How the Smartphone Loosed Applebee’s Dread Grip Over the American Road Trip

I am a technology skeptic. Sometimes I think we really would have been better off if we had forgotten all about leaving the ocean, and had instead remained cheerful filter feeders at the bottom of a tropical sea.

But I’ll admit to this: smartphones have made the American road trip a much more delicious experience. The smartphone may also be at least partially responsible for the slow and unseemly death of the casual dining chains that used to sprout up beside American highway exits like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

Let me explain.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, people would drive across the entire goddamned country without smartphones. When I was a child, my parents and grandparents kept large spiral-bound AAA guides to American roads in the trunk of the car, which inevitably grew yellow and crackly in the heat of summer. We dreaded missing a road sign or an exit. I had nothing but taste-bud-destroying Warheads candy and half a dozen print books about dinosaurs devouring each other for entertainment. Sometimes, out the window, one might see a horse. It was a dark time.