McDonald’s seems to be, as I see it, a weird crazy bad–taste joke. (No pun intended.
) I mean, you have get in a waiting line in order to waste more than you should need to at some completely standardized, odd–tasting meal. Then you sit at an uncomfortable chair, listening to unsettlingly fast–paced music that gets you anxious as you eat your questionable looking food as fast as you possibly can. And when you’re finished, instead of being able to just leave the tray in the table and getting out, you have to clean it and dump cardbox paper and plastic sachets which could have been recycled instead; and if you don’t, people will stare at you and you’ll feel guilty for not leaving the seat clean for the next customer.
In other words, it’s expensive, it tastes ridiculous and it sucks.
But wait, there’s more!
Lets look closer into McDonald’s now, shall we?
What about it’s jobs. They don’t offer people any perspective, do they? It’s not like you start working there expecting to build a beautiful career out of it. In fact, if you ever work at McDonald’s, it’s because you desperately need some bucks. That drives people of generally lower classes to those jobs, which creates a whole stigma around it. Moreover, it seems that McDonald’s, knowing their jobs suck and are one of those “the last resource” things, exploit the poor people. What I’m trying to get through here is that they brainwash their workers and, think about it, their customers too.
Everything around McDonald’s seems to be one big ritual. There are plethora of sociology books about it (a very good one, in Portuguese, is O Nome da Marca, an in–depth sociological study on branding which uses McDonald’s as a study case). You get in, you join the line, you wait. You say a couple of numbers. The person in the other side of the bar, with some tokens stickers in their worker card, will make you the very same questions they will ever make. You reply automatically. You move one step to the left, hand them the money, get the change, wait. You get your tray, walk, sit, eat as fast as a hungry salvage pig, you dump your trash and leave. And you, for some reason, should feel happy about it: the lack of variety in situations, in food, in ambient. Everything’s the same, everything’s monotone and looks too artificial to be really happy, it looks like plastic happiness, like a big lie you for no reason whatsoever decide to join.
One of the funniest things one can do at McDonald’s is try to break that ritual. It’s not really that hard. Try to say the magic words “coke, no ice” and see what face your interlocutor will make. “Can I have my sandwish open?” They don’t even know what that means. What about “hmm, I don’t know, what’s your favourite one?” Watch close as their lips run out of words, it’s hilarious.
The whole thing reminds me of what a Nike CEO said, a while ago: “we’re not a shoe company, we’re a marketing company.” Indeed, Nike’s production is administered by a separate company, all they do is branding. And you buy it. Why?
I wonder how come we became a society of image. Everything’s so artificial. Some communist friends of mine always argue that it’s all a lie we have been told since our earliest childhood—that propaganda engraves in your mind that “McDonald’s = happiness” before you can dispute that, kind of like Kipling’s Law of the Jungle in the Book of the Jungle.
I don’t think so. Or rather, I agree, it is a big fat lie (again, no pun intended) that McDonald’s equals anything near “happiness.” But I don’t think we’ve been brainwashed by the bourgeois media. No, no… I don’t think any single soul on Earth actually believes McDonald’s to equal happiness. I think people have it pretty clear that it’s a big lie—they just pretend they don’t know that. So the question takes one step further: what leads people to join something they know to be a lie?
What’s the image that turns a bureaucratic fast–food store into an island of happiness? What’s so happy about McDonald’s?
I don’t usually go there. To me it’s a waste of money on unbalanced nutrition and stress. It can be funny (like I said, it’s funny to break the ritual with the attendants, and it’s also awesome to watch how people behave as predicted inside a McDonald’s, and how you can draw everyone’s attention by doing anything slightly different from the protocol).
But the damn thing is one great subject for questionings and research. Why do people buy it, really? There are so many better things out there…