Fast Food Capitalism & The Lessons of Kudzu

Fast Food Capitalism & The Lessons of Kudzu

In the beginning McDonald's probably wasn't such a bad place. Families could go out for a treat and have burgers, fries, and a shake. Somebody came up with the bright idea to have a drive thru window. Ingenuity & convenience wrapped up as one. Then came standardization. People wanted to have the same burger and fries in Boise, Idaho as they did in Memphis. Again, not a bad idea. Reliability at a place you could trust from coast to coast was a great selling point.

But that's the point in the story when the ugly side of capitalism began to rear its head. First came franchising followed shortly by the need to grow and grow and grow. The antithetical idea of competition and capitalism is truly a mismatched marriage. You see a capitalist does not like competition and does everything he can to drive out and destroy his competitors. This makes for an uneven playing field in which the best doesn't always win. So what you end up with is a giant corporate behemoth with its armada of financial power that comes in to your town and ends up putting your favorite burger joint out of business.

Capitalism is like a shark that dies if it does not continue swimming forward. It's not good enough to have a consistent business that produces a reliable income source. You have to have more - more - more. You have shareholders that must be appeased, and you have Corporatists who need to have their toys. So pretty soon number crunchers come in and figure out ways to bleed every drop of profit they can. They become desperate. It's not feasible to have loyal customers - you have to have every customer.

In this new position of desperate profit making you start first by lowering the pay and benefits of your workforce. Then you cheapen and outsource your ingredients. Then you automate and hire less and less workers, but expect more work from those that you have. It's almost like reverse Darwinism, in which you drive away your best and brightest, and retain a zombie workforce who produce only enough not to get fired. Loyalty and experience are no longer valued, you need a cheap, disposable workforce. Television commercials and politicians don't grow on trees.

In the end, what you end up with is a hollow representation of the business that people originally loved, occupied by a few corporate suck-jobs who crack the whip on their living dead employees. You end up with a round hard frozen disk of pink sludge ammonia and bleach held together by trace amounts of fecal matter and potatoes grown on a slave farm in red China and then shipped across the ocean. You have to coat these things in enough fat, sugar, and salt as to make them "edible". Your town, your state, your country no longer contains any unique qualities at all. So the best intentions of original ideas become like Kudzu - a weed grown in a lab to help stop beach erosion, but which - unintentionally - ends up swallowing and suffocating everything it touches.