Golden Arches

Encyclopedia : G : GO : GOL : Golden Arches

The Golden Arches are the famous symbol of McDonald's, a fast-food hamburger chain based in Oak Brook, Illinois. They began in 1953, when Dick and Mac McDonald began franchising their company, as part of the standard building design: a pair of stylized arches, one at each side of what was then a walk-up hamburger stand. When viewed from an angle, the design was reminiscent of the letter M, and was incorporated into the company's logo. While McDonald's dropped the physical arches from its restaurants in the 1960s, the Golden Arches have remained in the logo, and as a commonly understood term for the company.

They have also been seen more broadly as a symbol of capitalism or globalization, since they are one of the more prominent American corporations that have become global in their reach (along with Coca-Cola and Nike).

The Golden Arches theory

In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman proposed The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, observing that no two countries with a McDonald's franchise had ever gone to war with one another, a version of the democratic peace theory. Shortly after the book was published, the NATO bombing of Serbia proved an exception to the theory, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system "symbolised by McDonald's" (Friedman 2000: 252–253). It should be noted that Friedman framed this theory in terms of McDonald's Golden Arches "with tongue slightly in cheek" (Friedman 2005). Recently, Friedman has updated the theory with the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention (Friedman 2005).

References in Pop Culture

In the Japanese anime series InuYasha and Please Save My Earth (and possibly other series), characters occasionally eat at a burger-and-fries restaurant with a logo similar to the Golden Arches, but turned upside-down. In InuYasha, the restaurant is named "Wacdnards".

References

Friedman, Thomas. (2000) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books.
Friedman, Thomas. (2005) The Guardian, 21 April 2005.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.