By Patrick Alexander
McDonald’s has long been considered important to the global economy. It produced $23 billion in revenue for FY2022, while maintaining a presence in over 100 countries; it is planning on building 1,900 new units in 2023 globally, according to its CFO, Ian Borden. Its market cap is larger than the next nine global restaurant chains combined, including YUM! brands, Chipotle, and Darden restaurants. However, a more accurate representation of its reach is its well-known and easily recognizable branding: the warm golden arches, a made-for-advertising jingle written by Pusha T, and the common “Mc-” prefix that elevates any common chicken nugget to a branded product with added financial and sentimental value. Established international political-economic theory must acknowledge the fact that large multinational corporations such as McDonald’s are beginning to have influence levels comparable to nation-states.
Beyond its immediate reach, McDonald’s provides two diagnostic tools for those watching the global economy. The first, humorously “discovered” by The Economist in 1986, is the “Big Mac Index”. The ubiquitous Big Mac, with its consistent ingredients, can be used to assess local costs of living by comparing currency rates to the cost of a sandwich across borders (a version adjusted to purchasing power parity, a metric measuring relative currency value, was released later). The next is the correlation between the presence of Mcdonald’s and national participation in the global market. Being one of the oldest and most well-known fast food restaurants on the planet, the presence of a McDonald’s in a nation is a good benchmark for how it is integrated into the global economy. After China established special economic zones to encourage foreign investment, their first Mcdonald's was built in Shenzhen in 1990, the first of hundreds in the second largest market for the Golden Arches, behind the United States. Russia’s first McDonald’s came in 1990, amidst market liberalization and the eve of Soviet collapse; when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine and faced heavy market sanctions, the departure of McDonald’s provided a poignant indicator of Russia’s new disconnection from the global market. There is only one McDonald’s in the long-sanctioned island of Cuba, but it is operated at the American Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
With its dominant reach established, and its diagnostic capabilities known, it’s clear that McDonald’s holds a larger role in the international economic system than other fast food brands. However, can it affect the global economy, in addition to holding a large and revealing role in it? George Ritzer makes this exact argument in his book The McDonaldization of Society. Ritzer believes that the Weberian model of bureaucracy that many organizations were built around, emphasizing hierarchy, defined roles, and a rational system of rules, was replaced by the system McDonald’s emphasizes in their stores. Examples of this include automation in everyday life, such as gas pumping or burger making, removing what Ritzer calls “McJobs” in favor of more labor on the part of the consumer and increases to overall efficiency. Ritzer also cites the experience of the consumer under McDonaldization, one of little interpersonal interaction in favor of efficiency, as dehumanizing. McDonald’s opponents would further this line of logic, and compare the efficient and falsely enthusiastic system McDonald’s has perfected to a pig’s trough. Ultimately, McDonaldization entails a rise of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control in organizations immediately following the introduction of McDonald’s to their society. As a result, labor does not need to be specially trained, since every product has a predictable and efficient pattern to produce, while consumers are presented with a standardized menu of options that allow for a predictable and repeatable choice, no matter where they are.
Granted, this is not an intentional shift; there is no documented effort on the part of McDonald’s management to sociologically change the organizational cultures of the markets it goes to. There are, however, documented cases of political changes as a result of McDonald’s efforts, most notably in the company’s $2.32 million in American lobbying fees from 2022, leading to pro-business sentiment in Congress. The company publicly reversed course on the minimum wage issue in 2019, allowing House Democrats to push forward and attempt to raise it. This also shows how, while many see McDonald’s as an arm of American culture or governance, it does not take a strictly subordinative role to the government itself. McDonald’s is also able to run mass-influence operations across social media, with targeted advertisements in different markets to reshape how cultures think of food. In India, a country with a distinctly different food and restaurant culture from the U.S., McDonald’s was able to successfully run a rebranding campaign to position itself as cheap and authentic to India. In between its 1996 introduction and the modern day, it has become a central brand in a once-foreign nation, to the point of projecting 25 new stores every year.
McDonald’s is a financial juggernaut that also holds importance in diagnosing the health of the international order and can manipulate governments and populations alike. These examples from the case study of McDonald’s show how corporations can join nation-states as primary actors in the international sphere; many nation-states possess a similar (and in many cases, smaller) financial base, an ability to prescribe the health of international and regional markets, and influence client states through overt and conspicuous means. However, this influence is also fundamentally different in objectives and processes. This would challenge decades of established Realist theory and assumptions about how international relations works, but not without real-world evidence across decades of global operations and numerous crisis points. As globalization develops across new markets and supply chains, the number of companies that can claim this level of importance will only grow in turn. Perhaps this is an issue for regulators to rein in, or maybe McDonald’s can act as a global stabilizer for conflict and economic development. Many would see the food chain as an arm of American expansionism, but are its views truly in line with American doctrine? Should they be? The only thing known is that we, as both consumers and citizens, must live with a heightened awareness of how corporations such as McDonald’s affect all sides of the global economy.
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