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.

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