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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
McDonald's is under fire all over the world -- with Thursday's bombing only the most recent. Can the fast-food conglomerate withstand the heat of global anti-Americanism?
Dec 5, 2002 | Around the world McDonald's restaurants have been burning. One was torched in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Nov. 20. Another blew up in Moscow on Oct. 19, while less than a month before, a small bomb ripped through a franchise in a suburb of Beirut. According to Reuters, militants arrested in July for the bomb attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi had also been planning to bomb McDonald's. In December 2001, a McDonald's was bombed in Xian, in central China, and in September 2001 a pipe bomb exploded on a McDonald's in Istanbul.
And Thursday, according to early reports, a bomb tore through a McDonald's in Makassar, in eastern Indonesia, killing at least three.
While no one claimed responsibility for the bombing in Turkey (nor, yet, in Indonesia) the others were attributed to Islamic extremists. And, in fact, some Muslim fundamentalists have called for attacks on the burger empire. Arabic-language Web sites watched by scholars because they frequently publish dispatches from al-Qaida, have also targeted McDonald's and other global American companies, according to As'ad AbuKhalil, a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "Bin Laden, Islam and America's New 'War on Terrorism.'"
For more than three decades, the public's craving for those limp little hamburgers has fueled a massive global expansion, making McDonald's the most recognizable company in the world, with franchises in 121 countries. There's a meat-free McNistisima menu for fasting Greek Orthodox in Cyprus, a McRye burger in Finland, a McNifica burger in Argentina, a kosher McDonald's in Israel, and in France, wine to set off the standard greasy fare. But since the end of the Cold War, that growth has also made it a global favorite for those looking to blow up their own little piece of the American empire.
And along the way, the Golden Arches have become a Rorschach test of domestic and international discontent, mirroring anxieties at home and abroad. In United States, the company is blamed for the obesity epidemic, today's hot-button medical panic. McDonald's faces two separate lawsuits from customers claiming the food made them fat. One was filed by 56-year-old 270-pound Caesar Barber, the other by 19-year-old 270-pound Jazlyn Bradley and 14-year-old 170-pound Ashley Pelman. In Europe, McDonald's symbolizes a gauche, encroaching hyperpower and the decline of national epicureanism. To pro-Palestinian activists, McDonald's helps keep Zionist expansion alive by investing in Israel. And to terrorists, it offers a way to strike at the heart of the American global economy. Since 1990, franchises have been bombed or burned by various groups in France, Belgium, Mexico, London, Chile, Serbia, Columbia, South Africa, Turkey and Greece.
Not surprisingly, none of this is beefing up the company's bottom line, though it's unclear precisely how much foreign rancor is hurting the company. McDonald's just closed 175 restaurants overseas, including two in Jordan. It pulled out of three countries entirely -- Bolivia and two in the Middle East that it declines to name. McDonald's did not return calls for this article, but according to Reuters, the company has attributed the shutdowns to shaky overseas economies and a corporate retrenchment necessitated by weak sales in the United States and the fallout from mad-cow disease. Yet the recent upsurge in bombings is more than routine. "I think it is a big threat looming large on the horizon. Until recently, all these cases of arson, vandalism and bombing were sporadic," says Mohammed Elahee, assistant professor of international business at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. Now they come monthly, if not weekly.
Meanwhile, the key to the success of McDonald's abroad, according to Philip Zeidman, a Washington lawyer who writes for Franchise Times magazine, is whether people will continue to buy franchises. But since 9/11, the "unsettled conditions and the reluctance of people to travel ... has reduced the willingness of American companies to send salesmen over to support local operations."
But the bombings have more than an immediate economic impact. They're symbolic of a larger rejection of Americana, the culmination of separate strains of opposition that all spell trouble for U.S. companies that depend on relentless expansion. "Foreign expansion should be the most crucial part of their business strategy because the U.S. market is already saturated," says Elahee. "The only way they can grow is to go abroad and gain market share. Even if [anti-American sentiment] does not reduce their profit significantly right now, there are serious implications for their profitability in the future."
