do you feel like buildings all look the same, cars are fading to gray, and every movie is a sequel? It’s not just you. I felt it too, and there’s data behind it.
Long read, but at least take the logo test. You’ll start seeing it everywhere. https://x.com/i/article/2112198742581374978
The World is Fading to Beige
How Market Research, Spreadsheets, and Playing It Safe Led to a Society of Predictability and Sameness
As I get older, I’ve found myself falling into the trap of “everything was better in MY childhood.” It’s a trope as old as time, and as my generation (millennials) ages into our 40s, I worry we’re slowly approaching “get off my lawn” territory. Reminiscing about days before smartphones and instant information is a fun exercise in nostalgia, but underneath it I always wondered if there was a kernel of truth.
When I approach an exercise like this, I try to be as intellectually honest and unbiased as possible. I’m sure there’s data on why people get so attached to their own childhoods (that’s another article altogether), but here I wanted to see whether any objective facts backed up what I was feeling.
It was like the world had stopped making new things and started making safer versions of old things. Another sequel or remake in theaters. The 95th version of NCIS, a hospital drama that felt like every other hospital drama, or the newest city with Real Housewives. Another song that was a cover (fine, I’ll admit Fast Car by Luke Combs was a bop) or built on a hook from 1998. Another restaurant that looks like every other restaurant.
Before I dive in, I have to admit, it’s not all bad. My son and I just saw Avengers: Endgame Encore in theaters and it was an awesome experience. We were entertained by a blockbuster cast with a great storyline, even if it was 2,700 days old and we were mainly seeing it for the three minutes of preview footage for Avengers: Doomsday during the credits.
Still, the existential dread that we were descending into a world of sameness was there. But, it was just a feeling, without any real backing, and most of it was tied to entertainment anyway. Then I dug in, and the feeling got stronger. It was as if society prior to 2000 was a kid with big dreams, who wanted to be an astronaut, a video game tips giver (this was a real childhood dream of mine btw), or a pro wrestler. Over the years, those dreams faded, and that kid grew up into a middle-aged guy in a gray cubicle under fluorescent lights, updating a spreadsheet nobody reads.
The analogy above was intentionally on the nose, because the research showed that, best I can tell, it didn’t happen maliciously. Like adults trying to help a kid get ready for the workforce, the changes I was noticing were a long series of reasonable updates, each one meant to help, that slowly drained the color out of everything. But man, the realization that things were being drowned in a sea of sameness was heavy.
That profound realization actually started at one of the least profound places possible…McDonald’s.
Somewhere off the Interstate
I’m not a big fast food guy. I also work from home, which means most days my commute is 47 steps and my view of the outside world is whatever passes the window while I’m on a Google Meet. So hopefully you can forgive me for missing what happened to McDonald’s.
On a recent road trip with my family, we pulled off the highway for a quick stop to grab McDonald’s. I hadn’t had a Big Mac in years, and was ready to taste my childhood. In my head, I knew exactly what I was walking into. I could see the bright red roof with golden arches that weren’t just a logo, but part of the building itself. I could clearly picture a playground out front, tubes and slides in every primary color…the kind of thing you could spot from the off-ramp.
But that’s not what was there at all. What I walked into was more akin to a dentist’s office or Bed Bath & Beyond.
This McDonald’s, and apparently every other McDonald’s now, was a beige brick box. It had a flat roof, with a gray stripe, and the arches had been demoted to a sign on the side of the building. “McDonald’s” was spelled out in a font that looked like the default for a college kid’s PowerPoint presentation.
Inside was worse. When I was a kid, McDonald’s had stools shaped like hamburgers with literal faces. You sat on a smiling cheeseburger while you ate a cheeseburger, and nobody thought this was strange. There were red walls, yellow booths, and for a period of time, video game kiosks for the older kids parked right next to the playground.
Now there were ordering kiosks. We used them. You tap a screen, a screen tells you your number, and you sit on a colorless bench next to a wall of fake wood slats. It felt less like a restaurant and more like the waiting room of a sterile lab in a dystopian video game. The kind where the protagonist finds a note that says “they took the colors first.”
Across the street was a Taco Bell. I remember Taco Bells with red tile roofs, stucco arches, and a bell tower. This one was…you guessed it…a beige brick box with a flat roof and a gray stripe. Take the signs off, and I genuinely could not have told you which building sold Big Macs and which sold Crunchwraps. The interiors matched too.
If it were just fast food, fine. Nobody needs a 3,000-word essay about Taco Bell’s roof. But once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop myself from seeing it everywhere else.
The people inside were all looking at the same phone. Not literally the same brand, but the same black glass rectangle. Back outside, the parking lot was a gaggle of crossover SUVs in white, black, gray, and silver, all shaped roughly the same.
It was clear confirmation that I’m not going crazy. Everything really does look the same now. Cars, restaurants, hardware, movies…it was all blending together.
But as usual, my nerd brain can’t just leave things alone. I need to know how, and why, this was happening.
The Logo Test
Before I dig into that, let’s do a quick exercise so you can see what I mean with no uncertainty. I’ve worked in marketing most of my career, and something I always thought the best brands did was make themselves identifiable even if you remove the name. Look at the example below where I’ve created a picture of a vehicle with no logos.
What type of car is this?
If you guessed Jeep Wrangler, you’re right. Now, let’s try a building. I changed the name on this one, because modern AI is just too fun not to play with.
You probably guessed a White Castle, which thankfully isn’t called Steve’s Burgers, because Harold and Kumar Go To Steve’s Burgers has way less of a ring to it.
These are brands that haven’t abandoned bright colors and bold design. But that’s not the norm. Let’s try two more just to make the juxtaposition clear.
What type of car is this?
Depending on what you drive, you may have guessed a Honda CR-V, or a Nissan Rogue, or a Hyundai Tucson. It’s a Toyota RAV4. The thing is, if you got it right, it’s less likely because of its distinguishing features like the Wrangler, and more likely you took a guess on an SUV. My wife, for example, looked at this image and confidently stated, “That’s a Subaru,” because people in her family own Subarus.
Now let’s identify a building.
Based on my intro, you might have guessed correctly it’s a McDonald’s, but it just as easily could be a Taco Bell. Or a Wendy’s. Or a bank branch, an urgent care, or the dentist’s office I compared it to earlier. Take the sign off, and it’s just a building. And it’s certainly a far cry from this:
Anyway, you get the point. And I promise this (mostly) isn’t an article of me shaking my fist at the clouds longing for my childhood. Instead, let’s confirm this is real, and take a look at how this happened.
It’s Not Just Me (and It’s Not an Accident)
I promised intellectual honesty, so first things first. Is this real, or am I just an elder millennial yelling at a McDonald’s?
Turns out, it’s not just me. In 2020, data scientists at the UK’s Science Museum Group analyzed more than 7,000 photos of everyday objects in their collection, everything from telephones and clocks to cameras, lamps, and household appliances, some dating back to the 1800s. What they found was that over time, the objects got grayer and more square. To be fair, they credit part of that to the shift from wood to plastic, which has some logic to it, but also is sort of the point. Things went from warm, unique, and interesting to gray squares.
The parking lot anecdote checks out too. Every year, paint supplier Axalta publishes a report on the colors of new cars sold worldwide. In its 2025 report, white led at 29%, followed by black at 23%, gray at 22%, and silver at 7%. That’s roughly 4 out of every 5 new cars in a shade of meh.
I won’t deny that nostalgia plays a role here. I miss the stained glass lamps at Pizza Hut that barely gave off any light, and Taco Bell interiors that looked like a neon marker pack threw up. But the data is the data, and the data says we’re turning into Pleasantville.
So how did we get here? Having worked in marketing for nearly 20 years, I have a good lineup of suspects. And it happens to match the title of this article. Wow, what a coincidence!
Suspect #1: Market Research
I love the colleagues I’ve worked with who do market research because their function serves an important role in shaping branding and product. It’s genuinely useful for figuring out what people need. But at the same time, when you ask a room full of people what they like, oftentimes you don’t learn what anyone loves. You learn what nobody hates. You end up with the least disagreeable idea.
Show a focus group a building with a red roof, a giant playground, and stools shaped like cheeseburgers, and someone will say it feels dated. Someone else will say their brother is a lawyer, and that playground is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Show them a clean, neutral, modern building, and nobody says much of anything. It looks like the house they always wanted. In a focus group, “nobody said much of anything” followed by some affirming head nods is a win.
There’s a famous quote attributed to Henry Ford (there’s debate over whether he ever actually said it), “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The point of the quote is that people don’t always know what they want, and of course, he filled the United States with cars, not horses. Research is great at telling you what’s acceptable. It’s not always great at telling you what’s memorable.
Suspect #2: Spreadsheets
Fast food was built on predictability. A Big Mac in Ohio should taste like a Big Mac in Nebraska or Oregon. There are entire books and movies praising the strategy of standardization.
But predictability doesn’t stop at the menu. A standardized beige box makes it so a McDonald’s in Ohio looks exactly like a McDonald’s in Nebraska or Oregon, too. And once you have a uniform design, and uniform materials, it’s almost certainly cheaper to build, faster to get approved, and easier to maintain across thousands of locations.
Every one of those savings, including time and efficiency, shows up as a nice green number in a spreadsheet. The hidden cost, at the risk of invoking nostalgia again, is that you no longer say, “Have you been to the McDonald’s in Perrysburg? It has the best playground and a crazy plastic statue of the characters out front.” And it’s hard to put a number on that.
Suspect #3: Playing It Safe
When a decision passes through enough meetings, it drifts toward whatever offends the fewest people. It’s like the focus group conundrum, but now the audience includes your boss, and the stakes are your job. Bold is risky and polarizing. What marketing manager wants to stake their reputation and die on the hill of bold, when standardization doesn’t offend anyone? Beige never got anyone fired.
A friend of mine, Jeff Charney, served as the Chief Marketing Officer at QVC, Aflac, and Progressive, where I worked under him. Unlike most insurance executives, he wore jeans and a hoodie to work each day, sported a shaved head and radical glasses, and ran a marketing department aimed at disruption, not playing it safe. He rewarded risk-taking and creativity, and he’d regularly pitch bold ideas internally that had only a small chance of approval. Sometimes they landed. When they didn’t, the fallback was still a lot bolder than where the conversation would have started otherwise. He had a phrase for it:
“You need to drive the Mack Truck through their brain to get the Volkswagen through.”
It’s not a coincidence that Charney’s moves, which could be seen as risky in a company with a reliable spokesperson, helped Progressive see consistent growth in prospects and customers under his tenure. A few of Charney’s plays include:
- Expanding the cast alongside Flo in the Superstore campaign
- Bringing new campaigns like Dr. Rick “turning into your parents”
- Making himself heavily available for media and speaking opportunities to reach more audiences
- Spending an outsized amount of time working on internal communications, with the belief that Progressive didn’t have 40,000 employees, it had 40,000 marketers
The point here isn’t just to glaze Jeff, but rather to note that he took a job at a company where playing it safe wasn’t just an option, it was likely the path of least resistance, and he went the other way anyway. The awards back that up. Charney was named Adweek’s Marketer of the Year, Ad Age’s A-List Brand CMO of the Year, and one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People.
But Jeff Charneys are a rarity these days, in a world where CMOs are increasingly analytical, focused on saving money, and looking for the least disagreeable idea.
I said I’d be objective, so I’ll get off my soapbox and deliver a dose of honesty. None of this is crazy.
The old buildings were expensive to maintain. The playgrounds were an insurance line item. Kiosks speed up orders and cut down on mistakes. Simpler menus make the kitchen faster and make for a more efficient supply chain. A cleaner logo looks better on a phone screen. And all of it tested fine with the focus group.
That’s the part that’s hard for me to reconcile, because there is no villain. Nobody set out to make the world drab. They set out to save money, reduce risk, and make things easier to scale. The drabness is just what happens when you add up thousands of reasonable decisions that all optimize for the same things. Just a spreadsheet, a focus group, and a lot of smart people trying not to get yelled at. Jeff was the exception, and he got away with it because his results delivered. Most people would rather keep their jobs and avoid the risk altogether.
And once you see how it happened at McDonald’s, you start seeing the same playbook everywhere else.
It’s Not Just Restaurants
Remember at the beginning, when I said the movies, TV, and music thing was “just a feeling”? It turns out the same three suspects have been busy there too, but I’ll lay down my sword on one of these.
Movies and TV. A sequel is the cinematic version of the beige box. The audience is pre-tested, the brand is already built, and the risk is lower. So studios make more of them. And with the price of a major movie, film execs mirror the risk-averse marketers, taking the path of least resistance. In recent years, the top of the box office has been dominated by sequels, remakes, and franchise installments, while original stories have become the exception. Let’s compare two of my favorite movie years growing up, 1994 and 1996, with the two most recent complete years, 2024 and 2025.
Ten movies from my childhood, ten from the last two years. In 1994 and 1996, of those ten, five were original stories and zero were sequels. In 2024 and 2025 there were zero originals, six sequels, plus a remake, a reboot, a Broadway adaptation, and a movie based on a video game about stacking blocks.
To be fair to the 90s, it wasn’t all original either. The Nutty Professor was a remake, and Forrest Gump was a book first. But a sequel cracking the top five used to be the exception. Now an original story cracking it is.
And yes, I’m part of the problem. I’m the guy who just paid to watch a seven-year-old Avengers movie for three minutes of sequel footage. I’d do it again.
I won’t spend as much time on TV, because I already touched on it in the intro. The latest version of NCIS, constant spinoffs like Young Sheldon or Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, and a barrage of hospital dramas that all blur together are sufficient evidence.
Music. There are some data points to retrofit my perspective here, but I’m going to concede defeat. First, sampling old tracks has been a staple in music for decades. As have cover tracks. The final dance at my wedding was “I Swear” by All-4-One, which was a remake of a John Michael Montgomery song by the same name. They did a collab of the song together, by the way, which is an absolute banger.
I also have to note that some of the top artists in the world are pushing the bounds of creativity, with Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Beyoncé selling out stadiums worldwide with albums crossing multiple genres. Score one for the modern music industry.
Homes. If you’ve walked through a house for sale in the last decade, you’ve probably felt this one…gray vinyl floors, white walls, white cabinets, a brushed nickel faucet. Real estate agents will tell you to paint everything neutral before you list, so buyers can “picture themselves living there.” That’s market research applied to your living room. Your house gets more appealing to everyone by having less personality.
I’m guilty of this one too, having recently painted multiple rooms in my house white and gray. But my bedroom rocks, it’s blue with a deep teal accent wall behind the bed.
And now, AI. There’s probably a deep conversation here that deserves its own 3,000+ word article. At its core, an AI model is fed training data, and when it writes or produces images, it’s pulling things together in a specific way. For expert prompters, a result can be meaningfully different. For the average person, asking “give me an image of a cat” or “help me write this legal brief,” the results start to feel the same. I’ve noticed that in my own experience, AI falls back on certain literary devices and techniques when I use it with writing, so its best purpose here is as a research assistant, and an editor, with some cursory writing skills. But, as people flood the internet with what is often called “AI slop,” a new form of beige is entering the equation.
One thing I had to resolve before closing out was why I give music a pass for covers and samples while dinging movies and TV for sequels and remakes. After chewing on it for a while, I think the difference is whether anyone’s actually changing anything. All-4-One turned a country ballad into an R&B slow jam. A rap song sampling a 70s track is something completely different. And honestly, even the 90s movie remakes did that. The Nutty Professor turned a Jerry Lewis movie into an Eddie Murphy movie. Today’s remakes are mostly studios re-releasing their own movies with better CGI. Disney’s live-action remakes are effectively the same movies, re-shot.
One makes something different. The other makes more of the same.
The Ghosts of Pizza Hut
If this were only a matter of taste, I’d chalk it up as me being a grumpy old man and move on. But there’s a decent argument that the beigeification of society isn’t just boring. It might be bad business.
The logo test I made you take earlier isn’t just a party trick. Marketing researchers actually study it. At the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia, Jenni Romaniuk has spent years researching what she calls “distinctive brand assets.” Those are the colors, shapes, characters, and fonts that make you think of a brand without ever seeing its name. Her argument, in a nutshell, is that those assets do real work every time you see them, and a brand that strips them out may be throwing away decades of recognition it can’t easily buy back. Here’s another example of a company that has had a clear understanding of that brand value for decades.
Even though the screen says “Capybara,” your brain thinks “Coca-Cola.” Its colors, font, and even the shape of its bottle pass the logo test. The exact opposite of a beige box.
But my favorite example might be Pizza Hut.
There’s an entire corner of the internet devoted to buildings that used to be Pizza Huts but now house some other business. The sloping, hat-shaped roof is unmistakable. A few of my favorites are below. An urgent care, a church, and even a Domino’s now occupy what was clearly once the home of The Hut.
It passes the logo test, no logo, no company, and no pan style pizza. Even when a new company occupies the building, nobody out-pizzas the Hut. Nobody.
Now think about the beige McDonald’s from my road trip. Someday it might close, they’ll take the sign down, and another business will move in.
And nobody will ever know it was there. No kid will point at it from the back seat. Nobody will start a Reddit thread about it. It will just be another beige box, in a parking lot full of gray SUVs, in a world that worked very hard to make sure nothing stood out. It’s as if the whole country hired the same interior designer, and their favorite color is oatmeal.
And that bums me out. Because 3,600 words later, I know it’s really happening, I have a pretty good idea why, and best I can tell, it’s going to keep happening. Nobody is going to rebuild the red roofs. The playgrounds aren’t coming back. My kids won’t miss the cheeseburger stools, because they never sat on them.
And to be honest, I’ve fallen into the trap myself. For the record, my favorite color is orange. Which makes it a little embarrassing that when I started this blog, the headers were beige, made with AI, playing it safe like everyone else.
The new headers are AI too. The difference is that this time, I told it what I wanted instead of taking what it gave me. Orange…loud orange. Black ink, a little gold, and a black Lab who shows up in every header, completely unbothered by whatever’s happening around him.
It’s my way of putting a little dent in the universe. I’m writing long form articles in a world that’s gone to short form video, with a big bold header, telling that kid who wanted to grow up and be a video game tips giver to do what makes him feel whole.
I know a blog header isn’t going to bring back the Pizza Hut lamps. But it’s still fun to have a little hope, and drop a little orange, in a sea of beige.
Cover the logo. You’ll know it’s me.
This article was originally published on my substack, Expanding Curiosity. If it lands with you, it would mean a lot if you head there and subscribe to get future articles.