From the star Mcdonalds in peel Square to close down after nearly 20 years in the town

RE: Unlikely.

True, but then McDonalds as a company has been losing money hand over fist and has had to close many stores down as a result. That might well have a bearing on the decision to close that outlet down.

 

From the BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4759130.stm

 

Interesting article from the NY Times

Italian upset: Focaccia 1, Big Mac 0
By Ian Fisher The New York Times
THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2006

ALTAMURA, Italy - Somehow the tale of how the city with the best bread in Italy forced its McDonald's out of business might never have been told, though now it is spilling out.

All the elements of a McDonald's morality play remain relevant today: supposed corporate arrogance; traditional food triumphing over food product; a David in the form of a humble and graying baker named DiGesù against an expansionist American Goliath.

And, inevitably, it includes the French.

It was the leftist and Amero-skeptic French newspaper, Libération, that last week wrote the fullest account of what happened in Altamura, in southern Italy, where the road signs welcome visitors to "The City of Bread." (The poet Horace liked it, 2,043 years ago.) The article began like a triumphant cold war novel:

"The long red mat was taken away secretly during the night," it reported, noting, too, that the "enormous M" over Piazza Zanardelli was "also packed up surreptitiously." The windows were covered "like a shroud on the victim of a culinary battlefield."

"Today," Libération said, "there are no longer Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets or industrial fries in Altamura."

What Libération neglected to say - as have most of the other articles in an irresistible landslide of coverage in print and on the Web - is that the McDonald's closed down in December 2002. The paper spoke vaguely of happenings a "number" of months ago.

But no matter: The protagonists here in Altamura - as well as many others - are thrilled for the belated attention, and the distinction as the city whose food was so good that it closed down a McDonald's without really trying.

"What took place was a small war between us and McDonald's," said Onofrio Pepe, a retired journalist who founded an association here devoted to local delicacies. "Our bullets were focaccia. And sausage. And bread. It was a peaceful war, without any spilling of blood."

Pepe and several like-minded citizens of Altamura, with 65,000 residents, 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, south of the Adriatic port city of Bari, made up one wing of the army. Their reasons for fighting were largely pride, against what they said was ill-executed intrusion, in their food - which includes a local mushroom called the cardoncello, focaccia, mozzarella and, most of all, a coarse-grain bread famous for millennia around Italy. The bread is protected as unique in European Union regulations, which note that Horace called it, in 37 B.C., "far the best bread to be had, so good that the wise traveler takes a supply of it for his onward journey."

When the McDonald's first opened in early 2001, Pepe said he was not opposed to it, and even supported the 25 or so new jobs created. "In the beginning," he said, "it seemed like modernization."

Then the modern seemed to take over: McDonald's erected the huge arches on a pole near the old town center, jarringly near the 13th-century cathedral, beaming yellow neon 24 hours a day (and disturbing, Pepe said, little falcons that nested in nearby trees).

"It gave the sense of a city being occupied," he said. "It was considered a sort of challenge. Not a challenge to confront in anger, but with a smile. They brought in their products, and we had ours."

So his group held low-key protests to highlight local food, as another front on the war opened, very much unplanned.

A fourth-generation baker, Luca DiGesù, now 35, opened Antica casa DiGesù, a small bakery right next to McDonald's. DiGesù said he had no intention of challenging McDonald's. He merely hoped to shake free some customers attracted to the spot by the novelty.

"I was afraid of McDonald's," he said, speaking in his bakery on Tuesday afternoon. "I was afraid we would be completely glossed over. I was afraid no one would even notice us."

For awhile, McDonald's drew in the customers of Altamura. "In the beginning," DiGesù said, "McDonald's was McDonald's."

But soon there was a migration of locals who preferred their own version of fast food: hunks of the thick focaccia like the dozen that DiGesù was tending in the oven as he spoke. Part of the reason seemed economic: DiGesù said that a big slice of focaccia cost the same as a single McDonald's hamburger. It was also, clearly, preference.

"It wasn't that my shop was full," he said. "But people slowly started showing up more and more at my place."

McDonald's began fighting back: It offered school trips to visit the kitchens; free access to the restaurant for children's birthday parties; coupons for children; even a television for customers to watch soccer. Nothing seemed to work.

"They'd watch the games, and as soon as it was over go out and get focaccia," Pepe said.

Finally, in December 2002, after less than two years in operation, the McDonald's of Altamura closed shop, according to the company, for lack of profitability.

The huge space is now divided by a jeans store and a bank. DiGesù smiled broadly when asked how he felt that the Italian media - which missed the story three years ago - is now hailing him as a modern-day David.

"I like it," he said. "McDonald's is big. I am small. Right now it is 1-0."

Food snobs, patriots of all sorts, and antiglobalists will all read what they like into the fate of McDonald's here. But unlike some anti-McDonald's activists in France, the people of Altamura say their issue was not anti-Americanism.

"The difference between France and here is that in France it is ideological," Pepe said. "Here it was completely natural. We like America very much."

And, while Italy is at the forefront of the so-called slow food movement, which emphasizes rare and distinct local foods, there seems no overwhelming aversion to McDonald's - judging at least by how crowded with Italians they often are.

"In no way is this a defeat for McDonald's," contended Mario Resca, president of McDonald's in Italy, saying that he hoped to double the current number of 340 McDonald's here. "If anything, I am proud that the local culture is appreciating its local cuisine because this means that McDonald's has stimulated a healthy competition."

In the end, it seems there may simply be places in the world where McDonald's is out of its depth on every front.

The landlord both for McDonald's and DiGesù happened to be DiGesù's brother-in-law.

The brother-in-law gave DiGesù a good deal on the rent. He did not do so for McDonald's.

Then there is the local food - cheap and overwhelmingly good - and the people who have eaten it for centuries and consider it as much their tradition as their history. Odd as it might seem in a corporate boardroom, they put no value on a McDonald's in Altamura.

"The majority couldn't imagine McDonald's becoming an integral part of their lives," said Patrick Girondi, 48, an entrepreneur from Chicago who has lived here for 15 years. "McDonald's didn't get beat by a baker. McDonald's got beat by a culture."

Peter Kiefer contributed reporting for this article from Rome and Altamura.