{"id":35114,"date":"2019-04-27T01:00:08","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T05:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35114"},"modified":"2019-03-27T08:05:09","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T12:05:09","slug":"qotd-when-mcdonalds-came-to-moscow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/04\/27\/qotd-when-mcdonalds-came-to-moscow\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When McDonald&#8217;s came to Moscow"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>[In an NPR broadcast] McDonald\u2019s is positively portrayed as being an excellent, almost heroic, force for good. McDonald\u2019s manner of doing business is celebrated as changing social norms for the better \u2013 for making the world (or at least Russia) not only a more consumer-friendly place, but also a more pleasant, a more polite, a more respectful, and a (yes) more happy place.<\/p>\n<p>Listeners are reminded at the start of the clip that Americans smile a lot, including at strangers. Russians \u2013 and, especially, Russians under Soviet domination \u2013 did not smile very much. Then McDonald\u2019s opened in Moscow in 1990. McDonald\u2019s trains its workers to smile at customers, and to be polite and friendly. We then learn \u2013 from one of the Russians who worked at that McDonald\u2019s in Moscow \u2013 that that restaurant became a place of pleasant refuge for Muscovites. The simple, smiling friendliness and politeness that Americans take for granted was, in Russia, actively sought after by many Russians and embraced by their choosing to dine at McDonald\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>Commerce \u2013 voluntary exchange \u2013 is essential for what <a href=\"http:\/\/cafehayek.com\/2016\/06\/quotation-of-the-day-1746.html\" target=\"_blank\">Deirdre McCloskey calls \u201cmarket-tested betterment.\u201d<\/a> This betterment, however \u2013 and Deirdre would agree \u2013 is manifested not only in new and better material products but also in the ways in which businesses treat consumers. In market economies consumers are valuable to businesses; in these economies consumers are treated by businesses as respected guests. In contrast, in non-market economies \u2013 in economies in which prices and profits are prevented from moving in market-clearing directions \u2013 consumers are treated by \u2018businesses\u2019 as repellant pests.<\/p>\n<p>Don Boudreaux, <a href=\"http:\/\/cafehayek.com\/2016\/06\/40968.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;<em>Doux Commerce, avec Sourires<\/em>&#8220;, <em>Caf\u00e9 Hayek<\/em><\/a>, 2016-06-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[In an NPR broadcast] McDonald\u2019s is positively portrayed as being an excellent, almost heroic, force for good. McDonald\u2019s manner of doing business is celebrated as changing social norms for the better \u2013 for making the world (or at least Russia) not only a more consumer-friendly place, but also a more pleasant, a more polite, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,62,41,1119],"tags":[263,262,1026,1054],"class_list":["post-35114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-europe","category-quotations","category-russia","tag-1970s","tag-culture","tag-microeconomics","tag-moscow"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-98m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47501,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35114\/revisions\/47501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}