Word: mcdonaldization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sightings: it's like the Elvis thing, except you know he's alive! The rapper reappeared at a release party in New York for the Wu-Tang's new album. Then he was arrested in Philly while signing autographs at a McDonald's. For a fugitive, the man certainly did get around...
...wide windows of the fast food franchises have become something of a traditional target for crowds protesting everything from the bombing of Serbia or the entry of U.S. corporations into India's catering market to globalization in general. U.S. embassies may be impregnable, but the wide windows of McDonald's and KFC are a tempting forest of windmills for Nike-clad Quixotes everywhere in the world who want to tilt at symbols of American influence...
...Being in the firing line, of course, makes the fast-food chains do their best to fit in with the local culture, adapting the menu and the marketing to reflect local tastes and concerns. Hence the Indian "lamburger" or the fact that beer is served in McDonald's in Germany and France. The object of the globalizing corporation is to "indigenize" itself as quickly as possible. McDonald's may have been forbidden fruit when it first rolled into post-communist Moscow in 1991, but if all goes according to plan the next generation will know it simply as a local...
...indigenize" themselves abroad, of course, fast-food chains also face pressure to march in step with the passions of the natives - even when that involves biting the hand that reared it. Last year, ads published by McDonald's France used "Ugly American" caricatures to plant the Golden Arches firmly on the European side of the conflict with the U.S. over beef imports. "What I don't like about McDonald's France," says an overweight U.S. cowboy in one ad, "is that it doesn't buy American beef." The ad specifies that French McDonald's uses only French beef, to "guarantee...
...Fords as American cars, quite simply because they've been made in local plants, according to designs tailored for European markets, for more than half a century. And if all goes according to plan, 10 or 20 years from now an anti-American mob may charge right by a McDonald's without as much as lifting a stone. Because like the Ford logo for the protesters of today, the next generation may not know the origins of the Golden Arches...