Ray Kroc opened his very first McDonald's in 1955 in Des Plaines, Illinois, not that far from where my parents lived for many years. This was one of the very first fast food restaurants. He had purchased the right to develop the hamburger stand from the McDonald brothers. As we all know, he turned that into a colossal international chain. How did he do it? In some respects, his success can be attributed to his adoption of the same kind of standardization and assembly line techniques developed by Henry Ford. Ford had gained market share in the automobile industry by introducing the moving assembly line. But he also had the idea of standardization. He would make every car exactly the same so that customers could be sure of what they were getting. Ford even quipped, any customer can have a car painted any color they want so long as it's black. As we mentioned in unit one of this class, McDonald's developed explicit preconceived routines for the various aspects of food production and interaction with its customer base. Every hamburger should be just like every other hamburger. No wonder hamburger associate, Scott Kaywood, was fired for violating the preconceived routines by doing such things as creatively arranging the ketchup, mustard, and onions into smiley faces when applying the condiments. But what interests us in this unit is the growth and expansion of McDonald's worldwide. To be a success, the company had to appeal to peoples in other parts of the world. How would they fair? And would they be able to continue to offer exactly the same hamburger wherever you were in the world? You can imagine from our discussion of cultural boundaries in the last video that McDonald's had a significant cultural boundary to cross when it moved into India. Hinduism is the dominant religion in large portions of India. In that religion, the cow occupies a special, even sacred, place. It's not eaten. For a chain that prided itself on the beef-based hamburger, this posed a problem. Either the practitioners of Hinduism would have to cross the boundary and eat beef, or McDonald's would have to develop alternatives to the hamburger, or they would have to meet each other partway. In fact, McDonald's choose the latter route. They eliminated the all beef hamburger, their signature item. But they also chose to develop the Chicken Maharaja Mac to replace the Big Mac. The ingredients are listed as sesame seed bun, chicken patties, smokey sauce, cheese, onion, iceberg lettuce, tomato. So they made an effort to adapt their signature cultural product for a different set of cultural preferences. More recently, they have moved further in the direction of adapting to Indian culture. They created their first all vegetarian restaurants with no meat products, but they still had something that looked like their original burger, the McAloo Tikki burger. The ingredients include a potato and peas patty made with Indian spices. This replaces the all beef burger from the original McDonald's. The McAloo Tikki burger is served on a bun, topped with a tomato mayo sauce, onions, and tomatoes. Let's diagram this situation in the way we did the earlier ones involving Karen and her boyfriend's family. Here, MacDonald's is like Karen going to her boyfriend's house. Like Karen, MacDonald's encounters a difference in cultural expectations. For her, it was how eating was initiated at the dinner table by an invitation, versus by a request for permission. In the MacDonald's case, it is the selling of their signature all beef burger versus a widespread prohibition on eating beef, with some potential customers being fully vegetarian. What I think you can appreciate here is that culture moved across the boundary in both directions in McDonald's case. The American style fast food burger moved into India, but McDonald's in India in turn took up the prohibition on beef.
