Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,39
hydrogen bomb—that tens of thousands of Muscovites, isolated by their regime, walked away as new members of an American-founded global fraternity, paper cups in hand as keepsakes. The final figure of customers served—thirty thousand on the first day—was not just a company record, but also a historic moment of Cold War thaw. After more than four decades, the United States had outlasted its foe and, as the lone world superpower, would never again be undermined by dastardly Russian schemes. America, sprinting toward the new millennium, would also become freer to satisfy its imperial urges in less oppressive forms than other global powers had. In lieu of colonies, there would continue to be American music and language, science, technology, and popular culture. To be sure, a few scattered military bases here and there and a little expression of economic and political clout. And there would be fast food.
The end of the Cold War arrived with exquisite timing for American fast-food companies, whose momentum had started to buckle as the sheer number of stores hit a saturation point in the United States. So, the chains turned their expansionist gaze outward toward countries with rising middle classes or newfound prosperity, expanded trade ties with the United States, or aspirations to enter the global market. One of the central complaints about the international expansion of fast-food chains (and along with the reach of processed-food peddling conglomerates) is that the footprint of US companies abroad is a form of cultural hegemony, a dynamic that upends traditional diets and foodways, kills national culinary traditions, and foists American dietary norms and values upon unsuspecting communities.
Though some recent studies of rising obesity rates in developing countries offer some alarming evidence of this effect, fast food’s interactions abroad have been less monolithic and more culturally significant than some might expect. In many ways, fast food channels a quaint, almost certainly outdated national image of the United States around the world—approachable and agreeable, charismatic and casual, evangelical and democratic, hectoring and optimistic.
Yuri Chekalin was part of the original team at the Pushkin Square McDonald’s. From a pool of the 27,000 applicants that responded to a newspaper ad placed by the company, Chekalin secured one of the coveted 630 crew jobs. In addition to learning technical skills, his training also included surreal-seeming instruction for a hospitality gig in the Soviet Union, such as lessons on smiling, making and maintaining eye contact with customers, and committing to a foreign-seeming palette of polite phrases such as “How can I help you?” and “Come back soon.”
It might be too easy to read this American imperative for cheeriness as an attempt to civilize. But part of what made McDonald’s inroads into the USSR so revolutionary was that it inverted a system in which the average consumer held no power. (In Soviet Russia, you wait on waiter!) The eternal shortages and rations of the state-controlled economy, which had worsened in the late 1980s, created a dynamic that placed customers arbitrarily at the mercy of commodity purveyors, whether it was a grocer, clerk, cashier, or waiter. “In the Soviet Union, when you walked into a restaurant, the first thing they would look at is your clothes,” Chekalin told NPR’s Alix Spiegel in 2016. “And then they would, you know, judge if they want you in this restaurant or if they’d just rather take break.”
The assertive McDonald’s diktat about smiling and manners wasn’t just an effective signal of something new, but a form of democratic samizdat that, in many ways, made the food itself secondary to the experience. “There is a lesson to be drawn from this for the country,” said Tatyana Podlesnaya, a schoolteacher and a first-day pilgrim to the Pushkin Square McDonald’s. “What is killing us is that the average worker does not know how to work and so does not want to. Our enthusiasm has disappeared. But here my meal turned out to be just a supplement to the sincere smiles of the workers.”
More than twenty-five years later, Chekalin echoed this sentiment. “A lot of Russian people walking into that McDonald’s, they also acted differently,” he went on. “They were friendlier.… Everywhere else you go, it was just gloomy and there were troubles, stress. And you come to McDonald’s and it’s, you know, everybody’s always happy, and you see smiles. You can stay there for as long as you want. Nobody’s going to kick you out. And so it was just a great place to hang out. People really felt they could just relax and