So I’m watching McDonald’s new ad campaign – focused on encouraging us to make the bold move to have lunch at Ronald’s house. 
While the digerati are obsessed with the social media aspects of this campaign, I find it most interesting for what it says socially – that leaving the office for lunch became a “radical” choice during the Great Recession and that actual courage is required to break the trend and “take back” your lunch hour.
Great messages are founded on truth, and this one certainly is.
There’s a good chance you work in a culture where taking lunch is perfectly acceptable, but believe it or not, a lot of cubicle monkeys feel a lot of pressure to show up early, stay late, and work through the lunch hour. This toxification of the workplace is an easy-to-diagnose result of the fear generated by the Great Recession.
And don’t turn blue holding your breath for management to dissipate that fear either. Fear has become the new black in work place motivation in all but the most high-demand careers, and is likely to stay that way until employees can again threaten to pick up and move to another job.
So enter McDonald’s, brilliantly tapping into the fear, the resentment and the hope for new empowerment that might come from something as basic as taking a lunch break.
On second thought, really, lunch breaks have only been viewed as “basic” over the course of a few short decades. Before labor’s awakening, it was “lunch, smunch” – much like it is right now.
So go to McDonald’s and give your boss the passive-aggressive middle finger you’ve been dying to since, oh, maybe 2007.
Brilliant.
