McDonald's transformed Russia... now it's leaving the country | CNN

In this country, McDonald's are running out of French fries 0:46

New York (CNN Business) --

When McDonald's first opened its doors in Moscow, it was a big deal.

It was the middle of winter, January 31, 1990, but still people came out in droves.

Grainy CNN television footage shows lines out the door and throngs of people inside, trying Big Macs for the first time.

• McDonald's, Starbucks and Coca-Cola are leaving Russia

The Pushkin Square location was huge, with the capacity to accommodate hundreds of people.

It was the largest McDonald's restaurant in the world at the time.

Inside, the fast food place was packed with people.

In most cases, it looked like any other McDonald's of the time.

But there was a hammer and sickle flag under the golden arches and an international theme inside, with a model of London's Big Ben in the dining room.

Soviet customers queue outside the newly opened first McDonald's in the Soviet Union on January 31, 1990 in Moscow's Pushkin Square.

Bright-eyed McDonald's employees wearing maroon-branded visors and big smiles took orders from customers.

They were the ones: About 630 employees passed the cutoff of 27,000 applicants, according to a 1990 Washington Post article.

They underwent a month of training before the store opened its doors.

The golden arches were an immediate success.

On the first day, 30,000 people were served, a McDonald's record for an opening day, CBC reported at the time.

The location even had to stay open for hours later than planned due to the crowds.

McDonald's arrival in Moscow was about more than Big Macs and French fries, said Darra Goldstein, Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor Emeritus of Russian at Williams College.

It was the most prominent example of glasnost in action, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbechev's attempt to open up his ruined country to international relations.

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"There was a really visible crack in the Iron Curtain," he said.

"It was very symbolic about the changes that were happening."

About two years later, the Soviet Union would collapse.

After that first location opened, McDonald's expanded its reach within the country.

As of last week, there were around 850 outlets operating in Russia.

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused McDonald's to change course, at least temporarily.

On Tuesday, the company announced it would halt operations at those restaurants, following similar decisions by other Western firms and pressure from critics.

For Goldstein, this moment is just as symbolic, but far less hopeful.

"If the opening of McDonald's in 1990 symbolized the beginning of a new era in Soviet life, one with greater freedoms, then the company's current exit represents not only the closure of the business, but of society as a whole," he said. .

How McDonald's came to Moscow

Opening McDonald's in Russia was not easy.

George Cohon, who oversaw McDonald's business in Canada from the early 1970s to the 1990s, led the campaign to bring McDonald's to life in Moscow.

It took 14 years for that to happen.

Hundreds of people line up around the first McDonald's restaurant in the Soviet Union in Moscow's Pushkin Square on its opening day.

In his book, "To Russia With Fries" (with an introduction by none other than Gorbachev), Cohon detailed the difficult process of opening that first location.

"On the Soviet side, there was very little real understanding of what was involved in establishing or operating a chain of McDonald's restaurants," he wrote.

"For our part, we had to identify suitable sites (the Soviets' instincts seemed to be to put us behind elevator shafts in hotels or somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow; our instincts, naturally, were more or less the opposite). )".

Perhaps more pressing than finding a suitable location was the search for a viable supply chain.

McDonald's needed a constant supply of meat and potatoes for the thousands of people who arrived every day.

"We had to convince ourselves that it would be possible to source raw materials in Russia," he said.

Cohon and other team members visited local food processing plants and found them substandard.

McDonald's decided to set up their own.

"In the absence of reliable infrastructure, we were going to have to build one," Cohon wrote.

"We were going to have to go directly to the field and develop a network of suppliers that didn't exist before."

When McDonald's finally opened in 1990, some were skeptical that it wouldn't last.

"Everything will go downhill. We don't know how to run a restaurant like this," Andrei Grushin, an engineer who visited the restaurant on opening day, told The Washington Post at the time.

But the suffering that McDonald's cost was worth it.

service with a smile

One of the defining characteristics of the McDonald's Moscow location, at least on that first day, was the friendly staff.

"They're always smiling," a young employee told CNN reporters on opening day.

"As you know, in Moscow, not in every restaurant you can find smiling people."

Another employee told CBC that when she smiled at people, they asked her what was wrong.

"They think I'm laughing at them," she said.

At the time in the Soviet Union, "food service was really terrible," said Williams College's Goldstein.

"He was rude, the places were dirty. There was often no food that was on the menu."

McDonald's was an "almost magical place where food was always restocked and people smiled at you," he said.

"It represented more than just a place to buy American hamburgers."

A McDonald's in Moscow around 2021.

The burgers themselves weren't that exciting, at least not to some customers.

"I don't like it at all," one man told CBC of the food, shaking his head.

Another said that he liked cooking, but that he "expected more".

The food was expensive.

A meal could cost half a day's pay for the average consumer, according to the CBC.

Olga Berman, who grew up in Moscow before immigrating to the United States in 1993, recalled a trip to McDonald's with her family as a child.

"We didn't really go out to eat much. So it was a great experience in itself, going to restaurants," he said.

She remembers McDonald's as "shiny new," she said.

"It was really brilliant. It was super clean," she added.

"It was an experience. It didn't feel like the fast food I know today. It felt like going to a real restaurant."

And the food?

"I don't even remember what the food was like," she said.

Christina Frankopan grew up in London.

When she was a teenager, she went to Moscow for a few weeks to improve her Russian, right around the time of the opening of the first McDonald's location.

In the spring of 1990, he went with some friends to try it out.

"I went once or twice and the queue was too long," he said.

"And finally, we went once, and it was doable."

For Frankopan, McDonald's was no big deal.

But his friends were excited, less about the food, he recalled, than about the chain's Styrofoam containers.

"I was surprised that the packaging was actually highly coveted," she said.

Frankopan remembers people taking the packaging home and pasting it on the walls.

They said "it's an incredibly good insulating material," he recalled.

But "I think it was actually a status symbol to be able to show that not only do I have a Big Mac box, but I've stood in line 15 times to get my Big Mac boxes."

He added: "I think it's hard to exaggerate the symbolism of the place."

As CNN reporter Richard Blystone put it, when he reported the story 32 years ago, "a Western burger emporium in Moscow has all the intrinsic appeal of an ice cream stand in hell."

McDonald's stops operations in Russia

After years of investment, it all came crashing down this week.

"In Russia, we employ 62,000 people who have put their heart and soul into our McDonald's brand to serve their communities. We work with hundreds of local Russian suppliers and partners who produce the foods for our menu and support our brand. And we serve million Russian customers every day who count on McDonald's," McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a statement on Tuesday.

"In the more than thirty years that McDonald's has operated in Russia, we have become an essential part of the 850 communities in which we operate," he added.

But the current situation makes it unsustainable to continue in the market, according to the executive, at least for now.

"Our values ​​mean that we cannot ignore the unnecessary human suffering unfolding in Ukraine," Kempczinski said.

Also, with the region in crisis, McDonald's can no longer reliably secure the supply it needs.

“We are experiencing disruptions to our supply chain along with other operational impacts,” he said.

After 32 years, "McDonald's has decided to temporarily close all of our restaurants in Russia and pause all operations in the market."

McDonald's will continue to pay its employees in Russia, the company said.

But it's unclear when Russians will be able to visit a local McDonald's again.

“Right now, it is impossible to predict when we will be able to reopen our restaurants in Russia,” Kempczinski said.

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