You Want a Big Mac?
The story behind that name
Making a choice sometimes can be very frustrating, especially when it comes to a time that you need to order something fast, really fast — at a “fast”-food restaurant like McDonald’s. After years of feeding myself in school life, I developed my never-wrong-go-to-solution for McDonald’s order: if you don’t know what to eat while in a queue to order burger, go with a Big Mac.
It’s quite intuitive to think that BigMac, the popular double layered burger, is the eye-catching product in McDonald restaurant, however, the name of it actually came with some stories. In 1967 when this sandwich was invented by franchisee Jim Delligatti in Pittsburgh, it was firstly named as ‘Aristocrat’, meaning ‘the people that a particular social order considers in the highest social class of that society.‘ This word might not be that familiar to most of people, neither it is easy to pronounce and being understood. Imagine one man walked into a McDonald restaurant, staring at the board and said, ‘Can I have one Aristocrat?’, which is pretty funny isn’t it?
Of course those managers ran the corporate noticed this lethal name crisis, not too long after the name ‘Aristocrat’ was used, it was changed to ‘Blue Ribbon Burger’ to make it lot easier to read and imagine. I am not sure whether at that time the packaging of Big Mac was a paper box with blue ribbon around it but this change-name-action was definitely to put this sandwich to an iconised, symbolised stuff.
Just one year later, in 1968, a 21-year-old girl named Esther Glickstein Rose, worked as advertising secretary at McDonald corporate Headquarter in Oak Brook, Illinois, decided to give the sandwich a new name. One day, a product development manager approached her, as Ms Rose recalled, ‘He said I need a name for this new bigger hamburger. He described it to me, and off the top of my head I said, ‘Big Mac’, coz I dislike the two previous names.’ This combined word was not invented by that accidentally, in fact the name was established to compete with ‘Big Boy’ sandwich from another restaurant called Big Boy.
Let’s take a deeper look into the name: Big Mac. People just found it so easy to remember and so easy to be cheered up when they heard the pronunciation, Big, Mac. The two words follow a very similar pattern, begins with a consonant(/b/, /m/), transfers to a vowel(/i/,/æ/) and ends up with a happy consonant(/g/, /k/). Not only in a sentence we need to pay attention to beat and rhythm, it goes same for individual word phonetics. Vowel-centred and short words are much more easier to remember than long, multi-vowel words.
Eventually, consumers recognised the new name of that sandwich and Big Mac made a legendary success in the sales history of McDonald’s restaurants as the number one popular product in the menu. Next time when you go to McDonald, don’t be too hesitant to make a choice for the lunch, just grab a Big Mac meal and enjoy.
