Would you like relish with that court ruling?

chrispagefiction — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:53:58 +0000

A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. (Read here.) I love stories like this that illustrate the petty mindedness, rule obsession and control freakery of super-sized corporations.

After all, it was Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, who said:

“We have found out … that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

The quote sounds like a dictum of Stalinism, rather than from a paradigm of western individualism. It is one of those nice structural fractures that reveals the reality behind the myth. And both the story and the quote are very Weedy.

(At the end of the linked story, sense was enforced by a court that ruled that McDs were wrong to fire the employee and awarded damages against the company.)

Chris Page » McDonald’s

Would you like relish with that court ruling?