McDonald’s, You’re like Framily

Growing up on a farm, we didn’t eat out much, but I seem to remember enjoying a few Quarter Pounders with fries during my high-school days.

Then, during my time as a student at the University of Missouri-Columbia, my go-to lunch was a salad with a side of fries at the basement McDonald’s on Lowery Mall, across from the library. When I took my daughter for a campus visit to MU a few weeks ago, our student tour guide (who did an excellent job, I might add) pointed out where the McDonald’s used to be. He said at one time it was the highest-grossing McDonald’s location in the US. In the 80s, when I was there, we heard it was the busiest McDonald’s in the world. I think both statements are part of a Columbia urban legend—though I’d love someone to prove me wrong with some documentation.

When my family lived in Taiwan, we found McDonald’s in every city. That was especially welcome when we first arrived and couldn’t speak Chinese. It’s a lot easier to ask for a “Number 5” than to learn the vocabulary for ordering à la carte.

McDonald’s was popular with the locals, too, especially high school kids. It was common to see them gather there to study or work on class projects. It was a new experience for us to see young people in that group-centered culture pour all their french fries into a pile and share them together.

McDonald’s certainly is a global juggernaut. According to the company website, their more than 33,000 restaurants in over 100 countries serve over 69 million people each day. But there’s more to McDonald’s than just huge numbers. In honor of the chain’s 75th anniversary this year, Reader’s Digest ran a list of “75 Mind-blowing Facts.” Here are my favorites:

#2. The first McDonald’s drive-thru—in Sierra Vista, Arizona—didn’t open until 1975.

#22-22. French fries, McDonald’s best-selling item, were added to the menu in 1949. Before that, it was potato chips.

#50. As the result of a 1973 lawsuit, McDonald’s paid Sid and Marty Kroftt $1 million because the brothers claimed that McDonaldland had stolen the “concept and feel” of their Saturday-morning TV show H.R. Pufnstuf. (Remember that one?)

#58. Giving away (selling?) 1.5 billion toys each year in its Happy Meals makes McDonalds’ the largest distributer of toys in the world. (OK, that’s one of those “huge numbers.”)

#60. One out of every eight workers in the U.S. has at some time had a job at McDonald’s.

#66. Have you heard of the “Big Mac Index”? It was developed by The Economist in 1986 to use the local cost of a Big Mac to compare economies around the world.

I used to tell my Asian college-age friends that I don’t actually like McDonald’s, that most people in the US don’t actually like McDonald’s. But here’s what happens: You’re in a van with a bunch of young people on a trip and you ask them where they want to stop and eat and they say “Anywhere but McDonald’s” and they name other possibilities but when you exit the highway you don’t see any of the places they suggested and you’re running out of time and you decide to eat at the next place you see and—guess what?—it’s a McDonald’s. There’s always a McDonald’s close by, so that’s where you stop. It’s just too convenient.

This guy notwithstanding, McDonald’s burgers don’t garner much praise. In fact, when readers of Consumer Reports rated the hamburgers of 21 fast-food chains, they put the ones from McDonald’s dead last. The magazine called them a “Mc-disappointment.” When our local McDonald’s in Taipei ran out of hamburgers one day (I kid you not), maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

But there are those “world-famous fries.” McDonald’s calls them “golden on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside.” I don’t disagree. And a whole lot of other people seem to be on board, as well.

Mark Eichenlaub, a graduate student in physics, decided to figure out just how many french fries McDonald’s has sold. He used the formula

and came up with the figure “4 trillion, give or take a few.” I have a hard time following his detailed explanation (he lost me when I saw that squiggly S-thing before the numbers), but I’m pretty sure his estimate doesn’t even count fries sold outside the US.

Of course, McDonald’s gets knocked for a lot of things besides what’s on their menu. For instance, right now they’re the target of protests over low wages. Sometimes their negatives are symptomatic of the ills of American culture, but they’re magnified with McDonald’s because of the franchise’s large scale. And abroad, their ubiquity and visibility often make them a symbol of Western encroachment.

McDonald’s does give us plenty of reasons not to be “Lovin’ it.”

But again . . . there are those fries.

My second oldest son graduated from university last week. He drove about seven hours round trip to pick up my mother so she could attend the ceremony. The next day I took her back home, with an extra hour added on each way. After I dropped her off, she was worried that I’d fall asleep on the way back, but I told her I’d pull over and rest if I got tired.

A couple hours from home, in Lebanon, MO, I decided to stop and get something to eat. I parked at a McDonald’s, to go inside and stretch my legs and to use the free wifi. That and I got an order of fries.

The lady at the counter greeted me with “Welcome back.” How many businesses can say that to every customer and rarely, if ever, be wrong?

Sounds like framily. And when I say “framily,” I’m thinking of the Sprint commercials with their odd collection of characters—Ronald McDonald, Grimace, Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, Captain Crook and the rest of the citizens of McDonaldland. It’s an imperfect, dysfunctional framily at times, but it’s still framily.

In the Lebanon McDonald’s, the fries were good, as they nearly always are.

There’s something to be said about consistency. And there’s something to be said about always being close by.

Framily.

(Daryl Chen and Brooke Wanser, “75 Mind-Blowing Facts about McDonald’s to Celebrate Its 75th Anniversary,” Reader’s Digest; “Best and Worst Fast-Food Restaurants in America,” Consumer Reports, July 2014; Mark Eichenlaub, “How Many Fries Has McDonald’s Served?” Quora)

[photos: “McDonald’s,” by Mike Mozart, used under a Creative Commons license; “4 Combos Fries Mix,” by Shippou, used under a Creative Commons license; “plexi • burger.dude,” by Don Shall, used under a Creative Commons license]

Doing the Culture Slide: Living with the Confusing Effects of Globalization

5043651435_3d6a657c89 — Donald McDonald at an iCon’Chicken event in Japan

The culture slide. It’s not a dance for expats—though sometimes it may feel like it.

Culture slide is the name I’ve given to the confusion and shifts in thinking brought about by globalization.

It’s when your kids grow up in Taipei and think that Giordano clothing stores must be from Italy (they’re actually from Hong Kong) and they must have outlets in the US (they don’t). Likewise, Napoli sounds Italian, but the pizza chain is Taiwanese. Then there’s NET (from Taiwan), Fnac (from France), and B&Q (from the UK). And as much as they may feel like GAP, Best Buy, and Home Depot, the kids didn’t find any of them when they traveled to the US.

It cuts the other way, too. Back in the States, we think we should be able to order corn soup and extra-spicy extra-crispy chicken at KFC. . . and tuna and peas should be available as toppings at Pizza Hut. And we’re pleasantly surprised to find out that IKEA and Yoshinoya are in the good ol’ US of A, too—even if they haven’t made it to our part of the country yet.

That last part reminds me of a story attributed to Den Fujita, founder of McDonald’s in Japan. In Asian Brand Strategy: How Asia Builds Strong Brands, Martin Roll writes about Fujita saying, “Once a group of Japanese Boy Scouts visited the United States and were asked by a local television station what their impression of America was. One boy replied, ‘I didn’t know that they had McDonald’s in the United States, too.’” Maybe you’ve heard that story before, but that time it was a Japanese boy in Florida or a Japanese girl in Los Angeles or a French girl in Times Square or a European boy or a little boy from Indonesia. It’s all so confusing.

Donald McDonald

Ahhh, McDonald’s, the king of globalization, and the instigator of so much culture slide.

Not only does McDonald’s localize their menus wherever they go—which might make Germans think that all the world’s restaurants have McCurrywurst—but they’re selections also cross borders in some fairly strange ways. A couple years ago, Germany’s McDonald’s introduced bubble tea, a drink with chewy tapioca balls that was invented in Taiwan. Here’s the commercial:

As others have pointed out, why is the actor yelling, “Bubblezzaaiii”? Is he trying to sound Japanese?

So that brings us back to Japan, the country with the second most McDonald’s restaurants, next to the US. Fujita brought “Donald McDonald” (it’s easier to pronounce that way) to his country in 1971, writes John Love in McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, with the idea that the restaurants would have to look “100 percent Japanese.” Love quotes Fujita as saying, “If I insisted that this was something that came from America, the Japanese would say, ‘This is American, and we don’t like it because we don’t like Americans.'” It seems that in Fujita’s eyes, they didn’t disdain all things Western, as he’s also credited in Love’s book with telling reporters,

The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for two thousand years. If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years, we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair blond.

It will be some time before that can be proven or disproven, but it didn’t take nearly as long for McDonald’s in Japan to warm up to its American roots. Right now it’s in the middle of a campaign with throwback menus featuring “American Vintage” food from the ’50s, ’70s, and ’80s—or at least it features what some in Japan think is vintage American food. The offerings include a burger with two beef patties, an egg, and mashed potatoes between the buns (’50s), “Hot & Groovy” chicken sandwiches topped with salsa (’70s), and sandwiches with the addition of BBQ sauce (’80s).

Now that’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Sing Along with Me: “Baseball, Hot Dogs . . .”

I’m just glad that here in the US, we’ve got a pretty good handle on who we are and what is ours. We know that McDonald’s is a genuine American export, even if the menu changes around the globe. We also know that no matter how much the world tilts on its cultural axis, we’ll always be able to count on things like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. Remember that chorus from the Chevy commercial in 1975?

To review, that’s baseball (where all the balls used in the Major Leagues are made in Costa Rica), hot dogs (which originated in Germany), apple pie (first made in England), and Chevrolet (which is the third-best-selling auto brand in the US, behind Toyota).

In 2006, Chevrolet came out with a new version of their song, once again advertising America’s “favorite brand.” The chorus was updated with several new versions, such as “stolen bases, goat-cheese pizza, bottled water, and Chevrolet.” The commercial ended with the tagline “The world has changed. But the love affair continues.”

I can’t attest to the love affair, but, boy, the world sure has changed.

Step, two, three, four. Doing the culture slide.

(Martin Roll, Asian Brand Strategy: How Asia Builds Strong Brands, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; John F. Love, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, New York: Bantam, 1995; Michelle Lynn Dinh, “McDonald’s Japan Serving ‘American Vintage’ Burgers Starting This January,” RocketNews24, December 28, 2013)

[photo: “iCon’ Chiken FES._064,” by TAKA@P.P.R.S, used under a Creative Commons license]

Live and Learn Abroad to Boost Creativity

You’ve been overseas and you’re back in the US looking for work. Not many job descriptions say that the “ideal candidate will have lived outside the US.” So what transferable qualities or skills have your experiences developed in you? How about adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and empathy?

Here’s something else you can add to your qualifications, and there’s research to back up the claim: creativity.

Finding the Relationship between Creativity and Living Cross-Culturally

A few years ago, William Maddux and Adam Galinsky conducted a series of experiments that demonstrate the link between living abroad and creativity.

In the first, the pair showed that the more time a subject had spent living (though not traveling) abroad, the more likely it was for him to solve a particular puzzle. But the cause-effect relationship wasn’t clear. What if it’s simply because creative people choose more often to live abroad?
The second experiment verified the results, this time using built-in controls for personality factors that are linked to creativity in order to isolate the effects of living abroad.
The third study had subjects who had previously lived abroad think and write about their experiences. They were then tested, showing a temporary increase in creativity.
Study number four looked at adaption to a new culture as the main driver of increased creativity. It showed that the more a person adapted, immersing herself in a culture, the higher the creativity.
And, finally, the fifth study followed up by showing that subjects with past living-abroad experience who then imagined and wrote about adapting to a foreign culture exhibited higher levels of creativity in a subsequent exercise.

(William Maddux and Adam Galinsky, “Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship between Living Abroad and Creativity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 2009)

Wanting to Live Abroad Isn’t the Same

As described in a recent article in Pacific Standard, researchers at the University of Florida, Gainesville, further validated the idea that studying abroad increases creativity, rather than vice versa. The study, by Christine Lee, David Therriault, and Tracy Linderholm, looked at three groups of students: those who had studied abroad, those who were planning to study abroad, and those who had not nor were planning to study abroad. The first group scored higher than the other two in levels of creative thinking, suggesting that it’s the actual experience of living overseas, rather than a personality type that is inclined to do so.

(Tom Jacobs, “To Boost Creativity, Study Abroad,” Pacific Standard, August 6, 2012; Christine Lee, David Therriault, and Tracy Linderholm, abstract of “On the Cognitive Benefits of Cultural Experience: Exploring the Relationship between Studying Abroad and Creative Thinking,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, July 2012)

Diversification and Flexibility

In the abstract to their research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers from the Netherlands and California note that “past research has linked creativity to unusual and unexpected experiences, such as early parental loss or living abroad.” Their experiments suggest that it is the “diversifying” aspect of these experiences that brings about great “cognitive flexibility.”

(Simone Ritter, et al., abstract of “Diversifying Experiences Enhance Cognitive Flexibility,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2012)

Learning the Whys of Culture Helps Even More

Back to Maddux and Galinsky, this time joined by Hajo Adam. Working on the idea that adapting to a new culture brings about novel ways of thinking, the researchers asked, “What is it about adaptation to foreign environments that is critical for facilitating the creative process?” They hypothesized that it is learning about a foreign culture in a multicultural setting that boosts creativity, To test this, the researchers assembled a group of university students in Paris who had previously lived abroad. They then “primed” part of the group by having them think and write about a time when they had learned about another culture. Others in the group did the same about a time of learning about their own culture. As predicted, the first group scored higher in a followup test of creativity.

The three then focused on “functional learning,” or “learning about the underlying reasons for observed foreign rituals, rules, and behaviors.” Subsequent experiments showed that creativity increased even more when the priming focused on not only on learning something new about another culture but learning when the subjects were actually able to find out the reason behind the cultural differences.

(William Maddux, Hajo Adam, and Adam Galinsky, “When in Rome . . . Learn Why the Romans Do What They Do: How Multicultural Learning Experiences Facilitate Creativity,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 2010)

Boosting Your Resume in a Globalized World

So, in review, if you want to develop your creativity, here’s the plan:

live overseas
adapt to another culture
learn about that culture
and learn why a culture is the way it is

In an article posted by the Kellogg School of Management, Maddux tells the American Psychological Association that their research

may have something to say about the increasing impact of globalization on the world, a fact that has been hammered home by the recent financial crisis. Knowing that experiences abroad are critical for creative output makes study abroad programs and job assignments in other countries that much more important, especially for people and companies that put a premium on creativity and innovation to stay competitive.

(Audrey Hamilton, “Living Outside the Box: New Research by Kellogg Professor Adam Galinsky Suggests That Living Abroad Boosts Creativity,” Kellogg School of Management, April 23, 2009)

[photo: “Globeism,” by Joel Ormsby, used under a Creative Commons license]

Welcome to Clearing Customs

During our 10 years as missionaries in Taipei, Taiwan, we wrote about 120 newsletters. In each one, we included a small section on some news coming out of Taiwan, a fact about the country, or an insight on Chinese culture. When we came back to the States in 2011, we switched the topic from Taiwan to globalization. Globalization means different things to different people, but the aspect we focused on is how the world is shrinking and cultures are more and more interacting with and affecting each other.

Soon, we’ll write our last newsletter, but I wanted to continue gathering and sharing information on the aspects of globalization that interest me. The first few posts come from our newsletter, so some go back a little while, but I’ll be catching up soon. Thanks for joining me.

Craig

[the photo is of a sculpture at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport. Ahhhh, memories: by T.CSH, used under a Creative Commons license]

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: