Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (16 page)

So, what’s to be done about it? Despite my ‘qualifications’, I am strongly enough in my debate camp to believe the solution must lie with each individual, and not with macro-level government or industry solutions. I do respect the difficulty that must arise for some extreme cases – but I came across a paragraph in a book recently that might offer a different mental framework within which to address the challenge. The book is called
Quantum Healing
, by Deepak Chopra, and listen to this:

If you could see your body as it really is, you would never see it the same way twice. The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days … a new liver every six weeks.

The skin is new every month? I don’t know – or care – how true that is (and if it’s true, how come the scar on my knee doesn’t go away?), but this is the sort of leverage we can use. Here’s a way into the challenge if you are seeking to get rid of big poundage. In my view, fad diets are useless, and if you are looking at shifting fifty pounds or more the task must look eternal and hopeless. But supposing you said to yourself, in the mirror, ‘Right, the next time my skin comes around, it will not look like this, and, what’s more, when my next skeleton arrives, it will look something like this …’ – at which stage you hold a photo of George Clooney or Catherine Zeta Jones up in front of the mirror. Now then, we have a plan. You have time, and you know that you do not have to do all the work – it’s all changing anyway, so all you need to do is steer the changes away from business as usual to something different.

How do you steer? If you’ve given yourself three months, just follow Julia Child’s famous advice:
Eat small portions, no snacking, no seconds, and try a bit of everything
. Add to that my own rule when my trousers get tight – no carbs before dinner and alcohol on only two days a week – and I guarantee, when your new skeleton and third new skin appear in three months, everything will be completely different.

I grant you, it will be a wee bit unfortunate if your start position is that of a tubby male and your end position is the Catherine Zeta Jones model, but it’s a start and I’m sure you’ll cope.

39. Feeding people? What’s the problem?

I
have, of course, run restaurants. I have been involved, as an investor or as a variously ranked employee, with all sorts of different types. From a chain of precisely two Italian restaurants right through to the thousands of Burger Kings which served millions of Whoppers every day while I was captain of that particular ship.

What’s different, of course, is that – other than during something called ‘executive training’ – I have never actually
run my own restaurant
, day in, day out. By that, I mean actually feeding large numbers of people. Occasionally I forget that, and – half-blinded by delusions of competence and grandeur – I decide to do that at home.

Here’s how such a day goes, and how and why I get back to my position of safety. Rapidly.

I started the day early, wandering downstairs in my shorts. On the last occasion, my wife and I had stupidly agreed to provide lunch and drinks to a loosely defined group of friends and were not sure whether our invitation included our collective ‘children’ – all of whom are now between twenty-five and thirty-five years old and still live within striking distance. That causes planning problems, particularly for the bar. Nevertheless, our menu was planned, and – pretty much like Top Cat – I greeted the new day unafraid.

The house looked pretty clean. To me, that is. My wife informed me that it didn’t look that way to her, and we would give it a run over before we started setting up. Still in my shorts, I found that the required specification for said ‘run over’ was that of a SARS ward in Toronto during the recent scare. As a result, I was a sadder and wiser man, smelling of lemon furniture polish, some two hours later. Only ninety minutes remained before the scheduled start.

Here’s my next mistake. I lived in Miami for twelve years. If you invited somebody to show up for lunch at 12.30 p.m. in Miami, the well-known northern suburb of Havana, nobody –
nobody
– would appear before 4.00 p.m. This was England, however, and they would all arrive on time. So, I had one hour and a bit to move and sort fifteen chairs, two tables, 150 knives, forks and spoons of various sizes, five sets of thirty plates and dishes and about sixty glasses, and to set up the bar and music. The latter is a crucial responsibility – it’s
my
party and I want
my
music. My son can go blow all his ‘garage-indie’ stuff out of his ear. Whatever it is.

I left myself three minutes to shower and change. I decided, in my wisdom, to wear all black – basically because I need my head examining. This was quickly confirmed. The bell rang spot on 12.30 p.m. and I opened the door to the first guest. It was one of the twenty-five-year-olds – a delightful one at that; the sort you would think might be impressed by my all-black image. ‘If it’s not Johnny Cash’ is the reward I got as she air-kissed her way past me, all smiles, to the bar – a trestle table upon which there were about two dozen uncorked bottles of France’s finest export. Depending on whether her friends arrive, this will last all day or ten minutes.

For the record, we served ‘nibbles’ or ‘munchies’ first. Halfway through this, a relative arrived, accompanied by three children between three and five. Not part of our plan. Our golden retriever thought this was great fun, and commenced a game of hide and seek. Our SARS-standard home began to look like downtown Baghdad.

I hid in the kitchen, getting the main course(s) ready. I was to carve the ham. With this is mind, my wife had bought me an electric carving knife. Ha! I spit on such convenience. An electric carving knife is right up there with an electric pool cue – it is not a man’s way of doing things. About thirty minutes later I surveyed the completed ham plate, which looked as though it was an out-take from
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

We got through to the dessert stage, with dusk setting in. The kids had hijacked the music centre, and something sounded as though a child was in pain. It
was
a child in pain. So much for letting them play with the electric carving knife.

I was partly responsible for desserts. One of the dishes – mine – consisted of tangerines poached in red wine. They had been chilling overnight, but something strange had happened under the foil. They hade morphed from appetising-looking fruit into what I imagine a malignant external growth on the Elephant Man might look like. Everybody studiously ignored them and headed for my wife’s ice cream creation.

Well into the night, the surviving bodies decided to play a game of Trivial Pursuit. We decided that the men would play the women, but complicate this already dangerous approach by having a sub-plot whereby the young played the old – rather like Spock and his multidimensional chess. Absolute chaos ensued, and bits of the cheese course started flying.

About 10.30 p.m., the ‘youngsters’ decided to walk up to the pub for the last round, and steadfastly refused our company. An hour later, they arrived back – and with what? Oh, goody, a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey. That’s whiskey with an ‘e’ in it. Not that it made a big difference.

At 12.30 a.m., just twelve hours after the opening bell rang, the last guest left. Three hundred and twenty-nine tables, 3,762 chairs, 43,765 pieces of cutlery, 65,983 glasses, and 72,876 empty bottles were jammed in the dishwasher. I discarded my Johnny Cash outfit. Armed, once again, only with my shorts, I retired.

No, gentle reader, I haven’t ‘run’ restaurants, and it shows. Gentlemen and ladies of quick-service, who do it every day, I salute you.

40. Next time you post a letter …

A
while back, McDonald’s dropped Kobe Bryant from its sponsorship activities, and the news broke like a thunderclap in England. Everywhere I went, people crowded me, pushed microphones into my face and generally harassed me – always wanting to know the answer to the same question: ‘What is a Kobe Bryant?’

I had to explain to them, of course, that it is not a ‘what’ but a ‘he’ – and he is someone who is seventeen feet tall and who plays NBA basketball in America. I then have to explain the NBA, which I do as follows: five very tall men run up a wooden court and (usually) score points by throwing a ball through a high hooped net. Five different very, very tall men then run up the other end and (usually) do the same. This progresses until about fifty seconds before the end of the game when, by some strange freak of the space-time continuum of the kind written about by Stephen Hawking, those fifty seconds last just over an hour, and then one side wins.

Back to sponsorship – and the question that bugs me yet again as I look at a paper in front of me telling the world that Vodafone has just canned its sponsorship deal with Manchester United (the world’s biggest soccer ‘brand’). Why do sane businessmen and women continue to flush
huge
sums of money down the pan by pursuing this odd mix of science and art? Marketing gurus are often in favour, arguing that – if you take the five-point marketing cycle as: 1) generating awareness of your product or service; 2) securing a trial purchase; 3) getting a repeat purchase; 4) encouraging increased frequency; and, finally, 5) landing that Holy Grail called customer loyalty – then effective sponsorship budgets can help any or
all
of those stages. What pish.

Here’s my position. If you are running
any
quick-serve business, and you receive a sponsorship proposal, you should consider it carefully. You should sleep on it, walk the dog and think about it, talk to your partner about it, phone a friend about it and then sleep on it again.
And then politely turn it down
.

It is not the best way to spend your hard-earned marketing support money. Markets are so cluttered and competitive today that you need to get customers to change behaviour when you get a message through to them – not just change an attitude or perception. Billions of dollars go into sponsorships annually, and I do not understand how the big spenders figure it actually works, let alone how it justifies itself. Take one high-profile programme, for example. The US Postal Service sponsored Lance Armstrong and his team – who have triumphed an unbelievable seven times in the Tour de France. Now here’s the problem: only about fifteen Americans know that the Tour de France is about bicycles and is the world’s greatest bike race. Of those fifteen, only three still write to other people, and they don’t have a lot of options when they post a letter in the US.

If it doesn’t fly in the US, does it work over there? Over in France,
Le Tour
is an annual sporting highlight for millions of Europeans. Armstrong’s victories have, as a result, given him megastar status. So, is this where the sponsorship pays off? When these millions visit the US next time, is the plan that they are suddenly resolute in their determination to seek out
only
the US Postal Service when they want to post a letter home? Er, as against what other option?

I am confident I know the determining drive behind most sponsorships. It is the chairman (it doesn’t happen with chairwomen) who trousers a huge chunk of the advertising budget and decides that the brand will lend its name to (let’s say) a PGA golf tournament. Is this driven by target marketing? No, it is not. It is driven by enabling him to: a) play one of the world’s best courses in the lead-off pro-am with Tiger Woods; b) watch the happenings on the eighteenth hole from twenty feet away with a martini in hand while playing King-of-the-Tent; and c) go on TV in his Ralph Lauren blazer and polo shirt and offer his golf wisdom in a thirty second slot at the end. Is that cool, or what? And it’s bound to make the target audience feel warm and attracted, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I said
isn’t it?
Yeah, right. Who cares?

Look, I’m not saying sponsorships can’t add value. Nike morphed from being a US sneaker-marketer to being a global sports equipment and apparel supplier on the back of extensive and risky marketing programmes that included clever sponsorships in golf (Tiger) and soccer (Brazil, Manchester United, et al.). All I am saying is that, apart from the obvious risks of associating your brand with somebody who might end up facing a judge, the huge relative amounts of money required to sponsor anything or anybody of note are not likely to be the best way to spend your quick-serve brand support money – whether that be at national brand level or that of a single owner-operator. If you are insistent, I would limit it to the
very
big (e.g. Nike-type) or the very small (e.g. local junior baseball-type). In the middle, it just gets lost. Remember: you need to change consumer behaviour when you spend – ‘feel-good’ stuff doesn’t cut it anymore.

If, however, after all that, you remain determined to spend your money in this way, I have an opportunity for you. I am hoping to represent my country in the 2008 Olympics in the KFC Bucket Leap competition – but a shortage of funds is limiting my altitude training. You know where to find me, and all cheques will be welcome.