McDonald’s Is Leaving Russia, but Capitalism Will Be Back

McDonald’s is selling off its 850 restaurants in Russia. This “de-arching” turns the clock back to January 31, 1990, when Big Macs first landed at Moscow and started showing the communist nation the wonders of capitalism — one all-beef patty at a time.In 1996, a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, packaged this special sauce as the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention: “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.”Two years ago, Foreign Policy magazine called this “a beautiful, dumb dream” with the hindsight of 2020. However, now Ukraine alone will have franchises, resetting the McRib paradigm. McDonald’s explained that “the humanitarian crisis caused by the war” meant “business in Russia is no longer tenable, nor is it consistent with McDonald’s values.” It’ll continue to pay the 62,000 staffers and ensure they “have future employment.” So, the story ends as it started, with proof of the free market’s moral superiority over command-and-control. When McDonald’s opened 30 years ago just off Red Square, Russians voted for freedom with their feet, forming a line five football fields long.With each “Beeg Mak” and “Filay-o-Feesh,” Russians gobbled down subversive messages about capitalism. “If you can’t go to America,” a TV commercial said, “come to McDonald’s in Moscow.”Come they did, and they liked it. McDonald’s fed 30,000 that first day and 27,000 filled out applications for 630 jobs. Craig Sopkowicz, in charge of quality control, outlined the training process for the Associated Press. “We are explaining that they must be polite, friendly, and say things like ‘have a good day’ and ‘come back soon.’” At first, customers were suspicious of smiles. “It’s very unusual,” one employee explained, “for Soviet people to be kind and to be polite.” Good customer service was pointless in the nation’s other restaurants. You’d never get a raise or be fired, so why bother? For reasons like these, emigree Dimitri Simes at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for Peace said it would never work, and had to eat his words. Marx-loving Westerners often belittle “hamburger-flipper jobs,” along with capitalism and American culture itself, but here were the results trickling down like ketchup: Russians rejecting the empty promises of communism for the full bellies of liberty.Moscow McDonald’s had everything on its menu, too, not half like competitors. To accomplish such feats, it taught farmers how to innovate. Canada’s McCain Inc. doubled local potato yields. Beef, lettuce, and pickles followed. Attitudes changed. Expectations rose. One customer gushed that she “only waited an hour” for food, and a 14-year-old boy said it tasted great, unlike dirty stolovaya, the Politburo’s boiled-meat answer to Mickey D’s. Ray Kroc, who franchised McDonald’s, loathed the inefficiency endemic to the USSR, and thrived on the competition that ensured the best product for customers at the fairest price.“If any of my competitors were drowning,” he said, “I’d put a hose in their mouth and turn on the water,” and the soda McDonald’s pumped out helped to sink the corrupt Soviet system. Thirty years later, President Putin dreams of reassembling the Evil Empire, and the lines are back at McDonald’s as Russians gobble up the last few fries.It’s private ownership that earned McDonald’s the loyalty of those customers and the power to punish Putinism. Since the parent company owns the real estate where its restaurants operate — a Kroc innovation — it exerts control to a degree that would make Marx choke on his McNuggets.As McDonald’s packs up, it’s a symbolic return to the Soviet Union, but the Russian reaction and Ukrainian resistance remind us that all the tsar’s forces and all the tsar’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpsky together again. “[T]he arc of the moral universe is long,” the popular Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. quote goes, “but it bends toward justice,” and in Russia, it bends into the shape of two golden arches.Someday, McDonald’s will again fire up its grills at Moscow, and Mr. Putin will join his beloved Soviet prison state on the ash heap of history, right where they throw the old French fry grease.

McDonald’s Is Leaving Russia, but Capitalism Will Be Back

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