Ukraine war
One last meal of fast food: huge rush to McDonald’s in Russia
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Pictures like 30 years ago: Since McDonald’s announced its withdrawal from Russia, there has been a rush to the branches. The end of an era.
One Western company after another is turning its back on Russia. After long protests from customers, Mc Donald’s is now also available. The fast food chain announced on Tuesday that it intends to close all 850 branches in the country for the time being. After all, good for the employees: The company also said that it wanted to continue paying all salaries.
But what does this mean for large parts of the population? “Back to the Soviet era” was the headline of “faz.net” on Wednesday, and Der Spiegel also wrote: “Frittenfett und Freedom Gone”. After all, the western mega-brand had enormous symbolic power for the country, which had just opened up to the West, at least in culinary and material terms, in 1990.
Pictures like 32 years ago
What can now be observed on Twitter videos could be images that could already be observed 32 years ago. In front of the branches there are queues of people or cars who want to eat American fast food one last time in the shop or via the drive-in before they are denied that too, at least for a while.
Similar scenes took place when the first Mc Donald’s branch opened in Moscow in 1992. On the morning of January 31, 1990, 5,000 people were already standing in Pushkin Square. Police officers continued to guard the queues of people for weeks after the opening, sometimes using batons to maintain order. And that despite the fact that the “skyscraper sandwich”, as the Soviet government newspaper “Isvestia” called the burger at the time, cost a small fortune at six rubles – the equivalent of more than ten Deutschmarks in 1990.
Symbol of departure
At that time it was the largest branch in the world and pointed to an era of new beginnings. 27,000 applicants responded to the job advertisement in the tabloid “Moskovsky Komsomolets” in order to be allowed to hand out burgers and cola. For quite a few Twitter users, the closure means the end of this era. In view of the war, hopefully only temporarily.
Sources: “Twitter”, “Spiegel”, “NZZ”
This article originally appeared on Stern.de