The Saddest Bar in the World, and We're Still Missing It

A meme showed up in a 90s nostalgia group on Facebook. White text on a deep red background. 2,600 likes. 263 comments. 747 shares.

Recreation of a facebook post. Original post anonymized; this is not a real screenshot.

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Growing up in the 90's Anonymous user • 16h

We had 24 hour Walmarts, $1 dollar McChickens, $5 foot longs and $20 dollar full tanks. We used to be a proper country. 💔😭

I read it. I nodded. For a half-second I felt the same vague mid-aughts warmth the OP felt, where your biggest financial concern was whether you had $5 in the cup holder for a foot-long. So I left a comment.

Then I closed the app. And I sat with it. Because the saddest part isn’t that we lost the cheap McChickens. The saddest part is that the cheap McChickens were the bar.

I’m 37. I lived in the United States for 33 years. I’ve been to 57 countries.¹ I’m writing this from Japan, where I’m watching my own assumptions about what “developed country” means get rearranged in real time.

The Bar We Set for Ourselves

Re-read the meme. Slowly this time. What is each item actually about?

24-hour Walmart. A monopoly big-box that destroyed downtowns, paid wages so low its employees were a top recipient of food stamps in multiple states, and only stayed open at 3am because the marginal cost of staying open was lower than the marginal revenue of catching the night-shift crowd. The “24-hour” part wasn’t a national achievement. It was a corporate inventory strategy.

$1 McChicken. A $1 sandwich profitable at $1 because the chicken was mechanically separated, the bun was high-fructose corn syrup and dough conditioners, and the worker assembling it made $7.25. The cheapness wasn’t generosity. It was the entire system squeezing every input until something gave.

$5 foot-long. Same story. The bread had so much sugar in it that an Irish court ruled in 2020 it didn’t legally qualify as bread.² The meat was 50 grams of processed protein on a foot of cake.

$20 full tank. Cheap gas was real, briefly. Made possible by a global oil order that the US has spent the last 25 years and several wars trying to maintain. The bill on those wars is still coming due.

Stack it up. The “proper country” being mourned is one where ultra-processed food was cheap, megastores were always open, and gasoline was subsidized by foreign policy decisions whose consequences hadn’t yet hit the credit card.

That’s not a country. That’s a coping mechanism with a flag.

The Passport Problem

Here’s the thing about Americans defending this version of “proper country.” Most of us have nothing to compare it to.

Roughly 170 million valid US passports are in circulation as of fiscal year 2024. Once you account for the people who hold both a passport book and a card, that works out to between 45 and 50% of Americans with a current passport.³ Less than half. Most of us have never even applied.

So roughly half. And of that half, the actual international travel patterns are what they are. A cruise out of Miami. An all-inclusive in Cancún. A long weekend in Cabo. None of which, for the record, count as visiting a country. Resort compounds are a US export with palm trees. You can fly to Cancún, eat the same Sysco buffet you’d eat at a Vegas hotel, drink Bud Light by a chlorinated pool, and come home having “been to Mexico.” You haven’t.

I’m not exempting my younger self from any of this. My first real trip outside of tourist Mexico or border Canada wasn’t until I was 22. I studied abroad to Vietnam in the summer of 2011.

That trip wrecked me. In the good way.

I landed in Hanoi jet-lagged, alone, and instantly convinced I’d made a mistake. The smells were different. Traffic was a constant rolling negotiation between mopeds. I couldn’t read any of the signs. I couldn’t order food without pointing. I was homesick for the first 72 hours. I missed Trader Joe’s. I missed knowing how to behave.

Then the homesickness broke. And what replaced it was the realization of how small my world had been. I’d been moving through life as if Tijuana, where I used to slip across the border to drink underage as a San Diego State student, was all of Mexico. As if NYC was a first-class city. As if a brief trip to Windsor, Ontario counted as “international travel.” Vietnam took all of that and threw it in a blender.

I came home a different person. The travel bug was set.

What I used to think	What replaced it after I actually went
Tijuana represented all of Mexico	San Luis Potosí. Oaxaca. CDMX. Mérida. Real Mexican cities and a real food culture older than the United States.
New York was a “first class city”	CDMX. Bangkok. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Tokyo. NYC has good bones and good pizza. It does not have the best transit, the best food, or the best urbanism. Not by a mile.
Windsor, ON was “international travel”	Morocco. Sri Lanka. Panama City. Places where you can’t just nod and pretend you understand. Places that make you put the phone down and pay attention.
The American dream was the global standard	Half the planet has a better baseline for healthcare, vacation, food quality, and public transit. They just don’t market it the way we do.

Vietnam in 2011 was the inflection point. And here’s what’s wild. Vietnam in 2011 was already changing fast. The sleepy beach towns I visited then are now ringed with high-rises. Da Nang is a tech hub. Startups are picking Ho Chi Minh City over Silicon Valley despite higher effective tax rates because life is just better. Cheaper. Faster internet. Better food. Less burnout culture.⁴ The US version of “the future” is a country whose largest budget grocery chain just had a bunch of self-checkouts replaced with one human and a security guard. The Vietnamese version is a country that materially improved every quality-of-life metric over a decade.

A Swiss colleague said something to me last year that stuck. He told me he wished he could have been born in the 1950s, because back then the framing was simple. Communism bad, America good. Now? Reality is messier than that. China and Vietnam are major economic and quality-of-life success stories. Xi has effectively taken the torch as the figurehead of whatever’s left of the rules-based international order, at least the part of it the current US administration hasn’t already torched. Pun intended.

You don’t have to like that situation to acknowledge it. I don’t, particularly. But you have to see it. And you can’t see it from inside the all-inclusive in Cancún.

The Vacation Problem

You can’t develop a frame of reference if you can’t leave. Which is, conveniently, the next part of the math.

The United States is the country with the joint fewest days of paid leave (zero) and the second lowest number of paid vacation days in the world (10). The U.S. is the only developed country with no statutory paid leave.⁵ We share that distinction with Nauru, Micronesia, and Kiribati. Three Pacific island nations with combined populations smaller than Sacramento.

American workers receive an average of 12 vacation days annually, but they usually only take 11, often because “life is too busy to plan or go on vacation.”⁶ Americans reported taking 14 days off per year, on average, compared to 24 days for Europeans.⁷

OK. Fine. Maybe you’ve heard the European stats before. Let’s go somewhere else. Let’s go to Mexico, the country every American I know thinks of as a developing country with poverty, cartels, and that one resort their cousin went to.

Mexico mandates 12 days of paid vacation by federal labor law after one year of service, going up to 32 days with seniority.⁸ Plus seven federal holidays. Plus a 13th-month salary called the aguinaldo (a minimum of 15 days of pay, mandatory, every December). Plus a 25% vacation premium on top of the regular salary during your time off. Plus universal access to healthcare through IMSS for anyone formally employed, and through IMSS Bienestar for those who aren’t.

My buddy Rob works for IMSS, the public health institute. Government job. He gets six weeks of paid vacation per year on top of mandatory federal holidays. Six weeks. In Mexico. The country Americans tell each other to be afraid of.

Karen at Denny’s gets zero. And she’ll tell you universal healthcare would be socialism.

The Philippines? Universal healthcare since 2019, when President Duterte signed the Universal Health Care Act and automatically enrolled every Filipino citizen in PhilHealth.⁹ Their basic vacation entitlement is only 5 days, but they have 11 paid public holidays plus 8 special non-working days, plus 105 days of paid maternity leave (compared to zero federally mandated in the US), plus solo parent leave, plus victims-of-violence leave, plus extended bereavement leave. The whole social safety net is built differently.

Country	Mandated paid vacation	Universal healthcare?	Federally mandated paid maternity leave
Austria	25 days	Yes	16 weeks paid
France	25 days	Yes	16 weeks paid
United Kingdom	28 days	Yes (NHS)	39 weeks paid
Spain	22 days	Yes	16 weeks paid
Germany	20 days	Yes	14 weeks paid
Denmark	25 days	Yes	18 weeks paid
Japan	10 days statutory	Yes	14 weeks paid
Mexico	12-32 days + aguinaldo	Yes (IMSS)	12 weeks paid
Philippines	5 days + 19 holidays	Yes (PhilHealth)	105 days paid
United States	0 mandated	No	0 federally mandated

Sources: Resume.io 197-country review⁵, Wikipedia minimum annual leave by country¹⁰, OECD, Mexico Federal Labor Law⁸, Philippines Republic Act 11223⁹.

A French worker is legally entitled to more than five weeks off. An Austrian gets nearly eight weeks when you add holidays. A Mexican private-sector worker with five years on the job gets 20 paid vacation days, an extra month of pay in December, and free healthcare. The American gets whatever HR decides is competitive that year, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics says works out to about 11 days of actual vacation taken.

Eleven days. That’s barely enough to fly to Europe, get over jet lag, and fly home. It’s certainly not enough to actually live somewhere else, eat the food, talk to the people, and come back having a thought you didn’t have before. Which is, I suspect, the entire point.

The Food Problem

This is the kicker. The thing the meme is actually mourning is bad food, made cheaply, available always.

The mean percentage of total calories consumed from ultra-processed foods eaten by Americans age 1 and older was 55%, during August 2021 and 2023. Among those between the ages of 1 and 18, the mean consumption was higher at 61.9% of calories.¹¹

Sixty-two percent of every calorie an American kid eats is ultra-processed. Two out of every three bites.

The United States is the leading country in ultra-processed food consumption, accounting for 60% of caloric intake, compared to a range of 14 to 44% in Europe.¹² Seventy-three percent of the food on grocery store shelves in America is ultra-processed.¹³

Read those numbers again. 73% of what’s available to buy at the grocery store is ultra-processed. It’s not that Americans choose poorly at the store. It’s that the store is mostly engineered food products with a small produce section against the back wall.

Country	Share of daily calories from ultra-processed food
United States	60% (adults) / 62% (youth)
United Kingdom	~57%
Germany	~46%
France	~31%
Spain	~24%
Italy	~17%
Portugal	~14%

Sources: NOVA classification studies via medRxiv¹², CDC NCHS Data Brief 536¹¹.

The Walmart-and-McChicken meme isn’t mourning food. It’s mourning the cheap delivery system for engineered chemicals optimized to override your satiety signal so you’d eat more of them. That this delivery system was once cheaper than it is now does not, on reflection, mean we used to be “a proper country.” It means we used to be more efficient at delivering cheap chemicals. The chemicals were always the chemicals.

In Spain, the local market sells you tomatoes that taste like tomatoes for less than what you’d pay at Whole Foods. In Mexico, the corner taquería puts more real meat on a $2 taco than Subway puts on a $9 footlong. In Japan, where I’m sitting right now, a 7-Eleven onigiri is rice and salmon and seaweed, and it costs about $1.30. Real food. From a convenience store.

What Bars Look Like When They’re Set Properly

Let me name a few comparison points. Not because they’re paradise. Because the bar is set somewhere meaningful.

Japan (where I am right now)

I have to lead with this one, because I’m typing this from a coffee shop in Tokyo and my mind is being rearranged in real time.

Food in Japan is cheaper than in Mexico right now. With the current yen-to-dollar exchange rate, the food and beer here cost less than what I pay back home in Baja, which is already dramatically cheaper than the US. And we’re not talking about cheap food. We’re talking about the good stuff. A proper kaiseki dinner that would be $300 in California is $40 here. A craft beer at a counter bar where the bartender has been making drinks for 30 years is $4. Conveyor-belt sushi where the fish was on a boat 18 hours ago runs about $1.50 a plate.

Other things cost more. Housing in Tokyo is real money. Electronics aren’t actually cheaper here than online in the US. Transit isn’t free. But it’s all cheaper than what you’d pay back home, and the quality is dramatically better.

Japan isn’t a “cheap country.” It’s better than the United States by almost every metric I can think of, except maybe work culture, where they actually work more than we do, which is saying something.

Yesterday we went to a national park. By public transit. From central Tokyo, the largest urban area in the world by population, to a forested mountain park, on trains and a bus, no rental car, no traffic, no parking nightmare. About two hours each way, mostly comfortable, mostly quiet.

Tokyo itself is the strangest urban experience for an American. You walk for an hour and barely see a car. Not because there are no cars in Japan. Because nobody needs one. The trains go everywhere. They’re frequent, fast, clean, on time to the second. If you want a little extra comfort on a longer trip, you pay a couple bucks more for the “green car” upgrade and you get a bigger seat and a quieter cabin. That’s it. That’s the system. It works.

I won’t pretend Japan is utopia. The work culture is brutal. The population is shrinking. Foreign residents face real bureaucratic friction. Every country has its trade-offs. After living in San Diego and Mexico, after spending serious time in Spain and Denmark, I came to Japan thinking I’d already seen most of what “well-functioning developed country” looks like.

Japan currently takes the prize.

Spain

Two-hour lunch on a Tuesday is not a vacation, it’s just lunch. Public healthcare. Walkable cities older than the United States. People retire and actually retire, instead of working the door at Walmart at 73 because their 401(k) didn’t survive 2008. The food at a random truck stop in rural Andalucía beats most American restaurants. Cost of living is a fraction of California, and a 30-hour work week is becoming the norm in some sectors.

Denmark

Consistently in the top three of every “happiest country” index for a reason. Generous parental leave. Free university. Free healthcare. Public transit. Bike infrastructure that puts every American city to shame. They pay high taxes and get an entire civilization back in return.

Vietnam

I went there as a 22-year-old and got my whole frame of reference reorganized. I went back recently and it had reorganized itself again. The country I knew in 2011 was a sleepy, recovering economy. The country in 2026 is one of the fastest-growing places on earth, with infrastructure investment Americans can only fantasize about, and a startup scene that’s eating into Silicon Valley’s lunch.

China

Careful here. I have real beef with the internet censorship. The Great Firewall is the main reason I haven’t been back as much as I’d like. You can’t run my kind of work behind it for any extended period. Fine.

But the high-tech cities I saw 15 years ago impressed me, and the cities I saw on my last trip impressed me more. Bullet trains that go where they say they’ll go, on time. Airports that work. Subways in cities I’d never heard of. Cashless payment systems we still don’t have. Over the past 40 years, China has lifted nearly 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for more than 75 percent of global poverty reduction in the same period.¹⁴

You can argue with the political model. I do, regularly. But the government’s investment in its own people and infrastructure is real and visible. They built things. They lifted people up. They aren’t running an empire of foreign military bases. Whatever else you want to say about the system, it isn’t pretending that 24-hour megastores are the high-water mark of national achievement.

Meanwhile, Back Home in May 2026

While we’re online mourning the loss of $5 cardboard sandwiches:

The national debt just crossed 100% of GDP. Debt held by the public was $31.27 trillion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, or 100.2% of GDP. At 100% of GDP, debt is roughly twice the historical average. Outside of a brief period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, debt only exceeded GDP for two years at the end of World War II.¹⁵ The gross national debt is now at about $38.95 trillion, well over 120% of America’s GDP.¹⁶

The CBO projects we’ll break the all-time record of 106% of GDP set right after WW2 within a year or two. Today, debt is projected to reach 125% of GDP by 2036. We’re spending $1.33 for every dollar we collect.

We’re in another Middle East war. The kind where the other side actually has the capacity to retaliate.

Jet fuel prices from that war just killed Spirit Airlines, the eighth-largest US carrier. Spirit Airlines, the pioneering discount airline that shook up the budget travel business, is shutting down its operations. The company is in its second bankruptcy and was in serious financial trouble well before the Iran war sent jet fuel prices surging. Spirit is the first major US airline in 25 years to go out of business because of financial problems.¹⁷

Eleven days of vacation a year, and the cheap airline that made even that affordable for working Americans just turned off the lights this week.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, I just got off a train that arrived four seconds late and people audibly grumbled about it.

So What Are We Actually Defending?

Look. I’m not a doomer. I’m not one of those expats who left and now spends every day online dunking on America. I lived there for 33 years, ran a marketing agency there since 2010, and still spend plenty of time there. I have friends, family, clients, and a business rooted in San Diego. America has real things going for it that I miss.

But the meme isn’t naming any of them.

It’s not mourning the national parks. The world-class universities. The first-amendment protections that, whatever their current condition, are still better than what most of the world gets. The genuine entrepreneurial culture where you can start a business in 20 minutes online. The diversity that no other country comes close to matching. The art, the music, the parts of American culture that the entire planet has been copying for 80 years.

It’s mourning $1 sandwiches.

If your highest cultural value, the thing you post about with broken-heart emojis on a Tuesday night, is the price of fast food and the operating hours of a big-box store, then I have some bad news about what you actually believe a good life consists of.

The question isn’t whether we used to be a proper country. We weren’t. We were a country very good at delivering cheap, processed, always-available consumer goods, paid for by a global order whose bills are now coming due. The cheap goods are getting expensive because the bill is real.

The question is what we want to demand for ourselves. Whether we’re capable of demanding it. Because the rest of the world figured out a long time ago that you can have things that aren’t cheap chemicals available at 3am. You can have time off. You can have healthcare. You can have transit that works. You can have food that’s actually food. You can have a society organized around something other than the lowest possible price for the lowest possible product.

But you have to want it. You have to know it exists. And you have to be willing to demand it from the people you elect, the corporations you patronize, and yourself.

The first step, honestly? Get a passport. Use it. Not for Cancún. Not for a cruise. Go somewhere actually different and stay long enough to use a laundromat. Watch what people consider normal. Watch what they consider non-negotiable. Come back home and ask yourself why so many things you’ve been told are impossible are completely normal in countries with a quarter of our GDP per capita.

Then maybe stop posting nostalgia memes about $1 McChickens. We can do better than that. The rest of the world already does.

I’m typing this from a 7-Eleven in Tokyo, eating a $1.30 onigiri that’s better than most American sandwiches, watching salarymen in suits pour off a train that arrived on the minute it said it would. The bar is set right there. We can see it from here.

We just have to show up.