McDonald’s Restaurant

McDonald’s restaurant is the most impor­tant food and eating-habit export of the United States to Germany and the world. It has become a synonym for the American way of eating and the complete industrial­ization of food processing and cooking.

The founder of this enterprise was Ray Kroc. Born on October 5, 1902, in Oak Hills near Chicago to a poor family, he be­came the incarnation of the American dream. He had not finished school and worked as a traveling salesman of bar blenders. As such, he sold two blenders to the brothers Dick and Mac McDonald, who had successfully run a drive-in restau­rant in Pasadena, California, since 1937. By the year 1948 they had given it up, de­veloped an entirely new restaurant system, and opened a new restaurant in San Bernadino. This new restaurant offered only a limited number of dishes, all of which could be eaten without a fork or knife. They insisted on high standards of hygiene and streamlined the food prepara­tion by dividing it into separate tasks. Speedy service and low prices were integral elements of their concept. Finally, they gave their restaurant an appearance that could be easily recognized from the street: it was marked by the Golden Arches—the famous McDonald’s “M.”

When Kroc met the McDonald broth­ers, they had already begun selling franchise licenses. After he entered the business, he bought the nationwide franchise to market McDonald’s products, and in 1961 he ac­quired the whole enterprise for $2.7 mil­lion. Although there were and are other fast food chains in the United States, such as Wendy’s, Burger King, and Sonic, none of these chains was as successful as McDon­ald’s. The number of McDonald’s restau­rants rose from 200 in 1960 to 500 in 1963 and to 1,000 in 1968. Just a year before, in 1967, the effort to expand outside the United States began with the first McDon­ald’s outlet in Canada.

McDonald’s has a leading position in the German fast food and gastronomic sector and has been a major factor in changing German eating culture and behavior. (Owen Franken/Corbis)

markets overseas: In 1971 it opened its first European restaurant in Zaandam in Hol­land. In the same year, the first German McDonald’s was opened in Munich, where a hamburger was sold for 95 pfennigs. The number of German McDonald’s quickly in­creased from 27 in 1975 to 244 in 1986.

McDonald’s aggressive expansion over­came traditional ways of eating. While older generations considered eating with one’s fingers and eating in the street as rude, McDonald’s propagated exactly that. Ger­man conservatives predicted that the family meal would lose its importance and with that families would break apart. In contrast to the United States, where McDonald’s was conceptualized and accepted as a family restaurant, in Germany young people espe­cially enjoyed the informal way of eating. This was part of the youth rebellion against rigid and narrow bourgeois manners and discipline of the 1970s and 1980s.

However, left-leaning intellectuals of this youth movement criticized McDon­ald’s for the way in which it treated its em­ployees: They had to dress in uniforms, were badly paid, and had to submit to a strict system of punishment and rewards. Membership in trade unions resulted auto­matically in losing one’s job. Gunther Wal- raff’s book Ganz unten (Totally down under, 1985) is the most famous literary discussion of these conditions in Germany. Walraff had worked undercover at a Mc­Donald’s restaurant and even pretended to be a Turkish national living in Germany. He detailed the mistreatment at this restau­rant from a very personal perspective. His book was a big success and resulted in high losses for the West German McDonald’s.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, McDonald’s seems to have passed its peak in Germany. For a long time, it continued to grow, especially after the opening of the Berlin Wall and

the access to East Germany that began in 1989. In 1986 McDonald’s had 244 restaurants in West Germany. By 1998 this number had risen to 931 in the unified Germany. In 1999 the company opened the 1,000th McDonald’s restaurant in Berlin-Treptow (former East Berlin). Al­though the number of establishments rose further from 1,008 to 1,244, and the num­ber of guests increased from 680 to 741 million per year from 1999 to 2003, the general growth slowed down from nearly 12 percent to 0.8 percent per year. Due to the public discourse on obesity and to the economic crisis in Germany, people began spending less money at McDonald’s restau­rants. McDonald’s reacted with a new mar­keting and image campaign that included new meal options—such as salads, grilled chicken, fruit, yoghurt, and even milk from ecological farms. Furthermore, Mc­Donald’s began to sponsor sports clubs for children. However, McDonald’s has a bad reputation in Germany. Asked for their opinion on restaurants, Germans ranked McDonald’s consistently at the lowest lev­els. Nevertheless, every second German ad­mits to visiting a McDonald’s restaurant on a regular basis (Wagner 1995, 209). In fact, McDonald’s has a leading position in the German fast food and gastronomic sector and it has been a major factor in changing German eating culture and behavior. Snacking and eating out have become pop­ular because of the pioneering role of Mc­Donald’s in the fast food sector.

Ulrike Thoms

See also Americanization; Chewing Gum;

Coca-Cola; Consumerism

References and Further Reading

Grefe, Christiane. Das Brot der Sieger. Die Hamburger-Konzerne. Bornheim: Lamuv Verlag, 1987.

Levenstein, Harvey. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. New York: Oxford University, 1993.

Pater, Siegfried, and Kathrin Greifeld. McDonald’s beiβt kraftig zu. Gottingen: Lamuv Verlag, 1989.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: What the All­American Meal Is Doing to the World. London: Penguin, 2001.

Wagner, Christoph. Fast schon Food. Die Geschichte des schnellen Essens. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1995.

Walraff, Gunther: Ganz unten. Koln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1985.