Questions :

1.how does this article refer to globalizationisandsome key detailsabout it; reflect on them;

2.are they complimentary or contradictory definitions?

3.Do they all seem to have a place or do some cancel others out?

4. Do yousee what a huge phenomenonglobalizationis when you look at all the definitions together?

The American Global Cultural Brand

By: Lane Crothers

While American movies, music, and television programs are important parts of the U.S. global pop culture, they are not the whole of it. The values, ideals, mores, attitudes, behaviors, norms, and rituals that embody life in the United States can be found embedded in a host of other artifacts. Consumer goods and other values combine with the products of the audiovisual pop culture industry to created a seemingly seamless, integrated American popular culture that can be found almost everywhere in the world.

This chapter examines some of the other features of globalized American pop culture. Whether the product in question is a car, a restaurant, clothing, or a sport, American brands, styles, and even identities have had a profound impact on markets, values, and attitudes across the planet. Moreover, the relatively new phenomenon of social networking adds layers of complexity and subtlety to both the marketing and the branding of pop culture artifacts. Understanding the impact of American popular culture on the process of globalization necessarily entails exploring at least some of the other ways American pop culture crosses national and cultural boundaries. This chapter offers a partial look at this multifaceted phenomenon.

FRANCHISING AMERICA

One factor crucial to the global expansion of American popular culture across the globe has been a commercial concept known as the franchise. A franchise is a contractual relationship between a company that controls a brand label for a good or service and private individuals and companies that buy the right to use the brands name and products but otherwise operate the business on their own. Such arrangements have proved to be useful, flexible means for corporations to spread their brands at minimal risk to their bottom lines. After all, when a company owns a storewhich does happen, even in some franchised businessesthe company assumes the risks associated with purchasing or leasing business space, hiring staff, marketing and building a market, and other matters. If a company-owned store fails, it costs the company a substantial amount of money. By contrast, in a franchise arrangement, the franchisee accepts most of this risk. As a consequence, franchisers can offer franchise opportunities in places and markets that might be too uncertain for the company to invest in otherwise. The franchise brand can therefore spread more quickly and into otherwise unreachable markets more easily than could an unfranchised company.

Franchises have a number of advantages that have encouraged their use. Some of these are practical and some are matters of loyalty and brand identity. From a franchisee's point of view, for example, buying a franchise can significantly reduce the cost and complexity of starting a business. One does not need to establish contracts with local vendors to provide things like hamburger to a restaurant; instead, the franchiser has preexisting networks of vendors the new franchisee can tap into to get the goods needed to run the business. In addition, franchisers usually have management-training programs so that new franchisees can learn how to recruit and manage their employees. The franchiser is also likely to have a complex set of rules and regulations defining workers' rights and responsibilitiesa fact that means that franchisees do not have to develop rules and policies on their own. Even rules governing the layout of floor space simplify the task of opening and managing a new business. By buying a franchise, the new owner gives up some freedom to run things as he or she might wish but also simplifies running the business by relying on the skills and expertise of the franchiser.

Another major benefit of the franchise derives from the concept of economies of scale. Franchisers typically buy large volumes of goo^s and services from vendors. They are able to negotiate price reductions from these vendors that smaller purchasers (who are often local, individually owned businesses) are not able to negotiate: vendors accept lower prices for bulk sales in order to get the contract for the major sale. Franchisers pass these cost reductions on to their franchisees, meaning that the franchisee can often provide a good or a service to the customer at a lower price than an independent business can. If necessary, then, franchisees can beat independent businesses on price, enhancing their market competitiveness.

Franchises also provide regularity and predictability to both franchisees and consumers. Colas from the same franchise taste pretty much the same wherever they are concocted, just as the hamburgers taste the same, just as the coffee tastes the same. Consumers can be pretty sure that they will get a predictable and safe product from any of a chain's stores, just as franchise owners can be pretty sure that competing franchises will not be opened in the areaat least not competing franchises from the same company. This uniformity may strike some people as unfortunate, since it often entails the destruction of local businesses unable to compete with the franchise's economies of scale, but given a choice, consumers seem to flock to franchise businesses instead of local ones. Predictability and regularity are powerful market forces.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to buying a franchise is not managerial at all. Instead, it is perceptual. Franchisers invest substantial amounts of money establishing their brand identities. The most important part of the process of building brand identity is advertising. Franchisers spend a great deal of money advertising

their product's label to a broad audience. This advertising both builds brand awareness and creates a public image for the franchiser's goods and services. For example, Ford, the automobile manufacturer, once offered a campaign centered on the notion that "quality is job one," suggesting that if consumers wanted safe and reliable cars they should buy Fords. Starbucks' advertising suggests it is not just a coffee shop but a destination for those who have discriminating taste and demand superior coffee. McDonald's offers decent food served quickly in a way that is supposed to mimic the feeling of home. And Coca-Cola ties itself to wholesome imagery, once promising that it would "like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company."

This brand identity-making is not an accident. Franchisers establish brand identities to create and maintain markets for their products. One goes to Starbucks not simply because of the coffee; one goes to Starbucks to be seen as someone whopoestn Starbucks Starbucks-pqers form a subculture with their own rituals and normsin this case organized around elaborate processes for ordering cups of coffee; Nike buyers "just do it." Mountain Dew drinkers "do the Dew." "Nothing," the model-turned-actress Brooke Shields once declared, "comes between me and my Calvins" (a brand of blue jeans).

Franchisers augment this subcultural identity-making by physically labeling their customers and turning consumers into walking (and driving) advertisements for their products. Coffee cups can be emblazoned with the brand label, as can shopping bags. Automobiles and many brands of clothing come with labels that advertise the product's makerand label the driver/wearer/user as someone who uses that company's goods and services. Some consumers respond to this labeling and identification by buying gift items emblazoned with the product's labels. Brand identity is a central feature of creating and maintaining markets for a franchiser's products.

Buying a franchise therefore means buying a brand identity and its associated market. Franchisees are largely freed of the need to convince consumers to come to their store. Instead, franchisees merely have to inform consumers about the location of their stores in order to give customers who appreciate the brand's identity the chance to shop for that store's productsand to be seen to shop for those goods and services.

Through franchising, consumers across the world have become aware of the brand identities of American clothing, restaurants, vehicles, sports, and innumerable other things. Brand identity can combine with price advantages to make American goods popular with foreign consumers, and of course American tourists appreciate the predictability of franchise brands. People across the globe seem willing to pay to associate themselves with American brands of clothing and food and other products. America has become, at least in part, a global franchise.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FRANCHISE

Franchising began in Europe. It began as a way to link taverns to specific types of beer: at franchised pubs, only beer of a particular brand would be sold. However,

franchising never became as important in Europe as it did in the United States. Whether for reasons of an entrepreneur-friendly culture or the vast geographic size of the United States, franchising began in America in the 1800s and quickly expanded. It took off after World War II when the automobile came to dominate American life.1

The earliest American franchises were in manufactured goods. As early as the 1850s, suppliers like Isaac Singer and the makers of the McCormick Harvesting Machine offered sewing, machines and tractors to franchisees, who sold these products out of their stores. The franchiser, then, did not own the store in which the franchisers goods were sold. Instead, the franchiser sold the goods to the franchisee. The franchisee then made a profit (or tried to) by marking up the price of the item, offering service, and perhaps earning incentive payments from the franchiser if the company sold a large number of units.

While Singer's first attempts at a franchise ultimately failed, the Singer model was adopted by the automobile industry as it grew. The first automobile franchise was granted in 1898, just a decade or so after the first recognizably modern car had been invented. Auto franchises allowed dealers to establish businesses at which to sell and service vehicles purchased from the manufacturer at a discount. This arrangement remains the way most cars are sold today.

The franchising concept branched out into food and services starting in the 1880s. The first truly successful franchise of a food product was Coca-Cola, the invention of an Atlanta, Georgia, druggist named John S. Pemberton. Pemberton, who sold the formula for his concoction before his death in 1888, mixed kola root, caffeine, and coca extract into a sweet, soothing formula. The person who bought the secret formula (which remains secret to this day), Asa Candler, created a franchising deal in which the Coca-Cola Company sold premixed syrup base to franchisees. (Coca was eventually removed as an ingredient of the formula.) The franchisees then added water, bottled the soda, and marketed it in their areas of operation. In time, as is discussed later in this chapter, Coca-Cola, aka Coke, would be bottled and drunk around the worldalways with the same base syrup shipped from the Coca-Cola Company.

Restaurants were added to the list of goods and services that were franchised early in the twentieth century. After Roy Allen bought the formula for a new drink called root beer from an Arizona druggist in 1919, he and his partner, Frank Wright, founded the A&W restaurant franchise in 1922. A few years later Harland Sanders invented a flavor packet that he added to the fried chicken he had learned to cook quickly at the restaurant he ran at his gas station and motel complex in Corbin, Kentucky. He began selling the flavor packets and licensing his quickcook technology to other entrepreneurs in 1930. While that business ultimately failed, his model became the foundation for the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant chain. In the same period, Howard Johnson, a pharmacist from Quincy, Massachusetts, began to sell ice cream and a small selection of other items in his store; he franchised the concept in 1935. In time both the menu and the ice cream choices expanded, and distinctive, orange-roofed Howard Johnsons restaurants spread across the United States.

The emergence of the automobile as the major mode of American transportation after World War II provided the opportunity for massive expansions in franchising across the United States. Americans began traveling on wide, well-built highways in comfortable cars. They also moved to suburbs with their attendant large yards and commuter lifestyles. Travelers sought reliable, consistent places in which toatand spend the night; car owners desired the security of knowing they could get their cars serviced at reliable, reputable chains across the United States; and consumers with money to spend pursued whatever fashion, music, or fad was hot at the moment. (One of Harland "Colonel" Sanders's innovations was to put a facsimile of one of the rooms of his motel inside his restaurant so that potential guests could see the quality of his rooms. Women wishing to use the restroom in his restaurant had to actually enter the display room in order to reach their destination.) Franchised restaurants, hotels, automobile service chains, and clothing stores rushed in to fill this market. Chains like McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Holiday Inn, and Western Auto grew dramatically.

Table 14.1 summarizes the franchises that have at least one thousand locations outside the United States. Fast-food restaurants are disproportionately represented, although service industries like real estate sales, tax preparation, and janitorial services also make the list. The chain of 7-Eleven convenience stores is by far the largest international chain; however, McDonald's remains the sales champion among global franchises. Subway, notably, now has more restaurants than McDonald's overall, but McDonald's has more than a $60 billion advantage in global sales. In any case, it is clear that the American way of eating is spreading around the world in ever-expanding networks of franchises.

Fast food, services, and convenience stores are of course not the only global franchises for American products, goods, and services. Ford and General Motors sell millions of cars globally, for example. (Chrysler, the third major American car manufacturer, has recently been taken over by Italian manufacturer Fiat.) Even in what have been relatively hard times in the American automobile industry, Ford sold more than two million vehicles outside North America in 2010.2 General Motors, long the world's largest car company until the recent global slowdown in auto sales, controls the Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, Opel, Vauxhall, and Holden brands. It sold more than five million automobiles in areas outside North America in 2010. This included 1.3 million vehicles in Europe, and some 800,000 in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. It sold almost 3.4 million vehicles in Asia, including 2.26 million in China alone.3 Buick is particularly popular in China.

Other aspects of American cultural life have also expanded across the world in recent years. The megaretailer Walmart has a global presence now, and it influences both how products are created and how they are sold to people around the world. For example, Walmart has 352 stores in China, and its focus on the quality of its products is pressuring Chinese producers and vendors to increase the quality of the goods and services they provide to Chinese consumers.4 The National Football League (NFL) now plays a regular season game in London every year. The National Basketball Association (NBA) is aggressively seeking to expand in global markets; playerslike the now-retired Chinese-born Yao Ming provided the league with entree into that vast nation.

Not all American goods and services are marketed globally by franchises, of course. Some companies own the stores in which they sell their products globally, and other distinctively American items like blue jeans have developed a global presence separate from the original manufacturers' control. Starbucks, for example, does not offer a traditional franchise to its operators. Instead, it owns most of its stores, but it licenses some independent businesspersons to run particular stores on its behalf. Such arrangements have made it possible, as of October 2011, for Starbucks to operate 17,003 stores in fifty-eight countries worldwide.5

Whether franchised or not, brands like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and 7-Eleven carry an American identity and an American set of cultural values and practices to the larger world. They are as embedded in American culture as

movies, music, and television programming are. They offer entangling threads in which American pop culture spins into global prominence.

AMERICAN BRANDS, GLOBAL PRESENCE

This section of the chapter explores the ways in which specific American brands, franchises, and cultural forms have been integrated into global life. In particular, it offers brief histories of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and blue jeans as case studies of the many ways American pop culture has gone worldwide. These companies and products offer insight into brands that have been long established as global forces. Their international prominence offers evidence of the power of American popular culture on a global scale.

Note that the fact that this section focuses on these companies and products should not lead anyone to the conclusion that they stand as the examples of American pop culture corporate globalization. The discussion offered here of how these companies and products have grown to global prominence is intended to explore the ways in which American pop culture has gone global. It is not an exhaustive list of those corporations that have spread across the planet. Indeed, both Coca-Cola and McDonalds are but branches of a complex tree of fast-food and beverage companies with a global scope. The analyses offered here are presented as a way to explore the ways American brands became global. While each is presented individually, they and the other forces of American pop culture globalization have a collective impact on the people who use American products and integrate them into their lives.

A Brief Global Cultural History of Coca-Cola

The Coca-Cola label has been called the most profitable brand in world history.Interbrand,an international consulting firm, lists the international trademarks that are understood to have generated the highest economic returns for their owners. Only those that generate more than one-third of their sales outside the United States are considered. For 2010,Interbrandestimated the Coke brand to be worth $70 billion, far outpacing the next biggest soda giant, Pepsi, at $14 billion. Coca-Cola exceeded the brand value of the second-place company, IBM, by $5.5 billion.6 It is a global powerhouse.

This is quite a change for a company that started as a store-mixed, coca- extract-laced drink developed to supplement sales at an Atlanta, Georgia, pharmacy. John S. Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, developed the drink in May 1886 and sold it from a local pharmacy. Pemberton sold the rights to his drink to several people before his death in 1888; by 1891 Asa Candler bought back all the rights Pemberton had sold. This cost Candler $2,300. Candler and his brother John joined with several other local businessmen to incorporate the Coca-Cola Company in 1892. The company's distinctive, script-based logo was registered as an official trademark in 1893.7 It has gone on to the status of global icon.

Coca-Cola is a mix of a secret syrup, sugar, and carbonated water. The key to its success is its syrup, which has been manufactured on a large scale since 1894.

In the company's early years, the syrup was shipped to pharmacies and other stores. These stores used so-called "soda jerks"so named because they pulled the large handles that controlled the flow of the syrup and water like draft beer is dispensed in bars todayto mix the sodas on the spot. In 1894, a Vicksburg, Mississippi, businessman named Joseph Biedenharn decided that he would bottle Coca-Cola so that his customers could store the concoction at home or work rather than needing to come to the store for a soda. Bottled Coca-Cola has been available ever since.

Nationwide franchising began in 1899. A group of Chattanooga, Tennessee, businessmen secured the rights to bottle Coca-Cola across the United States that year. However, they quickly discovered that they could not raise enough capital to build bottling plants around the United States to serve the national demand for the product. They identified bottling partners across the country and created zones of operation guaranteeing each control of a specific territory. Over a thousand bottling plants were established across the United States in the next twenty years.

Coca-Colas growth was international in these years, although not to the degree it would later enjoy. Asa Candler's oldest son took a batch of syrup with him on a trip to England in 1900, for example, and the company received an order for five gallons of the concoction from the UK later that year. The company had more success in Latin America and American territories in the Far East. Bottling plants opened in Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam in the early years of the twentieth century. Plants also opened in Canada and France by 1920. In 1926, Coca-Cola established an international marketing unit, and in 1928, the company shipped one thousand cases of the soda to the Olympic Games in Amsterdam. This began a long association between the company and the worlds premiere sporting event. The soda was bottled in forty-four countries by the late 1930s. That number would double through the 1960s.

In a striking example of the cultural relevance and significance Coca-Cola had achieved by the middle of the twentieth century, Coca-Cola became part of the U.S. war effort during World War II. While in North Africa in 1943, for example, General Dwight Eisenhower's headquarters sent a message to the company asking it to ship enough material to build ten bottling plants. It also requested that three million bottles of the soda be shipped to the frontimmdiately,along with supplies needed to fill a quota of 6 million bottles a month.

The Coca-Cola Company also made a commitment to provide five-cent bottles of Coke to all servicemen regardless of what it cost the company to produce the drink. In all, Coca-Cola shipped materials for sixty-four bottling plants around the world, including to far-flung outposts like New Guinea. Military personnel drank some five billion bottles of soda during the wara number that does not include soda and automatic fountain dispensaries. By the end of the war, a generation of Americans, and for that matter a generation of people touched by American military operations around the world, had been introduced or otherwise exposed to Coca-Cola.

While Coca-Cola was the dominant soda brand in the United States in the postwar period, competition from its main rival, Pepsi, induced the company to make what, in Retrospect, was one of the biggest marketing and branding mistakes of all time. Concerned that Pepsi's sweeter formula was stealing market share from its products, Coca-Cola executives initiated plans to replace traditional Coca-Cola with a new formula labeled, simply enough, New Coke. The new formula had won numerous blind taste tests against both the old formula of Coca-Cola and Pepsi as well, and in 1985, company leaders decided that it was time to launch a new chapter in the product's history. "Old" Coke ceased production and New Coke was presented as "the" Coca-Cola.

• say the new product flopped would be kind. Executives received hate mail about the new flavor even as consumer lobbying groups formed to boycott the new drink and demand the return of "real" Cokeall in days before the Internet made such communications comparatively easy. Company claims that sales were good and the new formula was popular were met with howls of derision. National news broadcasts covered the marketing disaster. When news leaked that the original Coca-Cola was to return to store shelves in July 1985, barely three months after New Coke was presented to the world as "Coke," then-U.S. senator David Pryor (D-Arkansas) announced on the floor of the Senate that the news "was a meaningful moment in American history."8 "Old" Coke, renamed "Classic," was marketed alongside New Coke until New Coke was pulled from the market entirely. (It should be noted that by the end of 1985, Coca-Cola's market share had grown dramatically, leading some to conclude that the introduction of New Coke was a cunning advertising strategy. The company has always denied this.) In January 2009, the company announced that Coca-Cola Classic would drop the "Classic" from its name. (Notably, the word "Classic" on the label had been reduced in size several times in the twenty years between New Coke's rise and the decision to remove "Classic" from the soda's package.) Coke would be just Coke again.
• the heart of this disaster was the failure to appreciate the iconic position Coca-Cola had come to hold in American society. Coca-Cola had worked hard to make itself a brand affiliated with the notion of America itself. Changes to the brand meant change to the emotional connection many consumers felt toward not just the soda but also the idea of the soda's existence as a cultural touchstone. To drink Coke was to be an American, and if Coke could change then so could Americaand not in a good way. Changing to New Coke was a betrayal of the brand identity that Coca-Cola had worked hard to create.

Notably, Coca-Cola faced a similar, if less intense, controversy during Christmas season 2011. The company decided to change the color of its cans from red to white during the Christmas holidays to honor polar bears and to raise awareness of the loss of Arctic habitat for the bears and other regional wildlife. The campaign caused confusion among some drinkers who thought they were buying Diet Coke, which is sold in silver cans, and got "real" Coke instead. But others were outraged that Coke had abandoned its iconic red color. Coca-Cola, it seems, had to be offered for sale only in red to be "real" Coca-Cola.

Notably, the popular sense that Coca-Cola had an iconic, cultural identity that ought not be violated by silly issues like marketing and flavor was in many ways itself a result of Coke's efforts to turn itself into a quintessentially American product.

From its early decision to use the script-lettered Coca-Cola label (drawn by John S. Pembertons partner and bookkeeper, Frank Robinson), the company showed remarkable creativity and success in branding its product. In 1916, for example, the company created the iconic Coke contour bottle as a tool to ensure consumers were gettingand choosingCoca-Cola instead of a competitors products. (This shape was granted a trademark by the U.S. Patent Office in 1977.) In 1929, the company introduced a distinctive fountain glass to be used in pharmacies, restaurants, and other venues that served Coke products; this glass is still used in many restaurants and can be purchased for home use as well. In 1933, the company introduced the automatic fountain dispenser at the Chicago Worlds Fair. This device allowed consumers to pour their own sodas as the water and syrup were mixed in the dispenser rather than by a soda jerk. It made it possible for millions more drinks to be dispensed than ever could be before.

Coke also invented Santa Claus. Or, put another way, it was Coca-Colas marketers who helped establish the now-classic vision of KrisKringleas a jolly fat man with a white beard dressed in red from top to bottom. Coca-Cola co-opted Santas image in an effort to get people to drink soda in the winter, and in the process created the modern image of Santa Claus. Prior to 1931, when a series of magazine ads for Coca-Cola featuring Santa Claus first hit American magazines, Father Christmas had been portrayed in an array of ways. In some cases he was seen as an elf; in others as a tall, thin, somewhat austere man. (This image remains popular in some parts of the world.) At times he wore a clerical robe, and at other times he was dressed in the furs of a Norse hunter. When cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa in the U.S. Civil War era, the character's clothes were tan, although in time Nast changed them to red.

Consumers became so obsessed with the images Coke produced that they actually scanned each years drawings for changes. One year, when Santa appeared without a wedding ring, people wrote in wondering about Mrs. Claus. Another year readers asked why Santas belt was on backwards. An icon was thus made, courtesy of Coca-Cola.

What was true for Santa Claus was true for a stunning array of consumer collectibles as well. It is possible to collect a vast amount of Coca-Cola labeled products, ranging from trays and bottles and bottle caps to advertising, games, smoking paraphernalia, and company gifts.9 If it has a logo on it, it is a potential collectible; if it is older and genuine, it is likely to have substantial economic value. But of course economic value is not the only reason people collect: surrounding oneself in Coca- Cola labeled products links one to the brand and the values it expresses. Many people collect Coca-Cola for its distinctive colors and logos rather than its potential sales value. It is a subculture.

It is also a global symbol. At least two international movies have put Coca-Cola paraphernalia at the center of their films. The 1980 cult hit The Gods Must Be Crazy makes the brands distinctive glass bottle the point of dramatic tension around which the movie hinges, for example. When a Coke bottle falls from a passing airplane into the hands of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the tribes people find it useful for grinding food and other matters until, in a fitxjf jealousy, one tribesperson hits another over the head with the bottle. One member, Xi, decides that the gods were crazy to give them the bottle and goes on a quest to return it to its rightful owners. Along the way, viewers get a travelogue of life in the modern world as seen through the eyes of one tribesman and his Coke bottle.

Another film, The Cup, a cult hit from 1999, is less focused on Coke, but uses one of its iconic symbols, its distinctively colored aluminum can, as an evocative introduction to the film. The movie is set in a Buddhist monastery in India filled with young monks obsessed by the World Cup soccer tournament. It chronicles their efforts to rent a satellite dish and television so they can watch the competition despite the supposed asceticism of life in a monastery. The film opens with a scene of young monks using a Coke can as a soccer ball in their courtyard. An older monk interrupts to take the can to his master; we see that the master has used many such cans to create oil lamps in his study. Coke is quite literally everywhere and quite literally recognizable around the world.

Along with its iconography, Coca-Cola has become a force of economic globalization. At one level, this is the result of the substantial economic impact Coca- Cola has around the world. The opening of bottling plants brings an array of other jobs and services to the communities that house them. Coca-Cola bottling facilities rely on local water and local sweeteners to mix with the base syrup, meaning that local bottlers have to establish relationships with local providers for these services. Bottles, whether plastic or glass or aluminum, have to be produced locally, delivered to the plant and used to store the soda. Trucking firms have to hire drivers to deliver the product to the many venues in which it is sold. Then, in a process known as the multiplier effect, the employees of the trucking company and the water provider and the sweetener company and the employees of the bottling plant and the places that sell Coke all have money to spend on new goods and services. People with money in their pockets tend to go to restaurants and movies and buy cars and better televisionsor televisions in the first place. In turn, this financial boon causes other businesses to hire workers as restaurant servers and car sales staff and television repair people. Bringing a large business like a Coca-Cola bottling facility to a new area is expected to promote economic growth broadly throughout the community.

Yet Coke is not always perceived as a good force in global affairs. In part this is because the reality of local economic development is never as clearly beneficial as the process just described. Corrupt officials and their cronies do better than they ought to from the deals the company strikes in the local area, and many people do not see the economic benefit that is expected under the logic of the multiplier effect. There are also concerns that as local suppliers of water, sweeteners, and bottles and distribution networks expand to meet the company's demands, they replace rain forests and other natural areas with sugar fields and build roads across previously undisturbed countryside, displacing endangered animals and plants in the process. The diversion of large amounts of water from their natural sources to satisfy the demand for soda can likewise harm the local environment.

Many people also wonder if addicting the planet to sweetened, caffeinated beverages in a world of limited resources and growing obesity is really a very good idea from a public health perspective. Indeed, since sodas are American beverages, the criticism arises that American soda manufacturers are contributing to making the world obese, all while destroying the local culture, flavors, and styles of consumption innate to other cultures. For some, then, Coke is a symbol of cultural degradation rather than a tool of global economic development.

One other critique has been aimed at Coke: its alleged role in repressing global labor movements, particularly in Colombia. Organizers of the "Killer Coke" campaign argue that Coca-Cola officials have been complicit in or have actually caused the murders and/or kidnappings of numerous labor organizers at Coke bottling plants in Colombia.10 Coca-Cola, then, is seen to be a central player in the efforts of global megacorporations to dominate the worldwide labor market by keeping costs low and profits high. The company, of course, denies these claims.

Regardless of one's position on the economic or moral significance of the Coca-Cola Company, it is clear nonetheless that it is an iconic representative of American pop culture across the globe. Its products, its logos, its values, and its brand identity have found a worldwide market and a worldwide audience. It is hard to imagine going pretty much anywhere on the planet that is inhabited by people who have ever had contact with groups from the outside world without expecting to be able to buy a Coke or a similar product when visiting. Indeed, it seems probable that one could visit a tribe or group that has pretty much been left alone by the outside world and find, quite by chance, someone wearing a Coca- Cola T-shirt or, a la TheJJods Must Be Crazy, using-a Coke honh^jyjyinol It is a global symbol of American popular culture.

McDonalds has also shaped consumer culture. Even something as seemingly common as standing in a line to wait one's turn to order from a preset and limited menu is in fact a cultural adaptation. As McDonald's restaurants opened, their employees and advertising had to teach potential customers how to behave. For example, employees at the Moscow McDonalds moved up and down the line explaining that at McDonald's smiles were an expected part of the service and should not be confused with threats or a form of mockery, which were what smiles were previously seen to indicate in Russia. Even cleanliness standards changed under pressure from McDonald's: the restaurant has strict standards for hygiene in its kitchens and its restrooms, and competitors were forced to change their practices as consumers grew accustomed to the McDonald's way of doing business.21

As was true of Coca-Cola, the global scope and significance of McDonald's has led to serious criticisms of the company as a global entity. International concerns about increasing global obesity have focused on the chain's offerings; American documentarian Morgan Spurlock filmed Supersize Me, named after the restaurant's "supersized" drink and fries offerings, to chronicle his experiences eating only McDonalds for thirty consecutive days. His doctor forced him to quit before the thirty days were up because of the severe impact that its high-fat, high-calorie offerings were having on his health. (McDonald's subsequently eliminated its supersize menu.) Eric Schlosser offered a broader indictment of fast-food restaurants and the lifestyles that developed to accommodate them in his 2001 book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal.22

Lifestyle changes like those seen across East Asia provoke further worries on the part of many commentators and analysts. McDonald's has changed various consumer cultures, eating styles, and social relationships. Such changes inevitably engender substantial resistance, fear, uncertainty, and even anger. People worry that local cultural products will be replaced by those offered by the global corporation, even as they see local business practices and relationships changed to meet the needs of the global, transnational company. They also worry about the fact that their children spend their time in new places, making new contacts, and, perhaps most worryingly, adopting new styles and cultural behaviorslike eating lots of french fries or learning English from a McDonald's menu board. Such changes canor can be seen tocause a wide range of cultural changes that work as a subtle form of cultural imperialism. Local cultures might be displaced in favor of a global, consumerist, effectively American one.

McDonald's has also not always lived up to its dietary commitments. On entering the Indian market, for example, the chain promised that no beef fat would be used in the oil in which its fries were cooked. This promise was made to meet the dietary restrictions of Hindus, for whom cows are sacred and beef is forbidden. However, McDonalds continued to add a small amount of beef fat to its fry oil mixture in order to assure the desired taste for the fries. The company was forced to change its oil formula when this practice was discovered and it lost a lawsuit. The incident left many people with concerns about whether the restaurant would live up to its other dietary promises.

Like Coca-Cola, McDonald's has also faced an array of criticisms from environmentalists. McDonald's is a hamburger restaurant, after all, meaning that its growth necessitates an increase in the amount of beef available to feed its customers. This is quite separate from the chain's reliance on vast amounts of chicken, potatoes, and other crops it needs to produce its food. Beef production is particularly troubling to many environmentalists because it takes a large amount of grain to feed cows to the point that they gain enough weight to take to slaughter. Growing large amounts of grain, in turn, requires both that new land be brought into production and that large amounts of chemicals be used to fertilize crops and protect them from infestation and disease. Rain forests and other delicate ecosystems have been destroyed to serve the planet's growing demand for beef, sparking concerns that humans are both driving some species to extinction and promoting global warming to satisfy their fast-food desires. McDonald's is not the only source of this pressure, of course, but it is the largest, and most globally recognizable symbol of the global love affair with beef. It therefore takes a leading role in debates about human-caused environmental degradation and species extinction worldwide. Its demand for cheap chicken causes similar questions to be raised in terms of the mass-production chicken farms needed to satisfy its requirements.