2009 winner for best marketing bungle
Posted on | March 20, 2009 | 2 Comments
So maybe thinking I’d have time to post regularly this winter was a big oversight. Blog writing is just one of those plates that just doesn’t stay spinning. It’s a joke, really, always picking it off the stage like this and giving it another spin. Kind of bad for the show.
But that’s not the best joke out there right now. McDonald’s is hilarious. Their latest billboard ad campaign had me kickin’. Next to a frothy cup of seductive hot drink, their corporate message to the world is “Rich, so you don’t have to be.”
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the reassurance that public interest has finally trumped profiteering. It’s so good to know I have a big brother dressed in red and yellow that will always be rich so it doesn’t matter if I’m poor. In fact, I’m rather fond of the roles, and it’s good to know big brother is doing all he can to keep the roles like they are. Kinda like the other big brother I have dressed in white and blue with “always low prices.” You know, what would we do without them? I mean all the cheap stuff and jobs they provide – what did we really think we had back before they existed? The ways my big brothers help the little guys even have some pretty cool names like mcdonaldization, walmarting, disneyfication, and cocacolonization.
This is irony at it’s best (or worst). You know, the disparity between the rich and the poor is now greater in America than any other nation on earth. We used to brag about the opposite. Not any more. Not with Disney’s CEO making as much money in an hour as it would take a Disney garment maker in Bangladesh 210 years to make.
So social reformers are crying their heads off along with the political and monetary reformers. And the common folk are bored to death of all those editorials that hint of anything with “crisis” in the headline. Social and political reform might not be a bad place to start. Monetary reform might be an even better place to start, especially if it has anything to do with redoing 1913. But I think Chris Hedges is most right when he says, “At this point, Henry Paulson can’t save us, but Dorothy Day can.”
Now here’s some down home irony. In a couple weeks, I hope to participate with friends in the annual fundraising walk for the Hershey Ronald McDonald House. Why? Because they offered care and hospitality to my family a year ago when our son Brennan spent a week in the Hershey Medical Center. I’ll never forget what it meant to me. And yes, a likeness of my big brother sat in the entry way. And no, the whole ordeal didn’t convince us to eat at McDonalds or to say that corporate injustice and crappy food is forgiven in the face of corporate benevolence. It just convinced us that it’s not worth demonizing anybody, because all have a potential for good.
I wonder when there will be a local fundraising walk for the Dorothy Day House. Maybe what the Catholic Worker Movement does speaks for itself.
Tags: corporate injustice > dorothy day > hershey medical center > mcdonaldization > McDonalds > poverty > public interest > ronald mcdonald house > wealth disparity
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:55 pm
lol. i saw that this weeknd too.
oh before you eat at the arch cafe again, plant a bunch of potatoes in the garden and then go and eat fries… grrrrrr…
May 4th, 2009 at 12:18 am
I see this one so often. I liked your little rant, I share the same one. I heard your doing that community gardening thingy in lan, brilliant…I’m working on finding an apartment in the city, for me and a friend, would be interested in whole gardening thing, once I move. I was wondering where it is, how much a plot is and what you guys think of it.