Would you like relish with that court ruling?
A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. But a Dutch court rules for the employee and admonishes McDonald’s.
Incidents like the firing of this employee over an unauthorised slice of fake cheese illustrate the petty mindedness, rule obsession and control freakery of super-sized corporations.
After all, it was Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, who said:
‘We have found out … that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them … The organisation cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organisation.’
The quote sounds like a dictum of Stalinism, rather than from a paradigm of western individualism.
It is one of those nice structural fractures that reveals the reality behind the myth.
And both the story and the quote are very Weedy.