The appeal of fast food chains isn’t their food: mostly fat, salty, sugary, empty-calorie mush. It’s their speed.
Order, pay, and — bam — your warmed-over burgerpizzachickentaco delight is instantly handed to you.
Yet, for a mega-chain based on speed, McDonald’s has proven to be embarrassingly slow in one key way, leaving it with flat sales and declining appeal. The executives in charge were so stuck on peddling obesity and diabetes for fat profits that they completely missed a mass shift in today’s marketplace: the rise of health-conscious consumers.
The Slow Road to Better Fast Food, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil BendibBut look out. Here comes the McDonald’s marketing machine with a blur of ads and promotional gimmicks touting “A new global commitment to make a world of difference.” Using endearing pictures of children, the Big Mac chain now claims to be all about fresh veggies, fruit, salads, juices, milk, health, and a fuzzy happiness for all.
The Golden Arches Empire is even teaming up with Bill Clinton to give its PR hype a sheen of sincerity. For an undisclosed splash of cash, the fast-food marketer says it is now “global partners” with the Clinton family’s foundation in its bid to sell more nutritious Happy Meals to the world’s kiddos.
However, the fast-food giant is in no hurry to deliver on this pledge. Claiming that getting healthier foods into its supply chain is hard, the CEO snickered that, “We don’t go down to the grocery stores” to stock up on fruits and veggies.
Well, maybe they should. Doing it the McDonald’s way, he says, will take until 2020 to get the more nutritious stuff into every store in the chain’s 20 largest markets.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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