Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (10 page)

The new generation was epitomised by Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander, the six- and eight-and-a-half-year-old Scandinavian ‘leaders’ of the infamous BOO.com – the deceased and unmourned internet company. Not only did these two signal the death of the old ways, they rubbed salt in the wounds by getting herds of previously sanguine WMAFPWWSHs to invest millions and millions in their doomed company. It seemed the Age of Aquarius was over at last.

Not so. The oldies fought back. Most of those dotcom enterprises imploded, and the WMAFPs are back in position. Scan any Western corridor of power, and non-whites and women are still noticeable by their absence, and the keys to the top-floor toilets are back in the hands of those with ‘experience’. Quite so.

Is there anything in this cycle for quick-service to learn? Is it better to have a white-haired business leader, who has seen it all before and who trades off some fire and creativity for safety and calmness under fire? Or is it a young person’s game, with success dependent on the ability to work eighty-hour weeks and be ‘in touch’ with the market?

My observation is aimed at being oh-so-helpful. It is neither and both. Sure, it is helpful to be physically fit – but there are many people who are in their sixties who are fitter than the sedentary teenagers of today. Sure, intelligence (as against intellect) helps – but I’ve seen that present in many twenty-year-olds and missing in industry veterans.

The quick-service business is unique in both its range of offerings and its range of people who can succeed at all levels. It does require one particular consistency, and that has nothing to do with age. It requires a mind that has a unique – almost telepathic – insight into the mind of the customer. Because of its very nature, quick-service lives on compromise – and the winning leader knows what is wanted, what is acceptable, and what is off-limits. The trite, conventional rulebook is baloney. The customer, for example, is not always right. To take one case, it is inexcusable for families with young children to leave the restaurant table and floor looking like a hurricane has passed through. The brats (and by that I mean the adults) should be taken out and soundly beaten by a
sous
chef.

The customer, however, always wants one thing – to be treated as you, the owner/manager/leader, would want to be treated if you were in their shoes. If you understand that, and deliver on that, you will succeed – irrespective of age, gender, race, or hair colour.

I have one more piece of advice for WMAFPs, if you are to hold on to power. It is an inviolate law. The arrival of nose hair should signal the disappearance of all visible jewellery. It is mission-critical if you are to remain credible.

23. Trattorias, osterias and big quick-serves

O
ver the years I have refused offers to eat sea slug and to drink the (still warm) blood of a krait (a staggeringly poisonous snake). These were not offered to me on the same night or, indeed, in the same country, but in both cases they were accompanied by a hint that the off-putting appearance of the delicacies was compensated for by their unquestioned aphrodisiac benefits. My wife gave me full marks for both decisions.

As I reflected on such events, however, it occurred to me that I should make this chapter more international. There is a tendency to think of the quick-serve business as essentially American and where it does appear in the rest of the world, it is where McDonald’s or one of the USA’s usual-suspect brands makes an appearance. Indeed, if you ask Londoners what a QSR is, they will probably reply that they don’t know – but that they think they lost 2–1 on Saturday. The confusion here, of course, is that there is an English soccer team called QPR, which coincidentally means nothing outside England (and actually very little in it). If you are all clear on that, I’ll proceed.

My logic in deciding to put an occasional international dimension to this
magnum opus
is that, wherever I have been in the world, cheap and quickly available local food has been readily in evidence – and, indeed, is usually part of the way of life. In many cases, of course, it now co-exists alongside the big US brands, but it is alive and well and there are many lessons that both groups could learn from the other.

Let me start in Tuscany, and more specifically in Florence. It was here the world came out of the Dark Ages via the Renaissance, and some elements of Tuscan culture have gone on to affect the world at large. If you are paid a salary, the genesis of that was when Tuscans were paid in salt (
sale
). This commodity was so precious that taxes were paid on its use, which is why Tuscans dry their tomatoes in the sun and dry their
braesola
beef in the air. It is also why, to this day, they (uniquely, in my experience) use no salt in baking their bread – which is why it tastes like your underpants.

From the top of the hill to the southwest of the city, you can look back down and savour the magnificent panorama. If you do that, the chances are that you will notice something that should be pinned up in every quick-serve boardroom in the world:
there are no visible brand signs
. With tourists topping up a hefty city population, there is a lot of quick-serve food being eaten. With the local pasta and pizza shops, tiny
trattorias
and
osterias
, and the big QSR brand guys all operating inside the city limits, there are a lot of quick-serves. But if you half-close your eyes and look at this glorious city, it seems to have paid no visual price. There are no ugly brand signs. Somehow, it all seems to work without having been turned into a cultural Chernobyl. Now, here’s an exam question: compare and contrast that picture with an average American Strip Center or a UK shopping mall. Quite.

Tuscan food raises a couple of other questions that the conventional quick-serve industry could ponder. If quick-serve is what it says – a quick-service concept (as against quick-preparation or quick-eating) – then arguably this part of the world has spawned a worldwide quick-serve industry with thousands and thousands of unbranded pizza/pasta parlours and
trattorias
all over the planet. What they have managed to do in many of these, however, is something that most quick-serve brands gave up decades ago – which is to defend culture, heritage, and integrity.

There is an east–west line drawn across Europe, south of which whole life patterns are determined by the harvest cycles of the olive tree and the grape vine. Obviously, what used to be rural ways of life have extensively changed in industrialised and modernised societies, and the farming techniques themselves bear no relation to those of the past. But a culture remains, and there is a reverence and respect for food and drink, the quality of the ingredients and the process involved in eating and drinking. That has been lost elsewhere. I defend the conventional quick-serve industry as vigorously as anyone for the good job it does. But it is about eating to live. Somehow, south of Europe’s Olive Line, however cheap and quick the offering, people still live to eat.

You will have gathered that I love Tuscany. It is a delightful and continual paradox. An eternal Italian talent is to make the impossible seem easy, and the easy seem impossible. The stunning buildings – many upwards of a thousand years old – leave you with your jaw firmly dropped. Then you go back to the hotel, and the water in the shower refuses to acknowledge gravity.

Prego.

24. What I know; what I don’t know

T
he quick-service business is, at times, murderously frustrating to write about. It is full of paradox. It is a bit like the Italy I talked about in the previous chapter – making a few complex things look easy but a lot of easy things far too complex. After a quarter of a century in and around the industry, I have decided that the more I know about it, the less I understand. To bring some order to my intellectual chaos, I decided to run an inventory check on my observations.

I was led to do so by the memory of Mayor Giuliani’s speech on 9/11. Frankly, I hadn’t been inspired by the guy before and (even more frankly) have not been over-inspired by him (or his truly awful book) since, but cometh the hour, cometh the man. For a while there, he was great leadership personified. In particular, his
‘This is what I know, this is what I don’t know’
speech rang out like a bell amidst the chaos of that dreadful day.

So, after twenty-five years, this is what I know, and what I don’t know, about quick-service:

• I do know that if you want to be mass-market in the quick-service business, and that if you seek your market distinction on the back of being healthy and/or fresh, you will fail.
  
• The minute you go into any foodservice establishment, everybody makes a simple judgement about it way before anything is served.
  I have seen research that says this is done in the first two seconds.
  More often than not, it is done subconsciously – you are either positive about the place or negative. Once you have formed such an opinion, it takes some changing. I do not know the formula to describe how individuals make that judgement, or even the variables involved. If I did, I would be scary-rich.
  
• I do know that you should, as a rule, back your employees up. I do know that the customer is not always right.
  
• I do know that if you see a huge sign outside a quick-service location offering a price-pointed product promotion, when you get inside you will have difficulty finding it. I do know that because I may have been part of the team that invented it. It’s called bait and switch in another guise.
  
• I do know that you can pay £80 per head for a meal and feel you have received great value. I also know that you can pay £2.50 and feel you have been ripped off.
  
• I do know that the explosion of quick-service branded materials and products inside schools is wrong. And, yes, Burger King pioneered it on my watch –
  mea culpa
  . And it’s happening in Europe as well as the US.
  
• If Jim McLemore and Ray Kroc were starting Burger King and McDonald’s today I do not know that they would seek to grow by franchising. What was an obvious and eminently effective way of rapidly growing a capital-intensive brand half a century ago may not be the right way to do it today. While still using OPM (other people’s money), Starbucks has shown that external investors in a company-run system can be a more-than-viable alternative to the franchisee-operator model.
  
• I met Jim McLemore several times and I do know that, amidst a million faces that have come and gone in my time in business, none has been more friendly or gracious.
  
• More than fifteen years ago, working for GrandMet, we acquired a pasta-based restaurant brand in Switzerland. Apart from the manager, the restaurant staff were paid either Swiss minimum wages, or a pool of money equivalent to 25% (I think) of the monthly net sales to share – whichever was the highest. The staff were, therefore, understandably motivated to optimise customer spending, to get them to come back again, and to keep staff numbers down. There was a waiting list for jobs at the place. I do not know why this (or something like it) hasn’t caught on – everywhere.
  
• I do know that Starbucks could improve same-store sales by fixing its food act.
  
• I do know that quick-service exists in some form or other in every country I have visited. I also know that the US is unique – in that every other country somehow emphasises ingredients. You might still be able to recognise them, or maybe the original colours and flavours come through. Maybe the product shape retains some original ingredient identity. Maybe they just tell you (proudly) about the quality of them. One way or another, they manage it.
  
• I do know that quick-service success is cyclical. Throughout their history, the big brands have responded to new initiatives, pushed forward for a few years and then found that they needed another ‘goosing’. Drive-throughs, breakfasts, value-menus, kids’ deals,
  big
  new products – all these have done the job at milestone points in each brand’s history. I also know that the cycles are getting shorter, that there’s another impetus overdue and that what it is ain’t obvious.
  

Quick-service has its vehement critics. Fair enough – millions have died defending the right to free speech, so you can just rant away, guys. But, can you also tell us what the alternative is? Just how will – literally – billions of people, using quick-service in one form or another, get fed every day? If there is an alternative, this is what I
really
don’t know.

25. Listen ’til I tell you

B
rowsing through statistics recently, as I do frequently on your behalf, I came across a stunner. There are, apparently, 275 million people resident in the US, and only fifteen of them have passports. Of that fifteen, only six have actually been abroad, three of those reluctantly to a family wedding in Denmark. I see it, therefore, as a key role of this chapter to expand the international outlook of the stay-at-homes. Today we hit Ireland.

My father was born in Limerick, while I was born in England. The latter fact enables me to see right through the drivel that manifests itself through a million Irish myths that have spread themselves none too thinly across the planet. The former means it is a land, and they are a people, that can grab and inspire me.