Word: mcdonaldization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Technically, McDonald's is doing nothing wrong. Since the U.K. rights on the designs of the chairs have expired, this is all perfectly legal. Thanks to U.K. design rights law - which holds that the rights on a design last a maximum of 25 years, instead of 70 as in much of Europe - British furniture stores and websites are legitimately selling copies of the Egg chair, for example, for a fraction of the original's $5,000 price tag. "A commercial decision was taken to use some reproduction similar chairs," Lorraine Homer, spokeswoman for McDonald's in the U.K., tells TIME...
...Specifically, Fritz Hansen says that at least two London McDonald's restaurants have installed copies of Arne Jacobsen not made by the company, in some cases alongside their Arne Jacobsen chairs. McDonald's freely admits that some of its U.K. restaurants are using Jacobsen reproductions bought from U.K.-based suppliers - but says it told Fritz Hansen it would be doing...
...Homer says that there are 28 McDonald's in the U.K. that were refurbished in 2006 and fitted with all original Fritz Hansen chairs. By the end of this year, another 100 restaurants will have gone through a "re-image": some using all originals, some using reproductions and some using a combination of both. "While the reproduction chairs are naturally very similar to the original design, there are differences," says Homer. "No attempt has been made to 'pass off' reproduction chairs as originals in any references or labeling...
...That's not good enough for Fritz Hansen, which says the differences are only visible to someone who knows what they're looking for. Anyway, says designer Avanzi - who has had a relationship with McDonald's for almost 10 years and helped bring it together with Fritz Hansen - the use of reproductions seems to go against the food chain's vision for its redesigned restaurants. "The concept was to be authentic, and McDonald's was in perfect agreement with that," he says. "I don't feel betrayed, but poorly misunderstood by a few people in England who didn't understand...
...sure. McDonald's says it has no plans to yank the disputed chairs and is working with Fritz Hansen to find a compromise (what that means exactly, it won't say). But Fritz Hansen says it has definitively withdrawn from the partnership. The furniture producer has already booked revenue of nearly $2 million for the 2,500 chairs it sold to McDonald's, and has requests for more chairs from several European outlets. These orders, the company says, will not be filled. That means fast food fans on the Continent - with its stricter design rights and copyright laws...