Edible Plastic

THE SUCCESS STORY has always held a cherished place in American literature. American readers cheered along as an excusably impoverished hero strove for the big business deal, the big money, and the big time. The hosts of explanations suggested for this popularity run from the Freudian (a need for vicarious gratification and fulfillment, experienced by armchair moneymakers) to the conspiratorial (sedatives written by a malevolent ruling class to substitute for the real thing) to the jingoistic (pride in the American inventions of Individual Initiative and the free market).

When Max Boas and Steve Chain set out to write Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald's they had their hands on what should have been the material for the modern success story. For McDonald's accomplishment has been compared to that of the man who invented the paper clip. They took the lowly beef patty and made an ideology out of it. How did dining under the heavenly golden arches become a transcendental experience, capturing national enthusiasm with a fervor surpassed only by the space program and World War II? How did just another greasy burger joint become a multinational corporation with sales surpassing the GNP of some nations, a powerful lobbyist with a very friendly Congressman and the nation's largest employer of young people?

The miracle was not achieved by the likely nominees for the innovative-entrepreneur success spot, the McDonald brothers, a hardworking pair who ran a Southern California highway restaurant where they turned out tasty hamburgers by a quick, then-unique process--the assembly line. Instead, McDonald's became what it is today by means of a basic capitalistic technique known as "stealing somebody's else's idea."

It was Raymond Kroc, today one of America's 12 richest men, who created the McDonald's monster. Back in 1954, Kroc, a slick-talking paper cup salesman passing through town, saw their operation. On the spot, he offered them a deal: in exchange for the right to use their names, methods, and golden arch insignia in order to establish identical McDonald's franchises around the country, he would give them a small percentage of each store's sales. The brothers, "out-spieled," reluctantlyagreed. Within five years Kroc had bought out their share of the enterprise. And a few months later, annoyed at the price the brothers had forced him to pay, Kroc opened a clone duplicate of the original stand--which they had renamed Mac's Place--across the road from it, and drove them out of business with their own irresistable name.

THIS VERY UNHEROIC start not-withstanding, Kroc's early empire-building methods were reassuringly based on efficient Harvard Business School principles. McDonald's sold burgers made quicker, cheaper, and cleaner than its competitors could. Kroc developed computer-run fryers that adjusted themselves to each potato stick, assuring a uniform munchability of each french fry. The consistent quality such techniques enforced in every stand endeared McDonald's to Americans with their stable habits. The franchises began to reproduce phenomenally. A success story within the success story was that Kroc's personal secretary, who in those struggling early years took company stock in lieu of salary and soon found herself with $70 million.

As things really began to boom Kroc found he needed more than inventiveness, or even his "special sauce" to run the operation. He therefore established Hamburger Central, the wall-less office near Chicago where Kroc and his burger consultants could set the party line for franchisers. In the center of one floor, a cone-shaped think tank, containing a circular water bed and a device which projects the user's alpha waves onto a screen, facilitates important decisions. (Employees may meet together within the womb-like room, unless they are of different sexes). Hamburger Central directives are communicated to the "professors" at nearby Hamburger University, which awards the Bachelor and Masters of Hamburgerology to future managers.

A phenomenon called the gangplank complex explains why what was almost a capitalist fairy tale has had a predictable ending. This complex works strange effects on recent entrants to the ruling class. Once they make it on to the ship of state or of class, they try their hardest to pull in the gangplank to success along with them. As McDonald's reached Fortune 500 status in the late 60's, it turned its back on its entrepreneurial origins. Kroc had touted the franchising scheme, for instance, as a kind of popularization of big business, an opportunity to return to the era of Mom and Pop restaurants in spite of an increasingly concentrated economy. But as Kroc's company grew, it began to tread mercilessly on the franchisers who had paved the way for its growth. Using questionable techniques, it aggressively bought back many of its franchises--usually the most profitable--which had provided it with capital and spread its name.

Nor did the workers who produced McDonald's secret weapon, the 50-second burger, receive their share of the benefits. McDonald's has lobbied for years for a subminimum wage for the teenage workers who form the majority of its employees. And even some famous universities could take a lesson from McDonald's union-busting methods. Claiming no "outsider" (read: union) is needed to resolve labor-management conflicts, managers hold "rap sessions" with employees, ostensibly to understand their grievances. Actually, Hamburger Central directs managers to heed complaints only as a clue to which employees have unionizing sympathies. Tricky lie detector tests await the bad burgers.

THE LAST IDOL of the free market Big Mac smashes is that of consumer sovereignty--the freedom to choose from a variety of goods. The burger entourage rolls on, covering over every trace of local color with a uniform circus yellow. Culinary freedom in America is disappearing--what became of the hot dog? And now McDonald's is standardizing the greasy spoon eateries of the world.

When McDonald's executives contest the charges of restriction of consumer choice and cultural imperialism, Boas and Chain give them enough rope to hang themselves. Company spokesmen point out, for example, that the McDonald's in London serve tea, and that advertisers in Japan, out of deference to the Japanese tongue, changed Ronald McDonald's first name to Donald. To those who feared a forest of golden arches across the land, President Turner once replied that "uninterrupted scenery, too, can get pretty monotonous."

Boas and Chain bill their book as "unauthorized" and they are true to their word. In researching Big Mac, they started at the bottom, unlike many "commissioned" corporate historians, who end up producing PR portraits of the top brass, with the blemishes retouched. The authors dug way back into hamburger history, and came up with a lot of dirt that the company hides behind the spotless view presented to the public--such as the $200,000 contribution to the 1972 Nixon campaign that left Ray Kroc's ketchup stained hands just a few weeks before the Price Commission cancelled its price rollback on the Quarter Pounder. The author's style is marred only by a few racially offensive comments, apparently made for sensational effect, such as the suggestion that the black ghetto population if denied local ownership, is "a breeding ground for revolutionary turmoil."

The moral of the McDonald's success story is not that every little poor boy can become chairman of the board with enough sweat and strain. The many skeletons in the McDonald's refrigerators disprove this. It was not the invisible hand of the free market but the iron-gloved fist of corporate greed which flipped the burgers that made McDonald's.