For a whole one minute and 23 seconds the other day, I gave some serious thought to buying a hamburger phone. Yes, you know the one: the handset is a big plastic bun and the keypad is bright yellow, like a wedge of cheese. The price was $19.99, and I thought it might make an amusing gift - although secretly I wanted it for myself, so that I could have serious discussions about presidential politics with my Editor while holding bread to my ear and talking into a patty.
And then I came to my senses.
Still, it made me think: sales of hamburger phones are up by 759 per cent, according to eBay, largely because one features prominently in Juno, the brilliant, Oscar-nominated comedy about unwanted teenage pregnancy. Which either means that this is another case of cunning product placement or that something more interesting is going on.
I suspect the latter. I suspect, in fact, that what America is experiencing is a form of mass-nostalgia - the hamburger blues, if you like. If you think I’m stretching this argument a bit, then just take a look at the results that came in from McDonald’s and Starbucks last week: at McDonald’s, quarterly profits were up by 6 per cent, and while investors were concerned about the recession, overall the company is - well, forgive the pun, but it’s on a roll.
The same cannot be said for Starbucks. Many of the people who once regarded their double-shot decaf soy latte as an aspirational lifestyle statement are now back under the warm glow of the golden arches. Starbucks is now closing 100 stores in the United States, and its last round of quarterly profit growth was as skinny as a non-fat cappuccino: only 2 per cent, in fact. If this isn’t enough to convince you that the hamburger blues are real, then consider the remarkably emotional tributes to the two Gods of hamburgerdom who died last month: Carl Karcher, founder of LA’s Carl’s Jr (now a national chain) and Lovie Yancy, founder of LA’s Fatburger (my particular favourite, and now also a national chain).
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But hang on a minute: isn’t the hamburger an icon of Bad Old America, Bush’s America, the America that made everyone fat and gave them diabetes? Of course it is, but that’s not what the hamburger blues are all about. An American feeling emotional about a hamburger is like a Briton feeling emotional about Concorde: you miss it, you hope it inspires something better in the future, but you don’t seriously think that anyone should build another aircraft that seats three people and burns through an oilfield before it reaches New York. The candidates in today’s election would do well to bear this mind, given that they all seem to be trying to capitalise on this new fixation with the past: Obama as Kennedy, Hillary as Bill, McCain as Reagan.
The hamburger phone isn’t actually a hamburger, after all. It’s just a reassuring wink to the past, with new technology inside. As for McDonald’s: I’m told people order salads there these days.