A global icon of fast food
The global icon and synonym for fast food, McDonald's, at the end of last year left is the market of Bosnia and Herzegovina. After Russia and Belarus, from which McDonald's withdrew due to known geopolitical reasons, the withdrawal here was conditioned by the violation of some of the rights and obligations of the franchise agreement. Ever since the fifties of the last century when it acquired its modern corporate form, McDonald's will quickly become an icon of the new global culinary style of fast food, intense flavors and debatable quality, a combination of almost perfect organizational management in the background and satisfied users. The first pairings with full-fat French fries and the iconic Big Mac, industrial ice cream and voluminous drinks - also shown in Hollywood films - further strengthened the brand from below, making it a planetary symbol of easy western life. Although nutritionally questionable and often harmful, at least from a public health perspective, McDonald's has an unusual transparency.
Tastes pleasing to the palate are one thing, possible consequences are another, but the nutrients are perfectly enumerated and listed on each menu. So, during consumption, we consciously agree to the intake of large amounts of salt, fat, carbohydrates and other components that are pleasant to the palate. Western life, as this culinary form shows, is still a matter of consent, and not a general compulsion to the offered menu, or more broadly, a lifestyle.
Big Mac politics
When the first McDonald's opened in Russia in 1990, the sea of people who patiently waited their turn were depicted in political analysis as those who wanted their share of the bite and intense taste of Western life. The opening of McDonald's restaurants, of which today about 90% are in the form of franchises, marked a new wave of democracy in Russia, as well as in other transitional societies, and the culinary and symbolic victory of a more liberal and contemporary lifestyle. The Big Mac has become a reference measure and economic indicator of the purchasing power of various world currencies. Namely, this famous dessert is found in various countries and as a product shows the relative purchasing power and value of individual currencies, and the famous The Economist has used it as a reference value since 1986. While in the more developed world the average worker works ten minutes and earns enough money to buy a Big Mac, in Third World countries, quite predictably, it takes much longer to buy the same. In the 1999s, another understanding emerged, let's call it pacifist and easy to remember, that countries that sell Big Macs cannot go to war. This idea of New York Times foreign policy journalist Thomas Friedman proved to be wrong already in XNUMX, when Serbia was exposed to NATO intervention, and India and Pakistan clashed in the Kargil wars. It turned out, unfortunately, that Big Mac is not a guarantee of peace between countries, even though McDonald's was present in the mentioned countries.
The flip side of globalization
Even McDonald's was not immune to the various inhumanities that arose from the corporate way of management. In recent years, workers have often protested demanding an increase in the minimum hourly wage, and in the United States they have become associated with the "Fight for $15" movement. A constant dialectic between owners and workers is expected in modern capitalist societies, but the aforementioned protests showed that the fast food industry mainly recruits people from deprived contexts, migrant origins, poor or no education and related class status. The management has improved the highly specialized division of labor for such categories, in which each individual is trained for a small and precisely defined segment of the work process, and the possibility of error is reduced, and productivity is increased. Although such a division of labor enabled the mass production of everything that McDonald's is recognizable by and that the world enjoys, there remains an eternal dilemma and a view of the people on the other side of the cash register and the kitchen, who enable us to enjoy the hedonism of food and other things. However, the aforementioned reverse of capitalism is present to a greater or lesser extent in all service-type industries.
Democratic carrot and stick
Just as complex agreements on franchises or franchising are the fruit of commercial contractual practice, so too are integrating relations with the international community the fruit of the need for cooperation in a globalized world. On the one hand, there are rules of the game dictated by the international side, and on the other hand, local actors who freely accept them and put them into action. Blatant non-compliance with the rules of the accepted game leads to the expected sanctions, which, especially in the highly disciplined corporate world, are immediate. The case of McDonald's, which fell with a whisper, showed exactly how sanctions follow as soon as it is established that the rules of the game have been compromised and that the mutually agreed upon rights and obligations have not been respected. There is something beautiful, a kind of aesthetic element, in Western functionality and pragmatism that almost immediately, at least in the corporate world, finds an antidote to compromises and obstructions of one kind or another. In the political world, these mechanisms are slower, but not completely. The classic model of democratic discipline - the carrot and the stick model - assumes a social reality intertwined with inaccuracies, obstructions, subterfuges and similar realities, far from ideal, but it also gives some hope that corporate and perhaps wider social anomalies can be somewhat corrected and repaired. If not by your own power, then at least from the outside.
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