Yes this is a contentious title, but I love contentious titles :P
So I've been working at McDonald's for about a year now, and I've concluded that I've finally gotten a glimpse of what it must have been like to work in Soviet Russia. Obviously there are massive differences between McDonald's and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the genocide, the starvation, and the whole disappearing in the middle of the night thing. I mean, McDonald's isn't healthy and probably has helped a few people along with heart attacks, but it never forced people onto farms. However there are tons of things that I see that are the same, and it made be think about the right wing argument that private entities funded with scarce consumer dollars are more efficient than public bureaucracies funded by a stream of tax payer money, given the fact we have a candidate and a party that believes in all manner of privatization, including the VA.
Privatization is synonymous with efficiency. The profit motive and a hierarchical structure ensure discipline and cost effectiveness that the consumer feels in their pocketbook and in the quality of the goods and services they consume. Poor employees and managers are crushed in the cold, logical machinery of business while the gems in the rough shine and twinkle like stars floating towards the heavens. Poor business practices and ideas fade away into oblivion while ideas that are perceived as useful to society find a sustainable revenue stream. There are clear rules devised by members of the company that deal with the intricacies and realities of their business that only they are truly privy too, which is why outside influence is seen by many as so destructive to the correct governance of these entities. Large corporations like McDonald's have efficiently spread to hundreds of countries and adapted to the varied tastes of millions of global consumers, offering creative solutions on how to change their menu to satisfy any palette.
Privatization doesn't necessarily bring better quality and it can carry with it many of the same bureaucratic constraints.
Working at McDonald's does a LOT to complicate the picture and I wish that the discussion around privatization was a bit more nuanced. You see, Soviet Russia controlled their means of production bureaucratically. The Gosplan released 5 year plans and the government hired out contractors and determined how much guns and butter to produce per year. Von Mises correctly points out that price levels in a market can more efficiently determine what should be produced in an economy and for how much. Also, since there was little in the way of personal incentive, Soviet Russia was plagued with inefficiency. Food trains would come up missing for no reason. Goods would make it to the wrong city or would find their way into the houses of the well connected. The quality of consumer goods was poor: toilet paper was like sandpaper, bread would sometimes have pieces of glass in it. If you wanted a different brand of toilet paper, bread, clothes, or apartment building, there was no variety to choose from. The state made your choices for you and the workers and management didn't care about quality because there was little reason to. If anything went wrong, people quickly circled the wagons and blamed someone else. A lot of time, regional councils would fudge the numbers and lie about how many sprockets they made that month, because as long as their numbers looked good to their superiors, they could escape punishment. Environmental disasters abounded (i.e. Aral Sea).
There really isn't much difference between the Gosplan and the McDonald's I work at, except McDonald's is nicer. There's a hierarchy, but pretty much everyone in the hierarchy is concerned about passing off their pretty sheets of numbers to the person above. Past that, they don't care, and why should they? Customer service and satisfaction, food quality and presentation, the work environment, all of it gets lips service. Customer complaints are handled with a pre-written script but action doesn't happen. I work at a corporate McDonald's, not a privately owned one, and corporate doesn't give a damn about the store. They invest no money in reupholstering the booths (they badly need it), the bathroom is broken on a daily basis (I'm not kidding) and most of the machinery is outdated and breaks constantly. Even if they wanted to, the store doesn't generate enough money to reinvest in itself; the money goes into a sinkhole. In Soviet Russia, the black market was huge and made up largely of stolen goods either smuggled from abroad or stolen from the factories the workers were at. Seeing as how they worked hard all day with no return, that's what they did. At my McDonald's, so much is stolen it's mind boggling. I won't lie, I've been known to swipe a chicken nugget when I'm hungry, but I don't just blatantly take things. At first I thought it was just poor inventorying, but when 100 bottles of water, 50 apple pies, and 3 crates (not boxes, crates) of grilled chicken came up missing month after month, I knew that there were plenty of people there with sticky fingers. I'm not excusing it, stealing is stealing, but in an atmosphere where the management literally ignores flagrant abuses of company rules because they have to get their spreadsheet looking the right way, anything clearly goes. Hell, the management takes part in many cases.
Sometimes, shortages have nothing to do with theft. The delivery system fails spectacularly and we get 100 cases of mustard and no ketchup. Sometimes boxes aren't properly packed and things burst. My managers spend hours on the phone talking with McDonald's Central Command to get what they need or replace defective products, causing delays and angry customers. There are cameras everywhere and my bosses actually can get a live feed of the security camera streamed to their laptop. Big brother is constantly watching. Not that it matters. The menu is bland and repetitious. Now, of course you can go to another fast food restaurant, but I recently went to a Burger King and found that they basically have the same menu with a few additions. The menus are so similar between a lot of the fast food places that customers come in and order stuff from other stores, not realizing where they're at!
Now, the libertarians reading this may be wagging their finger at me and saying that the store will eventually crumble under the weight of its own incompetency, but I'm sorry, McDonald's is so huge it has money to sink into the store even though they make little to no effort to make it more efficient. I know they post losses month after month, but the management keeps their jobs through a web of flattery and sexual favors. I'm not being gossipy with the last part, I have proof. Customers complain and then they come right back in because they are under some sort of spell; that's the only way I can explain it. The store isn't punished for bad management by the higher ups, it's not punished by the customer base who get their food super slow and sometimes of lower quality, so the pressure of the private market is pretty much not felt, so nothing changes.
Now, please don't give me the argument that this is anecdotal. I am being hard on Mcdonald's, but I've worked at other fast food places and I encounter the same thing, except the difference usually lies in whether the store is run by an owner who has a vested interest and can maintain a watchful eye over his store, vs. a big massive bureaucratic corporation. McDonald's is responsible for a lot of innovations in the way they serve their food and these systems have been done and redone as time has gone on and technology has improved. Some McDonald's are run better and more efficiently than others, but many of the same problems persist, and Soviet Russia wasn't much different in that certain cities were more efficient with their output than others due to a lot of factors.