How McDonalds conquered France:
In the battle for France, Jose Bové, the protester who vandalized a McDonald’s in 1999 and was then running for president, proved to be no match for Le Big Mac. The first round of the presidential election was held on April 22, and Bové finished an embarrassing tenth, garnering barely 1 percent of the total vote. By then, McDonald’s had eleven hundred restaurants in France, three hundred more than it had had when Bové gave new meaning to the term “drive-through.” The company was pulling in over a million people per day in France, and annual turnover was growing at twice the rate it was in the United States. Arresting as those numbers were, there was an even more astonishing data point: By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald’s, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food. Against McDonald’s, Bové had lost in a landslide.
As Hitler discovered, it helps a lot to have Frenchmen on your side. It’s a very entertaining read.
[Via Veronique]
[Update a couple minutes later]
The best take, from Michael Goldfarb:
In the course of Donald Morrison’s review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald’s right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.
Even better than the smell of napalm in the morning.
[Via Mark Hemingway]
Where’s Morgan Spurlock to condemn this?
To bad we can’t build cars like we fry cheap burgers.
The “country which invented fast-food”? Is there such a thing? The Earl of Sandwich, for example, is but one data point. Anyway, I cannot diss McDonalds because I never actually ate there, but I did go to Burger King once, and it sucked. That was probably the worst burger I ever ate.