I am an employee of Pizza Hut and have been all throughout college on into grad school, and am appalled by the hypocrisy Yum! Brands is positioning itself with in fighting to eradicate world hunger. Pizza Hut disposes of unfathomable amounts of edible product everyday keeping up with stringent, self-imposed freshness guidelines. It is a very wasteful and inefficient operation, save for the primary goal of turning a profit. Pans of unused dough are baked off every morning then disposed of (baking them off makes them easier to remove from the oiled pans, but alas, you are left with a cooked product); pre-made, unused buffet pizzas are tossed, and the salad bar is flipped on a time based schedule. I couldn't put an estimate on the amount of food that is wasted which could otherwise be saved and used to feed the starving, but it would be enough to make a sizable impact if preserved on a large scale basis. Yum Brands claims to own nearly 35,000 restaurants, so it is not difficult to imagine how much food is being wasted if the waste is 35,000 times as great as what I have witnessed. However, preservation isn't profitable, and that is the bottom line to a company like Yum Brands! It would be too expensive and counterproductive for a fast food chain to feed people for free, but if philanthropy were the goal, they'd have the means.
Now I know what some are thinking: at least they are doing something. But only if it were that simple. We're talking about a company here that has earned $2,607,000,000 in gross profit in the past four quarters, which is a little over 2 and a half billion dollars for those unable to grasp that many zero's. And of that profit, they donated $50,000,000 to fight world hunger in 2006, or roughly 2% of that total. Keep in mind that their donations are tax deductible and serve as a great public relations tool, so it is a cost saving measure. So while this is being positioned as an unselfish, praise worthy initiative, it is also a very profitable venture as well, and is much more business minded than socially minded. Just check out their website. There are logo's littered all over the place. They are much more interested in the credit for the deed, rather than in the actual deed itself. This is just another form of advertising, much cheaper by the way than traditional print or television campaigns, and makes for good PR.
http://www.fromhungertohope.com/
Despite the bad rap that cynicism has developed over the years, I am a firm believer. You don't believe me. Consider the company Altria, the parent company to Kraft foods and Phillip Morris, and the imaging building campaign it embarked on in 2000. After years of receiving bad PR for being in the tobacco industry and deceptively contributing to millions of deaths by underscoring the health hazards of smoking, Phillip Morris, in an effort to paint a new image, donated roughly $60 million to various social causes such as to disaster relief funds and to fund minority education. Now this seems great on the surface, until it is realized that Altria spent about $100 million on their campaign advertising this deed, or nearly twice the amount spent on the actual charities. There is a real problem with this. Remember when as a child your parents told you to let your actions speak for themselves, and that actions speak louder than words. Well, that's bad PR as an adult, and as adults, we must take motives into consideration. Why pretend that these companies are acting out of nobility, when there is an inherent selfishness to their philanthropy? I just can't accept capitalistic corporations claiming to fight for social causes, when it is these very same capitalistic corporations which do not act socially unless there is a selfish motivation. Couple that with the fact that capitalism is a driving force of world hunger, and Yum Brands is really looking like the hypocrite.
I recently viewed "Capitalism and other Kids' Stuff", which is a must see, and came across this startling statistic from the World Health Organization (WHO) over the course of the documentary. According to the report, over 20 years ago the WHO estimated that there were enough resources and means available to feed the world 12 times over, but that instead, we had a famine in Ethiopia. What does that say about our morals? That despite the ability to do real good, we choose our economy instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hentIFNmZFo
Our government actually pays American farmers not to farm land so as to keep the price of certain crops at a high level, and it is as corrupt of a system as there is in this country. This will eventually turn into a whole separate posting itself, but our government actually spent $25 billion on aid in 2005 for farmers, a portion of whihch went as payments for not growing crops, so as to keep the price of the crop high by preventing the market from becoming over saturated. In short, there are not enough consumers in this country with cash to consume all that could be produced. This is inhuman. It is obscene to give $25 billion dollars away to esentially reduce production, only for the purpose of keeping the price of agriculture up to sustain higher profits, when real people need food to survive. People are starving to death, and our government follows the money. We have the means, but we do no good. No wonder so many outside this country hate us.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/01/AR2006070100962.html
My point isn't to paint a bad image of Yum Brands, but to point out that it is non-sensical for a capitalistic enterprise to claim to be aiding the fight against world hunger, when the very system that allows this enterprise to flourish is responsible for such vast, unfathomable famine. That coupled with the fact edible food is tossed away at disturbing amounts further questions the integrity of such a campaign. If Yum Brands were really concerned about fighting world hunger, they would enact practices in their stores which weren't so wasteful, which preserved edible food rather than destroying it. How can one not become cynical when looking at how the elite operate?
digg it
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Beyond_the_haze_of_philanthropy
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