Do we live in a giant McDonald’s restaurant? Let’s look at a Typical McDay (warning: contains satire):

• Wake up (thanks to your disposable plastic digital alarm, 99% petroleum and made by a laborer in Bangladesh making .06/hr) to the new Green Day hit, which sounds just like every other Time-Warner Green Day hit except they’ve added another trash can (32 gallon size, durable plastic construction, made in China and too large to fit through the doors of the local Dollar Store) to the percussion section.
• Put on chain store, mall-bought clothes produced in somewhere in Southeast Asia, sold at WalMart as a celebrity line of signature clothing (her publicist thought she needed some exposure in between reality TV guest appearances).
• Eat cereal–hand-crafted by minimum-wage breakfast artisans from genetically modified wheat, grown by commercial farmers who sold the operations and lease them back from shadowy subsidiaries of Monsanto/Pioneer/Syngenta, and use more petrochemicals than a medium-sized country in Africa–which you then drench in milk produced by using FDA-approved bovine growth hormone (which can increase milk production up to 16 fold, and the man sez it’s the most tested product in McHuman History!)
• On the way to McDonald’s for a less healthy round 2 of breakfast, listen to the local Clear Channel affiliate–you know the one: hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and today! (And you thought La Grande was the only place to get this stuff . . .)–with the local-sounding DJ, on the car radio, which was mass-produced in a factory along the U.S. Mexican border where workers are currently fired for demanding a .10 pay raise (which would have pushed them up to .90/hr). Hey! It’s that cool new Hillary Duff song!
• Wait in drive-through for your eggamuffin (or a similar product from Burger King, Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, Jack-in-the Box, Carl’s, KFC, Taco Bell, etc.).
• Get to work–you perform one task all morning–let’s say, you’re analyzing urine samples for traces of drugs among middle school football players (not what you thought you’d be doing with your chemistry degree . . . ). It’s repetitive, boring, the pay is mediocre, last week you dropped a flat of vials and had to work overtime–without pay–‘replacing’ them (17 players’ families subsequently filed lawsuits through the legal aid website jackpostjustice.com, claiming false positive results cost their sons full-ride scholarships, but not to worry–they had all signed a binding arbitration clause!). And your co-workers may be ‘secret shoppers,’ so if you liked the job, you’d be worried this week. But hey, it’s a paycheck while it lasts! And you get lunch! Well, not paid of course, but still. Hmmm . . . .where to go . . . .
• Lunch time-you only have half an hour, so you head over to Belly Buster for a megasized Whooper Dee-lux, eat it in 4 bites, down the 48 oz drink (with 36 teaspoons of sugar) and sneak a refill, and head back quickly to find a restroom before lunch break’s over;
• Avoid the talk at the water cooler about organizing a union–this may save you your job . . . for this week.
• Afternoon–time for your officially sanctioned-but-grudgingly-given 10-minute break. You head over to the 5-Minnit Loob to drop the car off for an oil change, and go across the street to Starbucks for a double shot Trenta (that’s thirty ounces!) skinny iced semi-gloss, red velvet cake-infused frappulattecino;
• When you return to work, the supervisor, a 19 year-old former student council officer (sergeant-at-arms) at the local high school, informs you that you’re two minutes late and tells you you’re on probation because you deviated from the customer script with two ‘secret shoppers’ the day before. Then he proceeds–with a grim expression, learned from management training webinars offered online by a corporate consulting firm–to give you a lecture on the importance of appearance and customer relations (even though everyone wears identical lab coats festooned with corporate logos).
• Work’s over. In the parking lot, you step in something dark and oily draining from under your car. You go home to your large apartment complex, Hamptondunne Luxury Townemaisons, built ten years ago on the busiest street in McTownVille, and narrowly avoid getting hit by a shingle that worked itself loose from the second floor right under your door (which was manufactured by displaced rice farmers, in Malaysia, using plantation-grown tropical ‘hardwoods’);
• You haven’t noticed yet, but underneath your car, the pool of oil is spreading where the 5-Minnit Loob attendant stripped the threads on the oil pan screw, because he was too busy jamming to the local Classic Rock radio station, you know the one–it requires the playing of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Free Bird‘ (depending on which state the local affiliate is located) at least once every 90 minutes. Chances are he was tightening the screw to ‘Free Bird’ during the frenzied guitar riff at the end when the screw, manufactured in a private prison factory in Louisiana by a prisoner making .23/hr, snapped in two.
• Once inside your apartment, you check the mail–the Oregon voters’ guide pamphlet and ballot for the next election is there. You’re too tired to look it over, and toss it in the recycle pile, feeling pretty proud of yourself for being environmentally conscious (you will later vote down the ban on plastic bags after having viewed a dramatic TV commercial with Chuck Norris assailing it as ‘weenie roast’ that represents an assault on freedom);
• You turn on the TV to watch 3 minute news stories on war heroes, disease and Hollywood celebrities, interspersed with 30-second commercials from corporate sponsors that cost $1 million each to produce. One of them tells you to ask your doctor about Wysteria if you’ve ever had itchiness between your toes; another ad had close-up shots of food that made the melting mozzarella cheese on the pizza look pornographic, like it was photographed with an electron microscope. You finish the news feeling pretty socially responsible for keeping up with current events of the day.
• There are presidential debates on this evening, being carried by the networks, sponsored by ExxonMobil, TexacoChevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, BP, and some fringe group called Citizens for Accountability in Politics. The two major party McCandidates have 2 minutes to discuss important policy issues, which they instead use to repeat market-tested talking points accusing each other of everything from terrorism to using a quarter saver at the local laundromat in their youth. They avoid answering the moderators’ questions, relying instead on simple scripts that repeat sound bites and talking points, which their campaign consultants recycled from their last client (who lost). The moderators don’t seem to notice the 2nd grade reading level speech patterns, but always know which camera to watch. One minute rebuttals with flashing red and green lights.
• But you changed channels, because you thought it was some cheesy reality TV show on C-Span (such programming is thought to be contagious).
• Too tired to cook, even in the easy touch-screen microwave (just press the hot dog button! Really!), you call Carbonizato’s Pizza and order a mouth-watering Dubble Stuffed San Antonio-Style Southwest Chicken BBQ Fiesta Pizza (with Hidd’n Valley Ranch® baked into the Crust). The chicken is produced in massive Chicken factories in Arkansas and North Carolina, and fed massive doses of antibiotics and steroids to reduce disease and fatten them more quickly (Some genetic engineering and processing experiments may apply! Ask your doctor about Chicktheria!), producing chickens with 20% more breast meat, and this meat is being used in the new ‘product,’ which is being test-marketed in the tri-state region.
• You spend the evening watching tightly scripted ‘reality TV’ shows, whose premises are based on focus group research designed to target the 18-34 yr demographic. All of the actors (who actually have names) are Extremely Buff, drop-dead gorgeous (just like real life), and attended acting webinars at their local McShakespeare Theater Institute branch campuses. Your favorite show is called MWF, My Wrestling Fantasy, where contestants vie for a spot on a Professional Wrestling Satellite Circuit (Really! No kidding!) by eating glass shards, trying to poison each other in the break room, and talking like Hulk Hogan (or that local DJ on the Classic Rock station). Planning for the sequel–Masked Wrestler–is in the works.
• After a day like that, who’s got time to pay attention to what politicians, who require millions of dollars to run even losing campaigns these days, are cooking up in Washington or the state capital? Time for bed. Just rest yer purdy li’l head on that pillow doused in polybrominated diphenyl ether–a flame retardant that keeps your hair from spontaneously combusting while you sleep soundly (thanks to Loonesta!). And I don’t know exactly what PBDEs are, but they double as neurotoxins, a word that was banned for textbook use by the Texas Public School Board. Did you set the alarm clock? Ooops, broken? That’s okay, throw it away! You’ve just contributed to the local economy/waste stream. Even if it’s only the batteries. There’s plenty more at the GiantBoxMart where those came from. Electricity’s never been cheaper. In fact, tomorrow you can use your 10-minute break to go out and buy another clock at GiantBoxMart’s brand spanking new SooperCenter! Oh . . . use the express self-check out, so you don’t get fired for being late back at work–those coaches and school boards are anxiously awaiting the results of your hard work!

Okay, maybe that’s not a McTypical day. Or typical McDay. Hopefully not. But hopefully you also get an idea of the ways in which McDonald’s business model has spread to other institutions, and quite literally around the McGlobe.