I prefer to keep away from things that are happing now, not that there is a lack of interesting things happing. Rather I find that looking at anything so close from a historical perspective simply lacks a whole lot of value, there are people far better than I keeping a historical account of matters. So as I waste time today watching a video on the infoweb (as I sadly do more than I care to admit) I saw an advertisement for McDonalds…
In the advertisement roving groups of McDonalds employees were driving around and handing out ( presumed) free McDonalds breakfast foods to people, the people were VERY happy to receive this food. It I assume it was intended to convey many things, but the three that came across to me were: first McDonalds is giving away free food they are a good company, 2nd I might get free food, people like McDonalds. So why am I talking about it? It is just a perfect, to the T real life demonstration of real cost of capitalism, and here is why:
The core of the advertisement was that McDonalds is giving food away, this is a mischaracterization McDonalds is in the business of selling food, not giving it away I will not get into the semantics of it’s charitable, work ill gotten gains and such. How is this a cost? Time and resources, human capital and public good sentiment! The entire concept here is an insane waste; just to produce this commercial McDonalds expended thousands of man hours, production costs, real resources some of which humanity (as a whole) has limited amounts of. The reason behind it all was to improve as many people’s opinion of McDonalds as possible, so as to increase there likelihood of buying McDonalds. Here we start to see the problem, McDonalds is not “good” for people, and by that I mean on the whole, It uses (or at least used) old dairy cows for it’s beef, and filler (I read fast food nation a wile back). That is probably not a surprise to anyone, but think of it this way: if you were going to cook a meal for your friend, yourself, anyone, would you inject non-food filler to make the meal cheaper? I think it borderlines on poising, but we as a society have almost no problem when someone dose it in a business setting . Far from it, that kind of practice is the publicly accepted norm! This leads to organizations that have almost no interest in public good commanding HUGE amounts of public resources! And for what? What do we gain for this humongous waste? Two things, a very small, very luck group of people get to command tremendous power over their fellow man, 2. In wealthy nations like the U.S. an unskilled, un-educated sixteen year old can work at McDonalds and make twenty thousand dollars in a year. If 20k seems like a small amount then it is a good indication of where you lie on the socio economic ladder, in some nations that is a fortune! I know there are better ways, this kind of stuff is needless, we have real problems on the planet that need to be addresses, but instead we waste time as a species with this kid stuff. Because “freedom” I think that most of the time I hear people talk about it they have no idea what it means, how about we move on to “happy” or “ needs met” . This will not happen with McDonalds as it is ( really most any Co.) there modus operandi is bad(profit), we should not be trying to exploit each other as a form of motivation…
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