? Well as it turns out, most businesses don’t want to buy a building that is recognizably from a different brand. You’d basically have to tear down the building and start over, a costly decision when there are plenty of plain looking spaces that you can buy/rent and put a lot less cost into renovations. So for a fast food chain now, it’s far better to have a plain “this could be any sort of counter service place, just change the signs!” In case you have to close that location and sell the building.
Basically fast food places look like this now because fast food is an industry that is well past it’s peak profits, and businesses must plan for their eventual closure and for their building to simply be absorbed into the next trend or monopoly.
This makes sense but also there’s an urgent care in my area that has the pizza hut roof
ALT
