Future Shock Therapy: A World With No McJobs, Part II

Future Shock Therapy: A World With No McJobs, Part II

In 2013, McDonald's had total revenue of 28.1 billion dollars and a net profit of 5.5 billion dollars. (source) Per store sales average 2.5 million dollars. Worldwide, McDonald's operates more than 33,000 stores and employs more than 1.7 million people. (You may have seen news stories about how Subway had passed McDonald's as the largest fast food place. Subway has around 41,000 locations- but the average location only pulls in around 480,000 dollars annually. Subway and McDonald's aren't even in the same category.) According to Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, McDonald's is the largest consumer in the United States of beef, potatoes and apples, in addition to being the largest operator of playgrounds in the United States. Subway doesn't even have their own hard-hitting attack piece bestseller. Amateurs. One in eight Americans has at some point been employed by McDonald's. (That's important to later discussion. Remember that.) Its estimated that half of the burgers sold in the United States are sold by McDonald's.

In short, McDonald's is huge and ubiquitous to an extent that many companies today simply aren't. Its no coincidence then that McDonald's has gone on to occupy a symbolic place in society's consciousness. Sociologist George Ritzer in his book The McDonaldization of Society argued that McDonald's (or more correctly, a generic fast food place) had replaced government bureaucracies as a model of inhuman, rationalized socialization in modern society. Not many companies go on to become sociological phenomena.

Nor are all that many companies used as economic metrics. The Economist famously uses Big Mac prices to determine the undervaluation or undervaluation of world currencies. You can view it here, although details require a subscription to The Economist.

There's a reason that McJob- a term coined by a sociologist in a single Washington Post article- would attain and maintain cultural relevance. Described by Merriam-Webster in 2003 as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement" and described by Douglas Copeland, author of Generation X in 1991, as "a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one." A McJob was a concept and a condition simply looking for a word adequate to describe it. Not many companies spawn a whole new word, especially not one that is non-proprietary,

When José Bové and his followers worked to dismantle a McDonald's in France in 1994, they weren't just trying to dismantle a place that would in the future sell industrially prepared meat products, they were trying to dismantle a system of globalization and homogenization and standardization. They were trying to fight the tide of history that is McDonald's. And well, to be honest, they lost.

But, you might say, McDonald's is losing. Other fast food companies are on the up. The entire system is being torn down by fast casual restaurants and artisanal food trucks. Ten years from now, McDonald's will be deader than Microsoft. And you're right in that sales have stalled. But you're wrong in that almost every competitor is still little more than a speck of dust to the Golden Arches. Even the so-called Breakfast Wars have done nothing to McDonald's earnings. And you're wrong in that McDonald's as a system, as the crystallization of everything fast food, is behind McDonald's the company's own stymied efforts, as even an industry analyst magazine like QSR will tell you. McDonald's has been losing footing to companies that have learned to act more like McDonald's.

So that is where we are today. Stay tuned to A World With No McJobs, Part III where we discuss the elimination of the McJob and the possibility of companies that don't act like McDonald's. Its interesting to note that of the four primary components of McDonaldization identified by Ritzer one is control- the replacement of humans by non-human technologies.