At night, these aren’t always the most civilized places.
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Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
It’s bad enough if you work in a bar.
At least there, though, you expect one or two customers to imbibe more than is wise.
When you work at McDonald’s, however, the inebriated can just wander in off the street and change the atmosphere of the place in an instant.
Even worse, of course, is the possibility that the drink will have infused them with bellicose bravery, which then leads to a gratuitous punch-up in the parking lot.
Some McDonald’s restaurants have hit upon an interesting answer.
Brahms and Liszt.
Yes, this is Cockney rhyming slang for drunk. (Brahms and Liszt = pissed. Geddit?)
However, these restaurants are finding that if they pipe a little classical music over their speakers, it gets the drunks to pipe down.
Naturally, one of the first places to try it was Glasgow in Scotland.
The Mirror reports that one of the world’s great — in some meanings — drinking cities enjoyed calmer McDonald’s when a little, say, Bach replaced, well, whatever fine popular music was usually being played. Slayer, perhaps.
Since then, other McDonald’s in the UK have tried it, again with success. The experiment has even drifted to Australia.
How odd that it’s Anglo-Saxon nations that seem to have the most need for this. Urgent scientific study is surely needed to discern why. The loss of empire must be a factor.
Still, you have to commend the ingenuity of those who first came up with the idea.
As a McDonald’s spokesperson told the Mirror: “We have tested the effects of classical music in the past and played it in some of our restaurants as it encourages more acceptable behavior.”
There’s a certain irony that, at a time when the world seems more fractious, more unpleasant than ever, we need to bring back music from the past to calm us down.
There were all are, constantly bathing in technology. Yet is takes old-style violins, harpsichords and cellos to soothe our souls and bring us back to an orderly state.
Perhaps there are other ways in which we should hark back to our past in order to discover our better selves.
What did you say? Hipsters are already doing that?
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.