A Big What? Millennials oddly immune to iconic sandwich.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a big McDonald’s franchise owner did some market research recently and stumbled upon a surprising fact: only one in five Americans of “millennial” age has ever tried a Big Mac. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know what my reaction was to this news: a paroxysm of skeptical eye-rolling.
The Big Mac might easily be described as the single most successful consumer product of the 20th century. Of all the various kinds of sandwiches that the human imagination has conceived since the lifetime of the 4th Earl of Sandwich (peace be upon him), the Big Mac might be the specific sandwich that has been prepared and eaten the most. It has a recipe that children everywhere can recite by heart. How is it possible that an entire generation has collectively skipped it, never thinking it might have some merit?
Well, whether or not I would have imagined it, the reactions I got when I asked around convinced me quickly that it is probably true. ( Big surprise: a businessman’s expensively gathered information about his customer base turns out to be more accurate than some jackass’s wild guess.) Dozens of young people immediately told me that they have never tried a Big Mac. Plenty of these sandwich- spurners were careful to specify, all with evident shame, that they do visit McDonald’s often; at least one had worked there. A few correspondents had specific reasons for avoiding the Big Mac, but for the most part, the prevailing attitude toward the item seemed to be apathy, rather than hostility.
Could this be a unique case of a multi- generational marketing process having been so successful that it propels its object into some Nietzschean realm beyond buying and selling? Was the Big Mac ejected by the force of commercial advertising into a sort of invisible cosmic background of fast food? It seems possible, but, as one of my fellow Big Mac thinkers observed, McDonald’s advertising has tended to downplay hamburgers for a long time. Even when it comes to alternative burger offerings — the McDLT, the McAngus — the implied message has inevitably been “We’re about so much more than Big Macs, honest.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Julie Jargon confirms that McDonald’s hamburger sales are not growing on a per-store basis. There are too many other places to get a much better hamburger now, if a hamburger is specifically what you want. Hell, you will get a better burger, as such, almost anywhere. The Big Mac is best appreciated as a sui generis object — a beef sandwich, even a beef fantasia. It would be a category mistake to consider it a rival of or a replacement for the Baconator or the Whopper.
McDonald’s hamburger problem suggests an interesting irony: the company and its fast- service business model may now enjoy a greater comparative advantage when it comes to relatively healthy food items, like wraps and salads. But many of the people who talked to me about the Big Mac mentioned one theme, and it wasn’t healthy eating. What they tended to say was that they had never thought to explore the McDonald’s menu beyond the Chicken McNugget. Everyone, literally everyone, loves a McNugget. When you read human interest/freak show news items about eaters so picky that they can barely sustain life, you usually find that chicken nuggets are what is holding their flesh together.
I was tempted to use this as a logical anchor for some good old millennial- bashing: imagine being raised so unadventurously, so deferentially, that a Big Mac is too exotic to consider! ( When we bash millennials, we are really trying to get at their parents.) But, of course, the McNugget had not yet been invented when I was very young: I know this because I have a very clear memory of seeing McNuggets advertised for the first time and instantly intuiting, like a physicist seeing a particle do something freaky, that culinary reality had altered. If I’d been born later, maybe I, too, would think of McDonald’s mainly as a nuggets-’n’- fries vendor.
As it happens, I was raised in the boonies, and we would visit McDonald’s just a few times a year. I have to acknowledge that my fondness for Big Macs is a matter of generational and circumstantial happenstance. They are, even though I’ve certainly had a thousand of the things, still attainably glamorous — a dream of childhood now indulged at will.
Fortunately, my inherited cheapness protects me from a nightmare of special- sauce overdose. I can never order a Big Mac without an inner Presbyterian voice — Socrates’ daimon, with my grandfather’s accent — grumbling that this damned thing should really cost about $ 2. What the Wall Street Journal has me wondering is how long the Big Mac can remain on the menu at all, if it has really been bypassed by progress and fashion in the manner of marmalade or pickled eggs. If I knew my next Big Mac was my last — though any one might be! — I might pay more like $50.
IMAGINE GROWING UP IN AN ENVIRONMENT SO UNADVENTUROUS THAT A BIG MAC IS TOO EXOTIC TO CONSIDER!