Quick Cuts

Would You Like Fries with Your Culture Wars?

by Nico Carbellano

Forty-seven million customers per day. Thirty-six thousand restaurants in 119 countries. One and a half million employees.

There are economies of scale, and then there's McDonald's.

The world's most familiar brand, its Golden Arches are a symbol more instantly recognizable than the Christian cross. But the behemoth has taken more than its share of hits in recent years: First there was Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, an anti-fast-food polemic that was promptly made into a movie starring such acting titans as Bruce Willis, Kris Kristofferson, and Avril Lavigne. Then Morgan Spurlock released Super-Size Me, a documentary that made eating at Mickey D's look like a singularly delicious form of slow-motion suicide. Not to mention a slew of lawsuits – and the storms of bad press that invariably accompanies them. (McDonald's did not respond to our requests for comment.)

But you don't get to be the number-one brand in the world by being a pushover. As Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's, said of his business rivals:

"If they were drowning to death, I would put a hose in their mouth."

Ray Kroc, the company's founder, who died in 1984, ruled the company with an iron fist – and his doctrine of centralized control of a global business persists to the present day. His mantra, QSC&V (which stands for quality, service, cleanliness, and value) is still the McDonald's watchword – though, according to journalist Konrad Yakabuski, a new element has also been added: a U, for uniformity. Customers – whether in Paris, Moscow, or Yorba Linda, California – can expect the same food, at the same speed, from people who say the same things.

But how to ensure such soothing uniformity? The Bible, of course.

The McDonald's Bible – as employees call its formidable operations and training manual — was first drafted in 1958, and was just 75 pages long; it's now 10 times that length, and weighs in at a super-sized four pounds. The book has even spawned its own institution of higher learning, a place devoted solely to divining and imparting its mysteries: the august Hamburger University, in Oak Brook, Illinois. If the McDonald's training manual is a sort of Bible, HU is its Vatican.

Anyone who wants to manage an American McDonald's franchise must attain their Bachelor's in Hamburgerology (a field scandalously overlooked by most Ivy League schools, but recognized as a sort of quasi-degree by the US government) before they can take the helm. While there, students are encouraged to wear company colors – say, a bright yellow tie emblazoned with the words "I'm Lovin' It," or a necklace made up of a tasteful string of twinkling golden arches – and to always remember to smile.

Since the training manual covers everything from the thickness of the pickle slices to the circumference of the cups to the width of the french fries (0.28 inches, and not a hundredth of an inch more or less), Hamburgerology is no mean science – particularly because McDonald's employs a crack squad of french-fry examiners (and pickle examiners, and so on) who go undercover into McDonald's outlets worldwide to make sure that all is as the corporation intended.

As Ray Kroc was fond of reminding his employees, "None of us is as good as all of us." (That slogan can still be found on staff bulletin boards across the United States, to caution employees against getting too uppity.) After all, this is the guy who barred women from becoming McDonald's employees until 1968 – but only on the condition that they be "kind of flat-chested," so as to keep from distracting the customers from the fries.

Perhaps that's why the company has always done everything in its power to keep its employees from unionizing: It's difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that degree of control in the face of organized labor. When employees do attempt to organize (a not-unheard-of occurrence, given the wages), McDonald's dispatches a "flying squad" of anti-union negotiators to the franchise in question. The squad gently steers their wayward flock back onto the path of virtue by reminding them of how lucky they are to be a part of the "McFamily."

Of course, employees do occasionally succeed in unionizing, as the did at one McDonald's, in St. Hubert, Quebec – but the location was promptly closed by corporate immediately thereafter.

But the company's labor practices are entirely in keeping with Ray Kroc's legacy. In 1972, Kroc gave one of the few political donations of his career: $250,000 to Nixon's reelection campaign. The reason: a piece of legislation called "the McDonald's bill," which would allow employers – particularly the booming fast-food industry – to pay their teenage employees 20% less than the federally mandated minimum wage. Which meant that the kids in the paper hats got $1.28 an hour, rather than the princely sum of $1.60 that minimum wagers made.

It makes sense, therefore, that Kroc habitually dismissed journalists who dared to call fast food an industry by saying,

"Look, it is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest."

This ethos has for the most part served McDonald's well – it does have a nice Darwinian ring to it. But the company's appetite for hand-to-hand combat also caused what was perhaps its greatest public-relations debacle ever: the McLibel case.

For four years, between 1986 and 1990, some rabble-rousers with London Greenpeace had been giving out inflammatory pamphlets about the House of Ronald; along the cover read the words "McDollars, McGreedy, McCancer, McMurder, McProfits, McGarbage." (That "Mc" prefix having apparently proved irresistible.) Its title: "What's Wrong with McDonald's? Everything they don't want you to know."

Inside, it accused McDonald's of "promoting Third World poverty, selling unhealthy food, exploiting workers and children, torturing animals, and destroying the Amazon rainforest," among a slew of other offenses.

Rather than ignoring the ragged five-member band of English whale-huggers, McDonald's decided to sue them for libel, on the grounds that all the allegations were false. Which was a big mistake, as it turned out: In his 800-page judgment, Justice Rodger Bell found that, while some of the pamphlet's claims were indeed false, many were true – McDonald's did "exploit" children through its advertising tactics, did serve dangerously unhealthy food, did pay workers unjustly low wages, did bust union activities worldwide, and did turn a blind eye to animal cruelty perpetrated by many of its suppliers.

A scathing judgment, by any measure – and not just because it eclipsed the McBible in length.