MCDONALDISATION?

As I arrive exhausted in Buenos Aires after a 14 hour transatlantic flight, I check out my luggage to wait for the next leg of my journey: The flight to Bolivia. Desire for breakfast overcomes me, and I walk by the McDonalds to get some fruit tea. Nicely calculated, two big suitcases and a cup of hot tea to go.

Balancing the hot teacup in my hand, I rest under a huge ad in the arrivals hall. “A thousand destinations, one taste”, it promises, featuring the universal McDonalds burger. But this, I realise, will not expect me in Bolivia. McDonalds has left Bolivia.

The fast food chain lasted for five years in the country, before it closed down all its restaurants in Bolivia in mid 2003 (DeSuremain, 2009). A recent documentary titled “Por que quebró McDonalds en Bolivia?” (Why did McDonalds Bolivia go bankrupt?) has given new popularity to the apparent failure of McDonalds in Bolivia. But while the documentary and various web sources praise the Bolivian rejection of fast food and of McDonalds as a symbol of Western capitalism, it is actually not at all clear why McDonalds left the country (Andean Information Network, 2012).

Do Bolivians reject fast food? According to my experience, not at all. Wherever you go in an urban area, at any time of the day, you will find street vendors selling traditional and Western fast food, and you will find restaurants offering food to go. From the traditional salteña (pastries filled with something like a meat stew) or fried intestines to hot dogs and fried chicken – Bolivians love their fast food. I even discovered what I call a “Bolivian hamburger”: “Trancapechos” (translated something like “stomach stuffers”), a white bread roll filled with: rice, fried potatoes, a generous piece of fried beef, a fried egg, tomato-onion salad and the obligatory hot sauce (containing locoto, the local chilli variant).

Do Bolivians reject McDonalds for ideological reasons? Some say so. For De Suremain (2009), for instance, the Bolivian population initiated a conscious boycott of McDonalds from around 2001 on, just around the time when the U.S. invasion of Iraq started. On the other hand, the more successful introduction of Shawarmas / Kebab in Bolivia is supposed to show Bolivian loyalty with Arab countries (ibid.).

From my experience so far, I would regard that analysis as overly political. Bolivians continue to consume all kinds of Western fast food. Moreover, almost every family meal is accompanied by the obligatory 2-litre bottle of Coca-Cola, another potential symbol of U.S. imperialism.

But here’s another piece of information: A standard McDonalds burger in La Paz used to cost the equivalent of 0.50 euro cents (about 5 Bolivianos), and a full meal 2.50 euros (about 20 Bolivianos) (De Suremain, 2009). For the amount of 5 Bolivianos, you can buy 2 or even 3 traditional salteñas, and for 20 Bolivianos, 2 persons can eat an abundant meal including drinks.

So certainly, McDonalds was only affordable for certain social strata (DeSuremain, 2009), mainly the upper-middle class that does however not depend on McDonalds for their daily alimentation. For the broad mass of Bolivian society, McDonalds was an expensive taste, too expensive to eventually get hooked on BigMacs.

Sources:

Andean Information Network Bolivia (13 January 2012). McDonalds left Bolivia in 2002; Fast Food still abundant on city streets. Retrieved from http://ain-bolivia.org/2012/01/mcdonald%E2%80%99s-left-bolivia-in-2002-fast-food-still-abundant-on-city-streets/#hide

DeSuremain, C. (2009). Shawarmas contra MacDonald’s. Globalización y estandarización alimentaria a prueba de las reivindicaciones identitarias (Bolivia). Anthropology of Food, S6, December 2009.