It's 'the vibe': Does McDonald's ruin a town?

"Maccas is more than a restaurant, it's a feeling," McDonald's Australia marketing director Amanda Nakad said in June. Nostalgia, comfort, joy, familiarity are apparently what McDonald's brings to mind.

But look around Australia right now and you could also add outrage and condemnation.

In Victoria and South Australia, residents of several towns are fighting proposed McDonald's developments.

In Sydney, a council has rejected two development applications by the golden arches in Redfern and Newtown — although last month it was revealed McDonald's would be coming to a different location in Newtown thanks to a fast-track development process that bypassed council.

McDonald's has also recently prevailed over local council opposition in Melbourne suburb Northcote.

Campaigns opposing McDonald's generally focus on negative health impacts, traffic, threats to family businesses and the loss of local identity — and they're not new.

There's a long list of towns and suburbs that have fought, and often failed, to stop the fast-food outlet.

These campaigns, obviously, aren't unanimously supported – recent Roy Morgan research says 11 million Australians aged over 14 ate at McDonald's in the past year. For every Change.org petition to stop the franchise, there's a rival petition in support of McDonald's. And for some, hanging out at McDonald's is a lifeline.

Stores near schools

Perhaps the most epic anti-burger battle occurred in Tecoma, on Melbourne's hilly, eastern fringe.

Between 2011 and 2014 there were picket lines, protester camp-outs on the development site, unionised construction workers refusing work in solidarity with the protesters, a local council that considered pursuing action in the Supreme Court, a Jamie Oliver tweet of support, and a trip to Chicago to take the fight to McDonald's HQ.

Yet, in 2014 the Tecoma McDonald's opened. And as one of the more than 1,000 McDonald's stores in Australia, it's been doing business ever since.

So, what happens when a McDonald's comes to town? Do the fears of the residents who oppose these developments play out?

At Phillip Island, a tourist magnet that juts off Victoria's wild south-eastern coastline, McDonald's submitted plans in April to build a store metres from a primary school, a major concern for the residents now fighting the development. 

"You can guarantee there'll be a fair whack of kids hassling mum saying, 'I want a Happy Meal'," says Trevor Ryan, a proud, fifth-generation Phillip Islander and spokesperson for the local Say No to McDonald's group.

Last year, when McDonald's proposed building next to a primary school in the regional Victorian city of Bendigo, the school's principal said the development would undermine its promotion of healthy lifestyles. 

And parents called for tougher legislation, like Ireland's "No Fry Zone", which bans fast-food outlets from opening near schools to improve children's health. (The Bendigo proposal was rejected by the local council and McDonald's says it's "reviewing its options".)

It's 'the vibe'

But measuring the impact a McDonald's may have on the health of a population is tricky. 

Understanding how we consume food involves looking at what foods are available, how they're marketed and branded, and the price they're sold at, says Gary Sacks, a professor of public health at Deakin University. 

In public health research, these factors constitute what's known as a "food environment".

So, isolating the effect of one store in one location is near impossible. 

"What we do know is that when a particular neighbourhood has a high ratio of unhealthy food outlets to healthier ones the evidence shows the mix definitely leads to worse dietary behaviours," Sacks says. 

"And we also know there's strong evidence that intense marketing of unhealthy foods affects what people eat." (McDonald's is among the top 10 advertising spenders in Australia, according to Nielsen.)

Influencing better dietary outcomes, Sacks says, isn't as simple as implementing things likes No Fry Zones because they only tackle one aspect of a food environment. 

He points to Chile as a country that is successfully creating healthier food environments. 

"So, they've got taxes on unhealthy food, they've got restrictions on marketing, they've got really good food labelling and the evidence from Chile is that those measures together are starting to make a difference," Sacks says.

When McDonald's moves into a neighbourhood, there's something aside from the food that needs to be considered, and that's "the vibe", Sacks argues. 

The golden arches has what he calls a lure effect: "Often young people see a McDonald's outlet as a cool place to hang out and so it attracts young people in a different way to how a regular fast-food outlet might."

Also, McDonalds can be a gateway to other fast-food outlets opening in similar locations to "try to compete with them", Sacks says.

What happens to local businesses?

At Phillip Island, where the high volume of submissions in relation to the proposal overwhelmed the council's website, Ryan argues a “multinational” like McDonald’s would ruin the “seaside feel of the island” and affect local businesses, although he lists multinational companies already there, including Aldi and Subway. 

For those who want McDonald's, he names two nearby towns where people can go; how McDonald's affected the local business in those communities is difficult to assess.

And Professor Gary Mortimer from the QUT Business School says large chains can have a positive impact on neighbouring businesses by creating "greater foot traffic and greater movement of populations towards that particular tenant" when they're not offering the same product.

Ryan also questions the purported employment benefits of the new store. McDonald's claims the Phillip Island outlet will create up to 120 jobs. However, Ryan points out that the company uses self-serve kiosks, is trialling AI drive-thru ordering and has tested robotic fryers in the US.

A spokesperson for McDonald's Australia said the AI ordering trial was at one restaurant in Sydney and "technologies like this are designed to support crew, not replace the role they play". The spokesperson said McDonald's employed more than 115,000 people in Australia.

The group opposing a proposed McDonald's in central Victorian town Castlemaine has raised similar concerns. "The same statistic is used for every development: 'It's going to be 100 jobs' … frankly we're talking self-serve kiosks and Uber deliveries these days, so I'm not actually convinced about that," Vicki Anderson of MAC OFF — Protect Castlemaine says.

In Victoria, a new planning law giving councils the ability to consider health and wellbeing when approving developments comes into effect next year. Both the Castlemaine and Phillip Island groups are concerned McDonald's is trying to outrun the changes and get new developments in place now.

A private members' bill giving councils powers to explicitly reject the development of a fast-food outlet on public health grounds has also been introduced to Victoria's Parliament. The bill would require authorities to assess the development's proximity to schools, the number of fast food outlets in the area and public health data. 

Anderson says community groups across the state are calling for the bill to be passed. "We'd love to see this become an election issue," she says.

She says local communities and councils should be able to say "enough is enough".