Day 188 - 15 Nov 95 - Page 47
1 Q. Yes, I see. Are you -----
2 A. I have not, you know, gone round reading Greenpeace
3 stuff about McDonald's. I have no idea. This is
4 information that I was given whilst I was on observation in
5 the store.
6
7 Q. Are you one of those people that disapproves of McDonald's
8 food?
9 A. Of McDonald's?
10
11 Q. Food.
12 A. Food -- not particularly, no.
13
14 Q. So, look down the page, please, to a single line just
15 behalf the last lump of paragraph: "McDonald's essentially
16 sells hamburgers, fatty hamburgers, junk food."
17 A. Yes. That does not mean to say I disapprove. I eat
18 hamburgers myself and enjoy junk food. What I was trying
19 to imply in that is that -- and this is the subjective
20 interpretation that I was making -- that, essentially, the
21 operation is about selling something that is very simple,
22 hamburgers, but the whole corporation view of making it
23 important to the staff and getting the ethos in which they
24 work is about something which inherently is quite trivial,
25 i.e., it is just selling hamburgers; it is not, you know,
26 manufacturing arms or teaching children, or whatever. That
27 is what that sentence means there.
28
29 Q. I see. Is that what the previous sentence means:
30 "McDonald's is like Coca Cola. It is not the real thing"?
31 A. That is the same kind of -- it was an interpretation
32 there about that American company management style. When
33 it says "Coca Cola is the real thing", it is a kind of, you
34 know, it is -- I think Umberto Eco wrote a book about
35 Coca Cola in the States and the way that it was sold as
36 "the Real Thing". So it was a reference, in fact, to
37 that. It is that kind of approach to selling stuff.
38
39 Q. I do not see a value, really, in chopping semantics.
40 I just -----
41 A. Well, I am trying to explain to you that it is not a --
42 that that is not there as a political manifesto, but it was
43 a kind of my interpretation of an approach.
44
45 Q. You are not suggesting that either McDonald's hamburgers or
46 Coca Cola are not what they appear to be?
47 A. No. They are straightforward McDonald's hamburgers,
48 and Coca Cola is Coca Cola. What that sentence is about is
49 a kind of play on the way that things are interpreted.
50
51 Q. Just a few lines above that, there is a paragraph which
52 begins similarly. Do you see: "McDonald's will go into
53 Moscow and require to wait a number of years in order to
54 see a return"; do you see that?
55 A. Yes.
56
57 Q. "As with the Third World, i.e., investment into cattle
58 production in Thailand is not merely meant by the opening
59 of just the one store so far."
60 A. Yes.
