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Big Macs and Half-hearted History (I)
Yup, it's one of those more essay-like entries. In fact, it's two of them. Sorry, but this is one of the things that's been gyrating around my brain for the last few days. I hope you at least enjoy the ride.
On the trip home from DC we stopped in a McDonald's. This is a standard feature of car trips, since I will eat exactly two items on the entire McDonald's menu - sausage biscuits, no egg, and hash browns - and I usually don't get to a McDonald's early enough in the morning to have them, except when setting out for a long day's trek.
I tore off a section of my placemat labeled "Under the Arches." I have it here as I write this. It contains various factoids about the Big Mac. Let's see ....
- Thirty-nine couples, obviously starved for ideas and attention, decided to get married at McDonald's in 1995 and have a Big Mac-themed wedding. (I've never understood why people do weird things for their weddings - why deliberately ruin a memory you know you'll want to keep for a long time? But I digress.)
- The Economist uses the price of a Big Mac all over the world to chart purchasing power relative to various world currencies. (Of course the McDonald's placemat didn't use words like that, since they assume their average customer reads on a fifth-grade level.)
- Enough Big Macs have been sold to reach to the moon and back twice, to circle the earth thirty-five times and then some, et cetera. (Fourteen billion Big Macs had been sold in 1996 when this mat was printed. Fourteen. Billion. There's a question in The Straight Dope somewhere, which I am too lazy to look up, which computes that in terms of cattle slaughtered per year. It's a lot.)
All of this is very interesting stuff. But nowhere is the most interesting fact: That the Big Mac was a renegade sandwich, developed by a clever franchisee to boost sales at exactly the time when Ray Kroc was trying desperately to get his franchises to conform, to not deviate from the Standard Procedures in even so minor a way as the method of mopping the floors.
McDonald's is Orwellian. Kroc bought out most of his original franchisees, who tended to be entrepreneurial types, cronies of his from the land of salesmanship. They showed too much initiative. They deviated from the Master Plan. They didn't do it His Way.
And, to be fair, His Way undeniably works, in its fashion. Say what you will about McDonald's food, but you will get the same food at any McDonald's across the country. You will know what to expect. Which is an astonishing feat of quality control and standardization. It also makes for bland food, but people do not go to McDonald's to be surprised.
Kroc spent the middle years of McDonald's history - the portion after the initial rapid expansion - finding ways to rein in his franchisees. Some of them had been given contracts which couldn't be rescinded except via gross negligence. On the other hand, when the franchise had a good idea, like the Big Mac or the Filet O'Fish, the Egg McMuffin or (sigh) even Ronald McDonald, who disgusts me but has undeniably become a commercial icon, Kroc was smart enough to accept it and use it. (He had to. All the new products he himself proposed were horrendous failures, and the McDonald's main office didn't have a much better track record. It's telling that ever since the crackdown on franchisees, the company has had trouble coming up with new products that succeed. Aside from the Quarter Pounder in 1972, the only other real winner among the new ideas has been Chicken McNuggets.)
I got all of this stuff from a book called McDonald's: Behind the Arches (not to be confused with "Under the Arches") by John Love. I actually had more respect for McDonald's after reading this book, nasty corporate behavior and all. I mean, how can you not be impressed with the knowledge that the Russet potato was never a big crop in this country until McDonald's? They tried to make better fries, and realized that to get anything approaching standardization, they were going to have to coerce every link in the supply chain to do it Their Way - not just the potato sellers but the people who grew them, shipped them, and stored them. McDonald's has changed the way beef is sold in this country, the way appliances for the restaurant industry are built, and even the way restaurants are air-conditioned.
What's all this got to do with half-hearted history? The next entry will tell all.
© Columbine
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