What Could Be Sweeter than the Love of a Grandmother?

A recent print ad for McDonald’s sweet tea reads “Just like grandma wishes she made.” At first glance, the ad is simply a clever play on the familiar saying “Just like grandma used to make.” But a more considered reading of the ad reveals the formula by which McDonald’s, and others of its ilk, are reshaping the landscape of desire.

Until very recently, the ad could have successfully relied upon the original familiar saying, “Just like grandma used to make.” The stirring of warm feelings towards grandma mixed with memories of her kitchen, once linked to the sweet tea, would have been sufficient to attract the prospective sweet tea consumer. Grandma was the source of a loving nurturance that runs deep, fulfilling a primordial need and at the same time establishing a desire to have those very needs continually met in an equally satisfying fashion. This potent combination of need, satisfaction, and desire secured a loyalty to grandma that a McDonald’s could only dream of from its consumers, even as it traded on that loyalty with advertising come-ons such as “Just like grandma used to make.





McDonald’s couldn’t have run the ad “Just like grandma wishes she made” perhaps just fifteen years ago. Even that recently the idea that a fast food chain could outdo grandma’s home cooking would have been seen as both preposterous and at least mildly offensive to grandmothers and grandchildren everywhere. Major corporations that are tone deaf to mainstream sensibilities do not remain major corporations for long. That the ad has run now, and that no one seems to have noticed it (I googled it, and found one lone mention on what appeared to be a stream of consciousness tweet), indicates that McDonald’s knew it could safely run the ad. McDonald’s understands quite well that something has changed, and what has changed is where our desires and, by extension, our loyalties rest. McDonald’s no longer needs to play off of our loyalty to grandma, but can instead flout our loyalty to McDonald’s. And we are loyal to McDonald’s because the golden arches can meet our needs and desires more readily than anyone or anything else, including grandma. Presenting the 99 cent sweet tea. By pricing its sweet tea and other items within reach of even the beggar on the corner, McDonald’s has refashioned itself as the local soup kitchen, opening its embrace to all when the threat of becoming that beggar on the corner continually expands its reach. If home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, that place is now McDonald’s. And if home is where the heart is, the respective questions of why grandma wishes she made it just like McDonald’s and how we could possibly take her wish for granted, have both been answered.