The fiance and I wound up spending our lunch hour (and then some) at the Mall of America today. The mission: buying my suit for the wedding. To make a long story short, our Brooks Brothers visit was hellishly non-productive. After 45 minutes of trying on suits seemingly at random, we repaired to one of the 62 food courts, where a series of choices between “bad” and “worse” brought us to the old-school lunch counter of Johnny Rockets.

Our food wasn’t terrible (my grilled cheese was decent, but that sets a fairly low bar for food-service competence, I suppose), but we both left feeling strangely depressed. The problem with Johnny Rockets is that it aggressively touts all the hallmarks of a fun, old-fashioned place to work: cutesy white uniforms with little hats, 1950s-style graphic design, miniature jukeboxes, etc. etc. At the same time, all the employees wear a hollow stare best evoked by Radiohead lyrics or the latter-day art of Goya.

I don’t blame the employees — the work and pay is undoubtedly terrible, and many of them appear to be middle-aged immigrants looking for a first step up the ladder. But I do blame the franchise for creating the visuals of an old-fashioned diner atmosphere and then creating conditions that lead to utterly miserable workers.

Ah, well. We’d been prepared for the experience. Becca had such a terrifically bad experience at the Johnny Rockets in Boston’s Logan airport that she wrote an essay about it.