Everything and more you want to know about McDonalds:
By now, partially because McDonald's spend more than $600 million dollars every year on advertising and promotion, nearly everyone is familiar with the basic statistics of the world's largest fast food enterprise. With 9,500 restaurants in more than 45 countries, an advertising budget unmatched by any other single brand name, and more retail outlets than any other merchant in the world, McDonald's is so well known that in the United States, on the island of Guam and in Tokyo, children are as familiar with the Golden Arches, the international symbol of McDonalds, as they are with the face of Mickey Mouse.
So huge is the McDonald's empire that the company is the world's largest purchaser of beef; has sold more than 65 billion hamburgers and uses more than 300 million kilos of meat to make those hamburgers every year; purchases nearly 10% of the entire United States potato crop in order to make its chips; and has annual world wide sales in excess of $17 billion. And, as if that is not enough to impress us, the people at McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois are delighted to let us know that the amount of ketchup that has been used in McDonald's branches throughout the world is enough to fill the Mississippi River, and that if the number of chips sold every year were lined up one after the other they would form a straight line that went back and forth from the moon ten times.
If the United States has succeeded in conquering the world it has been neither by military might nor by democratic benevolence. It has been through the establishment of American fast food franchises such as McDonald's on every continent on the planet (including Antarctica, where Big Macs are regularly flown in to the Navy personnel stationed at the research station there). American hamburgers, fried chicken and pizzas are as in demand in Moscow and Istanbul as they are in New York, and American style chips and thick milkshakes have become a part of the diet of people in cities as diverse in character as Paris, Peking, Bucharest, Mexico City, Istanbul and London.
McDonald's image is more than just food, nearly every branch in the world associated with the same uniform sense of - organization, the recognizable trademark of the golden arches and a highly standardized appearance. American sociologist Gerald Samuels recently wrote that "the Golden Arches of McDonald's are every bit as famous as their hamburgers ... and these signify to potential customers that they can expect the same standard of food and service as they would find at any other McDonald's in the world". In addition to the well known arches, nearly all McDonald's branches feature a distinctive decor of polymer tile flooring, plastic chairs and tables and a soft finish to absorb the noise. The surfaces on the floors and tables are smooth and easy to clean, the furniture is generally attached to the floor and cannot be moved to suit either the size or convenience of the customer, and there are pictures of the various food offerings to help one make one's selection. To customers, such factors are critical for, in addition to knowing in advance that the cost, food and service will be uniform, they also feel comfortable be- cause they are familiar with the protocol and manner in which to order and pay for their food. In other words, there are no shocks or surprises waiting at McDonald's and customers delight in the fact that they can purchase reliable products in a context that is familiar and predictable. They are willing to sacrifice high quality food, novelty and pleasantries for the sake of low-cost reliability, certainty and convenience.
The Americans were the first to realize that there is nothing on this planet more convenient or predictable than a fast food chain restaurant. The rest of the world is catching up rapidly, however, for with few exceptions, one can enter a McDonald's in Peoria, Illinois, New York City, Peking or Paris and anticipate exactly the same greeting, precisely the same atmosphere and, with rare exceptions made for local tastes, the same food. All of which must make sense, because the United States now boasts 155,000 different fast food restaurants, 93% of which show annual profits in excess of 20% of their capital outlay.
Successful restaurants in this category also realize that another of their attractions is in their long hours of operation. Many stay open 24 hours a day and it is easy to dine at such places alone or with an entire family. Where such places exist in college towns in the United States, England and France, they often invite students to use their restaurant as an alternate place to study. All of which is not quite as altruistic as it seems, for especially in the middle of the night this policy increases the sales of chips and colas.
Two other factors also make themselves felt in every branch of McDonald's - one pays for one's meal before it is consumed and there is practically no interaction whatever between the diner and the restaurant personnel. If there is interaction that goes beyond the level of asking what one wants to order, it takes the form of artificial, primarily rhetorical questions such as "And how are you today?". McDonald's tells us that advance payment and minimal interaction with the staff encourages speed and efficiency. They are probably right, but they do not tell us that this distance between customer and staff also makes it far more psychologically difficult for dissatisfied customers to complain, to ask for their portions to be better cooked or to request their money back.
Since the McDonald brothers sold their first hamburger in 1948 the fast-food business has expanded to become a 160 billion dollar a year industry, a market that generates nearly twice the revenues of the American computer industry. The ultimate sign of the success of McDonald's is not, however, measured in cash value, but in that it has succeeded in introducing American foods and dining styles to cultures such as those of Japan, China and Eastern Europe, where the foodstuffs and specifically fast-food dining habits are completely alien to local traditions. For better of for worse, McDonald's has made American fast-food and fast-dining an international standard. As historian Howard Hillman observes, "thanks largely to the initiative of McDonald's, from Japan to Peru and from Hungary to Tel Aviv, hundreds of millions of people are now happily parting with their hard earned money to eat standardized, homogenized and mass-produced foods that represent the worst of American cooking".
As to long term dining habits, the simple truth is that because the billions of hamburgers turned out by such places as Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger Ranch and MacDavid's range in quality from the abysmally bad to the merely acceptable, with few rising above a level of mediocrity, most people will one day leave them behind and turn to far better food. While some fast food hamburgers, pizzas and chips can be fun to eat, only the most charitable of people would call them "good food". In America, for example, those who grew up on McDonald's hamburgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken are now part of the yuppie generation and are feasting on Japanese sushi, Spanish tapas, and French pate de foie gras. Social-psychologist James Asher of Cornell University feels that "although McDonald's may provide a meeting place for youth, a convenience for parents who want to eat out on a reasonable budget with their young children, and for those in search of a quick snack, many of those people will eventually graduate to places that specialize in French, American or Italian cuisine".
Not everyone is entirely charitable when it comes to questions of fast food. Noted gastronome Christian Millau, once referred to fast-food hamburgers as "the blight of the American palate" and cookbook author Julia Child insists that "they are fit only for culinary illiterates". No one, however, seems to detest McDonald's more than Mimi Sheraton, who, when she was food editor of the New York Times wrote that their food was "irredeemably horrible, with no saving graces whatever. It (the hamburger) is ground, kneaded and extruded by heavy machinery that compacts it so that the tex- ture is somewhat like that of a baloney sausage, and it becomes rubbery when cooked. Once cooked, the burger is insulated in a soggy bun, topped with pickle slices that seem recycled, or dehydrated onion flakes, or shredded lettuce that is more like wet confetti, and one or another of the disgusting sauces. The potatoes may be crisp but they have no taste. The shakes are like aerated Kaopectate". Several years later, in only a slightly more generous mood, Sheraton admitted that fast food hamburgers "have their place ... but then again, so do screaming babies and poisonous snakes."
In fairness to fast-food, however, one must note that 7% of all Americans eat at McDonald's every day; that more than 96% of all American consumers have eaten at McDonald's at least once and that 90% of those people have eaten there four or more times. These figures do not worry true gastronomes who remain convinced that no matter how many McDonald's open in Paris, New York, Tokyo or Tel Aviv there will always be superb cuisine and there will always be people to appreciate it. As for this critic - I have no problem whatever with McDonald's. After all, the vast majority of people who go there to dine have a set of expectations and McDonald's meets those expectations with flying colors. All of which is fair enough. The fact that I personally eat at McDonald's only when I have been dragged there by enthusiastic children or have no choice but to sample their fare and write about them should be nobody's problem but my own.