I hate to disrupt the Maccy D's love-in. I'm a broadly omnivorous sort who finds the food itself not so much horrible as disappointing - it promises a cheap thrill it doesn't really deliver. It may be true that the coffee is good - the tea is certainly passable. I've been grateful to them for being open at silly o'clock in Bridgend, or just being warm and dry in Rhyl, and I can't fault their khazis. I've also had an actual McJob, albeit only for a summer. There's definitely, as Ian says, a lot of snobbery involved amongst the sort of folk who wouldn't be seen going in one - they slag off the food but it's actually the customers they are denigrating.
McD's is undoubtedly very good at PR, and has smartened up all sorts of aspects of its operation - not least because it has a longer memory than most of its fans and consumers, and knows what a serious PR disaster looks like. McLibel has probably made it better in some respects – everything Foodie says about hygiene, provenance and quality (these things, as a wise man often says, are relative) is true – and worse in others, as you will very quickly and expensively discover if you publish something they don’t like.
It’s possible to argue that it is no worse than any other ruthless multinational megacorp destroying the environment and damaging public health for profit. This may or may not be true, but as an icon and a pioneer, and an aggressively litigious adversary, I think it’s fair to pick on it. Not poisoning your customers is undeniably a good thing (not scalding them is also advisable
). We don’t even have to talk about nutrition or taste – there’s a thread for that elsewhere anyway – because we’ve got employment rights, deforestation, animal welfare, waste, de-skilling, freedom of speech and exploitation of children to choose from. However I do think it’s interesting that it’s almost impossible to get a burger quite so wrong as the world’s biggest burger chain manages to do, for precisely the reasons Foodie mentions. Under-seasoned, cooked in a manner guaranteed not to enhance flavour, and served in bread you wouldn’t feed to the ducks in the park (yeah, I know you shouldn’t feed them bread anyway). To pass the interminable hours of the shifts and try to block out the music on loop, we used to send out an occasional comedy burger, with 40 gherkins or some other amusing innovation. We never once had one brought back.
