A while ago, as I was walking home from work, I passed the McDonald's on Old Kent Road, and with a feeling of disgust, intended to go home and write something about it. As it happened, I got distracted and forgot about it, but I'm sure I can remember the gist of what I wanted to say...I don't understand McDonald's. Or rather, I understand it, I just don't understand the popularity. It really is a disgusting place. And yet hordes of people cram themselves into the tiny little buildings for a box filled with some sort of decomposing substance, which I certainly wouldn't consider food, any more than I would consider polystyrene food. The only real difference between the two being that polystyrene is probably healthier.
Everything, every single thing about McDonald's is oppressive. The minute you step through the door, you inhale the toxic stench of the place, and develop a layer of grease on your skin. Stay in their for longer than 30 minutes and you break out in acne. Wade through the crowds of fat people, screaming children with ice cream (or whatever it is that McDonald's passes for ice cream) smeared over their faces, and mouthy tracksuit wearing teenagers. Once you get to the tills, you are asked "can I take your order" by someone who looks as though they are about to die, which is no surprise given the fact that they work week long shifts for about 50p an hour. You choose something from the menu which, when it arrives, looks kind of like the picture, if the burger in the picture had been run over by a truck.
And the punchline is that McDonald's now calls itself a restaurant. Either the definition of restaurant is, or has become seriously lax, or not enough people are questioning this status. In restaurants, you don't stand in a queue for ten minutes and receive your meal from a conveyor belt. In restaurants, the staff are polite and take your order once you are seated. In restaurants, you can buy liquor (though I'm not sure a liquor license would be a welcome addition to McDonald's)
Other than the staff salaries, all of these criticisms are on a cosmetic level. So I am yet to mention McDonald's human and animal rights notoriety, but I think everyone is aware of this so it needs no explanation. When I was unemployed a friend said to me, "you can't want a job that badly, because you haven't tried McDonald's". My response to this would be that I haven't tried prostitution or drug-dealing either, because I'm not quite ready to take all of the ethics I have accumulated since I was 12, and throw them out of the window. I understand that in this economy many people are willing to take anything for a wage (good for them I guess). But to work at McDonald's I would be like Faust, only instead of selling my soul for knowledge and wordly pleasures, I would be getting minimum wage and humiliation. The primary figure in this simile being the devil.
I think the only perk of working at McDonald's is a discount on the food, but I would sooner eat a brick. Returning to the products themselves, like almost everything exported from America, they are unhealthy, unethical and I am going to have to assume, addictive. Unless people enjoy eating burger-shaped slabs of fat, and subsequently gaining weight, I'm going to assume that there is some other factor involved here (I'm going to point out here that McDonald's does have a healthy option; brown salads which went out of date about 2 weeks ago, essentially only on sale to make the mentioned slabs of fat look more appealing). Most people have seen, or at least heard about, the documentary Supersize Me, so everyone knows to some degree what goes into a McDonald's burger, and the fact that the fries do not decompose (so when I said it wasn't real food it wasn't actually hyperbole). People know about the ethical violations. But they still eat there. So I am forced to the conclusion that McDonald's contains small amounts of heroin. Like the heroin addict, McDonald's consumers know that they are wreaking havoc on their insides, but this is outweighed by the fix; those minutes of grotesque bliss in a dingy doorway. The harsh truth is that McDonald's is a drug, and Ronald McDonald is its kingpin.
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