The Fall of McDonalds

To my knowledge McDonalds, the global fast-food giant, the restroom with a cafeteria attached, is not going to be falling in the near future. However, a couple years back I read a newspaper article saying that for the first time in decades McDonalds was not the number one fast food company on the planet for that year. It was Subway.

Institutions like McDonalds, Coca-cola, and other global brands may seem like great unassailable and eternal stone edifices, but they are not. Like any other company providing a product (or value), they are only as powerful as the choice consumers make in buying what they are selling. If another company comes along with something the public prefers, then good-bye McDonalds.

There was a study done in which a group of five people enjoyed a nice meal. Each of them cleaned their plates and praised the meal. The follow day, the same five people were served the same meal in the same restaurant and prepared by the same cook. The only difference was the blindfold. None of the participants could see the meal. The results were that the meals were not finished because the subjects felt full and they also noted that the meals did not taste as good as the one the previous day.

This study highlighted the role vision played in eating. By seeing all the food on the plate subjects felt the need to eat more than their bodies required. By eliminating the visual stimulus they ate more slowly, therefore they were more aware of the physical cues from their bodies that told them that they had eaten enough. Also, the absence of vision gave them a more objective approach to the flavour of the food. The lack of vision made consumption a self-aware and conscious activity rather than a habit.

McDonald provides a product, a value, that which we act to gain or to keep. A value is only a value if it is of value to someone. The value requires a valuer. When customers decided that they no longer valued the values McDonalds was offering, they went to someone else. The executives concluded that Subway represented healthier eating, so McDonalds changed their values on offer to include a new healthy range to their menu, thus aligning their available products to the values of their customers.

As for the customers, something changed in them. Perhaps they were habitual McDonalds customers since childhood, but then one day, or perhaps gradually, there occurred a shift in their awareness and therefore a change in their values. When the time came to act on their values they chose Subway over McDonalds when given a choice.

People do not consume merely food. Food, as a value to be consumed, is but one of many. People also consume clothes, entertainment, leisure time, books, magazine, newspapers, and even friendships and ideas. Since we live in a value-driven society there are a myriad of value choices given to us on a daily basis. Collectively the choices made in consumption define an individual's style of life.

The question for each of us is how many of our choices are conscious and how many are a matter of habit or whim? Just as blindfolding the participants in the eating experiment made them more aware of their bodies and their tastes, so too must we become aware of our values. Perhaps if we are, then we may take the time to savour our values and perhaps realise that certain values do not taste as good as we had once thought.

I have noticed a small up swell in people consuming according to their values instead of through habit. This is most obvious to me in the media where the values on offer do not fit the values of the consumers.

When McDonalds dropped to number two it realised that it had to change the values on offer to fit the values of its customers. And yet, rather than change as McDonalds had done the traditional mainstream media outlets continue to drive their messages even harder. So consumers of values do what they have always done. They consume from someone else.

As a result, newspapers are failing across America; mainstream news outlets are loosing their audience to cable and the internet. I think the same might hold true of the celebrities turned social and political pundits as their comments become increasingly disconnected from mainstream values. More and more, nobody is listening to them anymore.

The lesson here is that if the mighty leviathan that is the McDonalds Corporation must change its ways or fall, then so too must politicians, media outlets, and even celebrities. We live in a marketplace of values. As any purveyor of values will tell you, "first know your market". It is not your place to tell them what they want when they clearly do not want what you are offering.

This reminds me of Betty Crocker and the egg. Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, invented the focus group and with it he invented public relations. Betty Crocker had just created instant cake mix and sales were poor, so they brought in Bernays.

By applying some of his uncle's theories to groups of housewives he discovered that they felt guilty using a cake mix. It went against their values. Bernays' solution? He told Betty Crocker to change the instructions on the packaging to read, "add one egg". The egg symbolised the housewife giving something of her own and made her feel as though she was actually making a cake for her family. Sales skyrocketed. The solution was not to change the customers' value system rather to work with it.

Contrary to popular opinion consumers of values are not a vast ignorant populace blindly buying whatever the mass media tells them to buy. Yes, people can be persuaded. Yes, not everyone consciously considers their value system when consuming. And yet, consumption is still driven by the individual value system of the consumer. When any purveyor of values, be they a massive corporation or a politician, fails to provide a desired value the consumer will go elsewhere. Without support from the consumer the seller fails and disappears from the market.

This is how the free marketplace of values, both material and immaterial, functions. But what about the unfree market? The unfree market can only operate with the force of government in the form of socialist, communist, fascist, and corporatist policies. In these systems the government decides what the individual may or may not consume according to its collective value system. After all, government and its academic lackeys know what is best, not the ignorant masses.

If the government favours McDonalds over Subway it will subsidize McDonalds, tax healthier food, give tax breaks to McDonalds over Subway, and run public service announcements highlighting the health risks of going to Subway. If the public still refuses to choose McDonalds over Subway and McDonalds goes bankrupt, then the government will bail-out McDonalds as being too big to fail and now the government is in the fast food business.

The public does not know what is best. It has to buy rubbish cars that are good for the environment or a light bulb that does not illuminate and costs a fortune to clean-up if it breaks. It should not smoke, watch Glenn Beck (or anything on Fox News), or eat fatty foods. It must not buy tires from China. It must send its kids to state-run schools and learn what the state says they should learn. It cannot buy health insurance across state lines and must take a prescribed policy. This is the unfree market at work. We, the state, will tell you what to value, when to value it, and for how long.

I'm no fan of McDonalds. I may have eaten at one five times in the past twenty years. Popular fashion is not always to my taste, nor is popular music. I do not own jeans, t-shirts, and trainers. I'm not a sports fan either. Nor am I a tech geek who needs the latest and greatest piece of kit to hit the market. I believe that global warming is a fraud, I smoke, and I do not trust in governments to make my life better.

All of these choices and beliefs are derived from my conscious and unconscious value system. Some I consider a matter of choice and others as moral imperatives. Most put me outside of the mainstream. I will always argue my corner, but never demand others to accept my ways as their own.

And yet in the media and online I see people not arguing their corner but insulting all those who do not agree with them. Worst of all, I see this coming from people in the US government as well. Idiot, fool, hate-monger, racist, astroturf. These arrogant politicians and pundits are mocking their customers.

The free market is about free choice. You may not like that people choose McDonalds, but that is the individual's choice. Accept it. If people choose Subway instead, then McDonald changes or it falls. Simple. At present, Glenn Beck's ratings are through the roof and both of his books top the New York Times and Amazon best sellers list. Why? The free market. He speaks to people's values, just as Obama speaks to the values of his audience. Is popular best? Not necessarily. But liberty is all about the right to choose from various values on offer.

In the world of material values companies recognise the need to address the values of as many potential customers as possible. In the world of immaterial values we are seeing ideologues condemn those whose values they fail to address. They are providing a product the public does not want and they seek to use the force of government or media pressure (in the form of public ridicule) to sell their agenda.

Unlike other countries in the world, the United States has a prescribed philosophical identity. To be an American is to accept a particular set of values and for every American liberty is one of the highest values. The simple truth is that you cannot have liberty without a free market of material and immaterial values.

It may be argued that the market has never been totally free. That is true. This is because there have always been powerful forces in the world that seek to control the market for their own ends usually with the excuse of helping society. Thus does the pendulum swing.

Just as McDonalds can fall by not meeting the desires of their customers, so too can ideologies, politicians and their parties fall. They become irrelevant and fade into insignificance. Republicans and Democrats/Conservatives and Labour are no more eternal than McDonalds or Coca-cola.

In a free market, the world will beat down the door of the company that can make a better sandwich. Therefore it is in the best interests of the authoritarian Statists and Corporatists to keep the marketplace of values as unfree as possible. Only then do they stand a chance of survival. So all lovers of liberty must be constantly vigilant in preserving the value of values by keeping the market place of values as free as possible.