My son, not yet four, was invited to a party at McDonalds recently.
Now McDonalds as a brand for me sits about as low as you can go. Rainforest destruction? Yep. Extremely unhealthy food? Oh yes. General environmental havoc? Of course. Exploitative working conditions? Goes without saying. Unethical advertising. Yup.
So why would someone actually go there?
Firstly, the food apparently tastes quite good (I say apparently because, besides a milkshake once, I feel fortunate enough never to have tried it). The old joke about McDonald’s faxing their burgers to all their branches from head office isn’t so far from the truth. Almost all their food is prepared elsewhere, and arrives frozen. But the good thing about starting with nothing is that it’s easy to add flavourants to the food, and make them taste good. There’re enough chemicals around to titilate the tongue.
Next of course is marketing. McDonalds is your trusted friend (a term they never used in actual markting, but a theme that pervaded many of their campaigns). Who can’t like the friendly clown Ronald McDonald. He’s bombarded at kids from every angle, and since so many kids watch TV, they’re subconsciously attracted to him from a young age. Young children also can’t tell the difference between advertising and reality, which makes exposing young children to any TV with advertising particularly insiduous.
Related to this are the promotions, and the setting. McDonalds usually have play areas for kids, toys, or are offering toy promotions. These toy promotions work really well. In the well-known Teenie Weenie Beanie promotion in the US, sales increased from an average of $10 000 a week to $100 000 a week for the course of the promotion.
If you get down to it, the main reason’s you’d eat there would be ignorance, or a sense of wilful self-destruction.
Parents taking their parents there can be as loving or caring as anyone else. Perhaps they really don’t know. However, much of the ignorance is wilful. People, when confronted with a truth they don’t want to hear, will often deny it. Mugabe doesn’t want to hear that his policies have been disastrous, he prefers to blame it on external enemies, and those who advise him soon learn the lesson – good news only.
To be told that a place where you’ve eaten so many times, where you’ve had so many good times, where you’ve even met Ronald McDonald as a kid, is really no good, is not an easy lesson to assimilate. It doesn’t help to stand screeching from the rooftops, shouting that McDonald’s is the spawn of Satan. Firstly, there are many equally bad, or worse, franchises. McDonalds gets more attention because it’s bigger. And that extra attention means that it’s actually better than some of the smaller offenders. But not being the worst doesn’t mean it’s any good.
Secondly, anger as a persuasive technique is almost useless. It just makes you look irrational, emotional, a bully, and the walls go up.
The only real way, I believe, is to pass on the same message repeatedly, in as positive a way as possible. Sometimes that may not be enough, and it may take personal experience – waking up and realising how sick you feel the day after eating the food. Or a trip to a rainforest that’s now a cattle farm. Or the site of a waste dump covered in McDonalds garbage.
My own journey has been almost entirely personal. I ate junk food for the first 25 years or so of my life (we didn’t have McDonalds in South Africa for almost all of that time, which is the only reason I managed to avoid it). I ate junk until I realised what it had done to me, and what it was doing to others.
So how did McDonalds get to be as destructive as it is?
A big reason is the lack of state control. The US has led the way in shrinking the influence of government, and letting the vacuum be filled by corporations. Democratic governments, at least in principle, look out for their citizens. Corporations, by design, look out for the financial interests of their shareholders.
In the US, corporations lobbied for taxes to be reduced. One of the consequences was less funding for schools. Less funding for the military was of course vehemently opposed by the corporations involved – no one was looking out for the schools. So who filled the gap? Corporations of course.
Many schools in the US became nothing more than giant billboards for this or that corporation, children being subjected to crass advertising in order to raise funds for their own education.
And often the corporations’ influence was more than just passive. Advertising contracts were tied to sales volumes, so the schools needed to achieve certain levels of junk food sales in order to earn certain levels of revenue. You had the perverse situation of school heads being told by their education boards that they needed to sell more Cokes to their students in order to raise money to pay for school necessities. Poor nutrition and learning are diametrically opposed, and Coke is about as harmful as you can legally get. But here were school heads forced to make a choice between two evils.
And all this has come about because of the influence of giant corporations, designed to earn their shareholders money, and to trick their customers into wanting to support them.
In the US, attempts to prohibit advertising aimed at children failed after large counter campaigns by food chains, and media companies. After all, the bottom line of both would be affected. And by structure they’re designed to maximise profit, and anything that gets in the way must be circumvented.
Luckily, things are improving. The relentless march of McDonalds the corporation is slowing, and healthier, less destructive alternatives are appearing. McDonalds itself is changing. South Africa has proposed some progressive legislation, mandating more comprehensive nutritional information, and prohibiting any advertising of certain defined junk foods to children under 16, including offering of toys or other inducements.
We’re that much closer to a healthier world.
So is my son going to the party? Luckily he’s doing something else that day. 🙂
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Glad to hear you have also never eaten MacD’s. I’ve only tried their watered down ice cream and watered down coke. Both are way too watered down for my liking.
The most interesting thing you can do in a McDonalds is try asking for water with your McMeal, instead of the usual Coke/Pepsi offering. The minimum wage worker often takes the form of a deer in headlights as she scrambles around looking for the “water” drawer. Things like that tickle me. They also disturb me. It makes you realize how many people *don’t* ask for water with their meal instead of machine-flavoured sugar water. In most cases, especially when it’s busy, they will just pour you a coke and place it on your tray. Sad.
Unfortunately I have eaten McDonald’s in the past. I will probably eat it again sometime in the future. Though my defense is that the last few times in recent years has been because there was almost no alternative in the area, and speed was a necessity. Living in the UK, their presence is overpowering and resultantly, often the only option when you’re on your way somewhere.
Good news though. My experience over here in Edinburgh, and throughout the UK, is that South Africa (though still punting the same corporations… KFC, McDonalds) do a much better job than any of the chains over here. You feel so much more like cattle over here, and the experience inside the cheap plastic interiors of the chain stores leaves you feeling a helluvalot dirtier than I’ve ever felt in SA chains.
Long comment.
Their marketing is based on pushing convenience and lifestyle aspects. Particularly non-memorable is a recent TV commercial where mom watches and “relaxes” behind the window as her kid plays in the PlayPen.
With our lifestyles confined (people don’t have the space to host parties, and gardens are becoming a true luxury), the real problem is not caused by these franchises, but by our willingness to “buy into” the convenience. It’s usually the cheapest solution. One just has to make some effort and be creative and try and steer yourself and your kids away from this.
Have you seen the 2003 documentary “The Corporation”?
It’s is very much related to your post in the way that corporations are becoming more powerful than nation states but without having much moral accountability and not having people’s best interest at heart. By design a corporation is meant to make money, which is often at loggerheads with the environment and peoples health and freedoms.
Two links for you to check out:
http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=2
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
p.s good post!
Thanks for your information. It will be good to know for me and my family.