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 119 countries. 31,000 stores. 47 million customers each day. 1.5 million employers. $22.8 billion of income.

Can you guess what these numbers represent? (Maybe the colors will give you a hint...)

.................

Yup, you guessed it. It's the worldwide popular fast-food chain store...

===Okay, you've probably had a burger from McDonald's and I have definitely too. It's a quick grab, cheap, and a burger with french fries and coke tastes good once in a while! But McDonald's impression on many people is not that positive. There are numerous reasons including the most common one: fast food is unhealthy and ruins your diet. Let's discover McDonald's a little more than just its menu through some economical terms and maybe learn some more reasons for not so liking McDonald's other than the reason that the food makes you fat.===

First of all, each McDonald's store around your neighbor, your city, your country works like a perfect competition. There is McDonald's every few kilometers away, thus the prices in all the stores need to be the same. Otherwise people would buy more at the cheaper store. As you can see on the graph, the price is decided by the market with supply and demand, and each McDonald's store acts as a price taker. Although the real value of a BigMac can be different from a country to another, the price of a BigMac in a country is the same.



= Opportunity Cost =

//Opportunity cost is whatever is given up to obtain what you got.// The opportunity cost of you buying and eating a burger set is the healthier food that you could have eaten and other items that you could have bought with the money you paid to get the burger set. This is obvious. But let's take a step back and look more specifically at the opportunity costs of making burgers for McDonald's.

BURGER => MEAT => COWS=> GRAIN!
Grain is fed to cattle in South American countries to produce the meat for the McDonald's hamburgers. Cows eat 10 times the amount of grain and soy that humans do. 145 million tons of grain are used, and only 21 million tons of meat and by-products are produced. The waste is 124 million tons per year at a value of $ 20 billion!! An amount that can clothe and house the world's entire population for one year. There is a huge amount of grain that is being misused as also, much of the crops that can feed the undernourished children and adults in 'Third World' countries are actually used to fatten cattle for more burger meat for the 'First World' countries. Now that's a huge opportunity cost !



= Negative Externality =

//Negative externality is an impact made that is harmful to the economy.// McDonald's has a few negative externalities such as ruining a healthy diet and pollution.

McDonald's is one of the many US corporations that create a lot of pollution to the environment due to the materials used for the packaging. In consequence, vast areas of Central American rainforest are harmed by the pollution. Although McDonald's have improved over the past 20 years, it had been using styrofoam for its packaging. According to the Environmental Justice Network, styrene is “known to indiscriminately attack tissue and the nervous system” and is absorbed through the skin, lungs and intestines. Also, polystyrene is not recycled in most U.S. cities, and takes 900 years to break down in a landfill. Even worse, petroleum is used in the process to make polystyrene products. Nowadays, you may see a little recycling signs on the packages, but still, it takes 800 square miles of forest just to produce the paper that McDonald's uses per year.

(All images linked)

Especially if people take-out their burgers, it is most likely that they do not recycle properly. I have definitely seen McDonald's drink cup, paper bags, and burger wrapers on the ground or just everything dumped inside a trash can.

= Positive Externality (?) =

//Positive externality is an impact made that is beneficial to the economy.//

It's cheap. Many people agree, in Korea where food is reasonably cheap (2000 won for a roll of kimbab, 6000 won for kimchijigae with rice and some side dishes, 7000 won for pork cutlet, 10,000 won for pasta, 20,000 won for steak...), you can get a good deal of 3000 won for a meal or normally around 5000 won. As the economy continued to decline in the recent economic crisis, the cheap prices of McDonald's menus attracted many customers. Thus, as a result: a growth in the industry and continued employment. McDonald's saw its U.S. sales increase 5 percent in 2008 compared to the previous year, the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company reported. Although the hourly wage may be low like in Korea (around 3000~4000 won), McDonald's holds a good number of employment around the world.

(All images linked)

Conclusion

McDonald's is everywhere and is one of the first sellers of fast food. It has some effects in my life as a burger-provider, and in the world both positively and negatively as a polluter, a diet-ruiner, and an employer. It has come a long way and is most unlikely that McDonald's will disappear all of a sudden. All we can hope for is improvements and better solutions to the current problems.

__Bibliography:__ http://www.startribune.com/jobs/career/43106192.html http://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/article_94720907-7d6b-5de7-9376-6177e9cd2072.html http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/pretrial/factsheet.html http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/37876