McDo and me

A RECORD of the Guinness sort was achieved this Monday with the biggest McDonald’s store in the country opening at Megaworld’s Capital Town in the City of San Fernando. As in nothing bigger, everything smaller, anywhere else in PHL.

No simple record though but history did I consciously make with my mere attendance to the event. As in only me, not anyone else there present. No conceit there as that privilege made possible simply by my senior citizenship and my media ID.

I very much doubt if anyone else at McDo-Capital Town’s launch was also at the opening of the first ever McDo store outside Metro Manila a nigh short of 40 years ago.

The exact date I cannot now recall, but it was in the pre-EDSA Uno 1980s – Ferdinand E. Marcos was still president, Estelito P. Mendoza was governor of Pampanga, and Fred Halili was mayor of a Mabalacat municipality that was still far from Boking Morales and farther from a city – that McDo set shop in Dau. Primarily for the American market of US servicemen and their families at nearby Clark Air Base, then still the bastion of American imperialism in the Asia-Pacific.

Indeed, as feasibility-studied, McDo-Dau drew the American clientele, but along with them those ideologically vowed to oust them from P.I. shores. By any means, less fair than foul, as it turned out.

Murder most foul

Exact date now, Oct. 27, 1987, USAF Staff Sgt. Randy Davis “had just crossed MacArthur Highway after an early breakfast at McDonald’s in Dau when he was shot dead.”
My banner story in People’s Tonight and dispatch to the Associated Press reported that Davis was one of three US servicemen and one American-looking Filipino gunned down in simultaneous attacks around Clark by urban partisans of the New People’s Army that day.

Scourge of the environment

Nearly three years after, it was McDo that was “attacked” – no, not by the NPA but by the press – for being “a scourge of the environment.”

So was McDo denounced in Pampanga Press Club Resolution 3-02 dated Sept. 30, 1990 after “three fully grown acacia trees were felled and a few others ‘pruned to the trunk’ to make way for the parking lot of the food chain” at the Dolores-MacArthur Highway junction in San Fernando.

“Senator Heherson Alvarez, chair of the natural resources committee, and DENR Secretary Fulgencio Factoran Jr., to whom the PPC resolution was addressed immediately took action and McDo was made to plant 10 seedlings for every tree it cut at a DENR-designated area and also helped sponsor a number of environmental campaigns.” So, we recalled in our book Of the Press (1999).    

It was I, as PPC president, that stood as the complaining party during the confrontation at the DENR office.

In an ironic twist of fate, the McDo representative was none other than my college journalism professor Nancy Harel nee Ladringan who recruited me to write for The Regina, the student publication of the then-Assumption College which editorship I later held. Nancy was head of Harel & Associates, McDo’s ad agency.

Contactors

McDo-Dolores junction made its mark as the place to be in Pampanga’s post-Pinatubo 90s.

Contractors, constructors and their retinue of contactors, and public works engineers made the place their veritable boardroom. I remember the late Ed Aguilar, alias Dan U. Pan but famously known as Macky Pangan, who made a virtual home of McDo-Dolores exclaiming only God, or the devil in this wise, knew what crooked means and corrupted schemes were crafted over Big Macs in the implementation of Pinatubo-mitigation projects.

Macky, it was too, that chaired and moderated the informal media forum at the place regularly attended by incumbent local officials, political wannabes, as well as has-beens and never-would-bes.

It was in one of these fora that I first met Macky, engaging me in a heated discussion on who would win the 1995 Pampanga governorship: he, bloviating on the “sure win” of  his cabalen Don Pepito Mercado; I, quarterbacking for Lito Lapid, japing on the reduction of the don to a pipit after the polls.

Senior-unfriendly

And who else but Macky, along with this paper’s resident poeta laureado Felix Garcia, that would revive my adversarial stance vis-à-vis McDo-Dolores in 2014.

On two different occasions I made a scene at the place for its unfair treatment of us senior citizens.

One, I snatched the “Priority Lane for SCs and PWDs” sign from its perch at the cash register and slammed it on the counter after a queue of giggly college girls and a gaggle of workers were served ahead of seniors.   

Two, I took an SC lady to the head of the long line of non-seniors, again, at the priority lane, and demanded that she be served first, lecturing everyone on the rights of the elderly.

Both environmental and social issues obtaining from McDo-Dolores came top of mind, as I joined other pressmen in the impromptu mediacon after the rites opening McDo-The Biggest.

Impact to community

Alien to the usual goodwill-hunting questions of why in the City of San Fernando – Because of its strategic location and its people; how many will you employ – 300(?); how big is it – 2,200-square meter lot, 1,000 square meters of floor area; what are the other amenities – modern McCafe, a no-touch drive-thru facility, alfresco dining, self-ordering kiosks, a meeting room, and a dedicated party area, I asked – this is not to rain on your parade, I prefaced – the environmental impact of the site raised so many meters above the surrounding flood-prone community.

I stand 5 feet 10 inches, at street level the ground of McDo-The Biggest is way over my head.

One of the execs promptly answered: They were given the approval to raise their ground with the city government and DPWH assuring them that the street level would also be raised in the future.

That’s for the future, I said, what’s for the present?

A lagoon to collect rain water to mitigate flooding.

Yeah, it would really be most unkind of me to rain, moreso to storm, on their parade. So, I stopped asking.    

The Chicken McDo with rice was not as bad. The brew at McCafe was even better.