Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,40
be themselves.”
This subversively jaunty, American-style service standard attracted fast-food apparatchiks. Since its opening in 1990, the Pushkin Square store has vied for (and frequently held) the mantle of busiest McDonald’s in the world.* Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Golden Arches would spread to hundreds of locations within the country. By 2007, the average Russian McDonald’s was annually serving 850,000 customers, more than double the average traffic of other McDonald’s markets. “In a country where there was nothing available, McDonald’s was everything,” Russian restaurant magnate Rostislav Ordovsky, who claims to keep a copy of Ray Kroc’s autobiography on his nightstand, told The Wall Street Journal.†
By 2010, the company’s twentieth anniversary in the country, the tally of customers to the Pushkin Square store had surpassed an eye-popping 130 million. As the remembrances and tributes poured in that milestone year, the arrival of McDonald’s came to embody a shorthand for how the country had transitioned from socialism to capitalism. “McDonald’s was not so much a fast-food chain, but rather a symbol of freedom, a symbol of Western values coming to Russia,” one journalist told Russia Today. “No wonder the Communist Party objected so fiercely, but at the end it didn’t have a choice.”
Now, despite sentiments like these, American fast food wasn’t exactly the belated fulfillment of Patton’s dream to march on to Moscow, and McDonald’s did not exactly impose its will on the Russian landscape. After so many years of negotiations just to open up shop, the company also had to undertake major steps to adapt itself to its new environs. For instance, in nearly every market, fast-food companies rely on a network of private suppliers to provide food and materials for their operations. But since no private companies were allowed in the USSR, McDonald’s was required to build the McComplex, a megafactory on the outskirts of Moscow, to produce the supplies for its own Russian stores, such as meat, dairy, and bread.† And whatever couldn’t be produced there—some 80 percent of the three hundred or so ingredients required—had to be imported from abroad.
As the Russian economy shifted toward capitalism, McDonald’s slowly cultivated an arsenal of private local suppliers. By 2014, around the time that Russia invaded Ukraine, 85 percent of the products served at the four hundred–plus McDonald’s outlets in the country came from Russian suppliers. (The last items to be produced at the McComplex were the hamburger buns, which were outsourced just ahead of the twentieth anniversary in 2010.) Ultimately, rising diplomatic tensions with the United States over the Russian 2014 invasion of Ukraine prompted the Russian government to close a handful of local McDonald’s outlets over “numerous violations of the sanitary code.” As with most Putin-styled nationalistic gambits, the closures were criticized for being both politically motivated and self-destructive, given the successful network of local suppliers and that the company employed over thirty-seven thousand Russian workers.*
Among the shuttered stores was the Pushkin Square McDonald’s, the closure of which inspired some laments about Russia’s flirtation with renascent Soviet-era totalitarianism: “Everything about this particular branch of the American fast-food giant was iconic for a person born in Soviet Russia,” wrote Mitya Kushelevich in the Calvert Journal. “Just as St. Petersburg was once considered our ‘window to Europe,’ this restaurant was our ‘window to the world.’” He added, “The message is clear and it’s not aimed at Americans, it’s aimed at us: the window to the world is closing.”
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Although there’s little doubt that McDonald’s enjoyed paying a symbolic yearly rent of one ruble to open its doors in Moscow, not every chain has had to find a way to work within a system as rigid as Soviet-style socialism. However, contrary to popular critique, any American fast-food entity that has found success in a new foreign market has done so by adapting drastically to appeal to the tastes, customs, and mores of the host countries. The results are a fascinating pageant of the world reflected and refracted through an American lens.
Any nineties film buff knows that a Quarter Pounder with cheese is called Le Royal Cheese in France* because of the metric system, but if you’re on the hunt for its kosher counterpart, the McRoyal is available (sans cheese) at certain McDonald’s outlets in Israel any day but the Sabbath. Meanwhile, metric system be damned, there are actually Quarter Pounders on McDonald’s menus in countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. The only little difference is that those burgers are certified halal.
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