I was talking to Andrew Peach this morning about memes.org and he popped me the news story you’ve all heard about, McDonald’s seeks ‘McJob’ rewrite, and sagely added, “memetically, McDonalds have scored an own goal with this one…..I personally had never heard of the term McJob until yesterday……Now that I know it I will surely be using it all the time.” Too true.
McJob wasn’t a thing since Douglas Coupland mentioned it in Generation X. I haven’t used it at all in ten-years and I haven’t heard it being used at all during the entire minimum wage war.
McDonalds is using the argument that 80% of McDonalds’ managers came up from their McJobs but I don’t buy it because if you’re at a cocktail party and you drop that you’re a manager at McDonalds, you’ll still get ridiculed because that is still a McJob, perceptions-wise, and you are still a loser.
The only people in the McDonalds world who get any respect are McDonalds franchisees and executives. (The same with car salesmen are losers but if you own all the Cadillac dealerships in New Jersey, you are god.)
A manager at McDonalds who doesn’t own a franchise is still considered a loser. So, I think this is just going to make bad into worse for McDonalds. The concept of McJob was dormant as a meme until yesterday.
Firstly, I don’t think that the OED delists words; secondly, who is McDonald’s PR agency? This is a case of letting sleeping memes lie because the truth is is that my friends no longer use McJob and the media no longer uses McJob.
Well, they sure as hell do now…
Look at all of this coverage: UPI, Sun-Sentinel, Chicago Sun-Times, STL Today, The Sun, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, News24, BBC, Boston Globe, SkyNews, Daily Record, WIFR, Daily Southern, ABC News, My Fox NY, Manchester Evening News, The Post IE, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times… and more…
I guarantee you that everyone is going to start using the term McJob again after this….
Doh!
Now, there are even Prediction Markets based on the McJob
