According to the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, first put forward by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in the mid-1990s, no two countries possessing at least one branch of McDonald’s have ever gone to war with each other. So the prospects for global peace must have diminished alarmingly this month when the Illinois-based fast-food chain and de facto world government announced it was pulling out entirely from three unnamed countries in the Middle East and Latin America.
For McDonald’s — if not for the corporation’s multifarious opponents — the news was much worse: it is closing a total of 175 outlets in 10 countries, too, and reducing its staff by 600. Among those restaurants to go will be at least 12 in South Africa, the corporation announced this week.
There are, of course, about 30 000 McDonald’s worldwide, so 175 is a mere drop of grease in the deep-fat fryer. But for years now, one of life’s certainties has been the opening of hundreds more outlets annually, often far more than 1000 a year, with the number reaching a record 2000 in 1996. By the end of 2002 only 600 new restaurants will have opened.
Things have arguably never been so bad for McDonald’s. You might have noticed something amiss if you had recently driven through the Midwestern United States town of Evansville, Indiana, where the golden arches now tower over an establishment called McDonald’s With the Diner Inside.
As well as a counter serving the usual burgers and fries, the outlet includes a full-service diner, where customers attended by waitresses can choose from more than 100 menu items, while imagining Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s and an advocate of ironclad standardisation from store to store, spinning in his grave.
Or maybe you would have been annoyed to be standing in a queue three years ago while McDonald’s trailed its ”Made for You” service, offering personalised burgers in another assault on Kroc’s philosophy. You would certainly have noticed something was wrong in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on November 20 when a man walked into a McDonald’s near a US Air Force base and torched it. Or in Jouineh, in Lebanon, two months ago, when another branch was the target of a violent attack.
Failing to capture changing public tastes in its homeland, retrenching abroad and, furthermore, damaged in Europe and Asia by the legacy of mad cow disease, the corporation announced a profit shortfall warning this month, and earnings have declined for seven of the past eight quarters.
”These actions are the right things to do for McDonald’s shareholders, the brand and our business,” CEO Jack Greenberg said, explaining the restaurant closures.
”I see this as another case of imperial overreach,” says Eric Schlosser, author of the surprise bestseller Fast Food Nation, a stomach-churning and meticulously researched investigation of the industry’s farming, food preparation and employment practices. ”They got too big, too fast and, like the British empire, their huge increase in size abroad really cloaked fundamental weaknesses.”
Desperate to keep impressing shareholders with upbeat, expansionist news, Schlosser argues, the chain has mushroomed frenetically abroad while sales in its existing restaurants — the key test of any food outlet’s real strength — seem to be reaching a plateau. In 2000, for the first time ever, the US fast-food industry gained, in net terms, no new customers at all.
”They’re at the ruthless whim of quarterly profit statements for Wall Street,” says Schlosser. ”It’s change or die.”
In the late 1990s executives often seemed genuinely baffled that anyone seriously thought they could challenge the company’s overarching dominance of the market.
But Schlosser’s revelation that McDonald’s was using beef tallow to make French fries in some parts of the world precipitated a major legal battle, when Hitesh Shah, a West Coast computer programmer whose Jainist religion forbade beef, found himself leading hundreds of Hindu McDonald’s customers in a class-action lawsuit alleging that the firm had deceived them, imperilling their peace of mind and even their souls.
Earlier this year McDonald’s finally agreed to pay $10-million to ”Hindu, vegetarian and other groups whose charitable and educational activities are closely linked to the concerns of these consumers”. Last week eight children began new proceedings in New York alleging that McDonald’s fast food made them obese — the first such case to make it to court. More are on the way.
More serious than the lawsuits, more enduring than the mad cow crises and perhaps even more threatening than the rising tide of anti-US and anti-globalisation feeling around the world, there is a deeper –and enormously ironic — problem with McDonald’s.
Because the all-American fast-food chain, the symbol of US-driven trade liberalisation and peace through commerce is, in certain key ways, a bizarrely un-American phenomenon.
In a culture that champions entrepreneurialism, the corporation is now a vast, unwieldy bureaucracy; in a culture that thrives on innovation, it has been selling the fast-food treat of the American working classes of the Dwight D Eisenhower era for decades since Eisenhower. And in an economy where unlimited choice — or at least the appearance of choice — is the main selling point of every food store, deli or coffee shop, McDonald’s has, from the beginning, adhered to the alternative philosophy of ”You’ll Eat What You’re Given”.
‘People are bored with the food and a little afraid of it now, too, and there are just lots of competing ways of having a quick meal,” says Barbara Haber, a historian of US food and curator of books at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
”The rigid consistency — knowing that wherever you were, you could expect the same meal — used to be a plus. But now there’s a new kind of chain, emphasising bread and baked goods.”
Meanwhile, McDonald’s attempts to refresh and adjust its menus — with healthier cooking oils, new product offerings and experiments such as McDonald’s With The Diner Inside — may be missing the point.
That point is nostalgia, says Daphne Derven, curator of food at the American Centre for Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa, California. And nostalgia, she stresses, ”varies with the generations”. For how much longer will Americans, let alone non-Americans, continue to find comfort in the fare of the Eisenhower era?
Nowhere, perhaps, is McDonald’s confused response to that problem more evident than at its worldwide flagship, its enormous new restaurant on 42nd Street near Times Square in New York. The interior is a cacophony of styles — the exposed brick of an upscale coffee house, banks of plasma screens showing extracts from children’s movies, and long industrial corridors of grey-painted metal held together with rivets.
Supersize Big Mac meals jostle for attention with strawberry and banana fruit juices and muffins arranged as if in a local bakery, though the sweet smell of frying oil still dominates. Handwritten signs advertising deals on mini-doughnuts turn out — only on very close inspection — not to be handwritten at all.
”I’m sick of that and I’m sick of that,” one middle-aged woman in line says, pointing as she counts off the menu items to her companion. ”I’m sick of that. I’m sick of that,” she goes on, in words to make any McDonald’s focus-group organiser pack up and go home.
”I’m sick of everything!” she says finally and not unhappily, as if a fundamental truth has been revealed. Then the man in front of her picks up his bag of food and she moves to the front of the queue and places her order. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002