yy How important is it for the McDonald’s customer service strategy to insist on having its employees provide ‘service with a smile’? Although McDonald’s is well known for its Fordist-style food production, its performative work culture including the ‘have-a-nice-day’ greeting required by corporate etiquette, China has had experience using an assembly line approach to feeding many people for over two centuries. As early as the nineteenth century, Chinese public dining halls had perfected breaking down the cooking process into basic procedures performed by a separate team of workers.

McDonald’s brought its own brand of food production and management to China in 1990 when it opened its first restaurant in the city of Shenzhen. In 1992, the world’s largest McDonald’s was opened in Beijing, serving 40,000 customers on that first day. McDonald’s now operates over 2000 restaurants in more than 190 Chinese cities, and opened 300 new outlets in China in 2014.

More than 70 per cent of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide are owned and operated independently by local men and women. In recent years, McDonald’s future growth strategy has focused on China’s smaller urban areas, known as second- and third-tier cities. McDonald’s is not alone as many multinational and domestic companies are now looking to expand outside the traditional economic bases in the larger Chinese centres. McDonald’s faces particularly stiff competition from KFC, a fellow American fast-food restaurant chain, which dominates the Chinese market