Tray Liners

Michele Letcher’s 1999 book, Disposable Enculturation, is an archaeological analysis of the fast food tray liners of McDonalds. As I leafed through Letcher’s massive, 450-page treatise, I wondered why anyone would study garbage. The answer, according to Letcher, is that by studying tray liners we can gain clear insights into the inter-relationships of twentieth-century American families, society and public relations. .

Archaeologists study past societies in order to construct a picture of how those societies operated and how people within them lived. The ultimate purpose of archaeology, though, is to understand contemporary society by deepening insights into the roots of our own culture and lifeways. It is ironic (and fitting in this age of publish-or-perish academic culture) that what archaeologists most often study is garbage and feces.

“If you want a clear picture of how people lived, study their accidental remains,” advises Dr. Lance Farnsworth, author of Digger, Picker, Puzzler: Habits of the Archaeologist. “Official records tend towards the self-congratulatory, focus on the top layers of a society, and ignore the bottom, more populous, and thereby more representative, layer. For example, the chemical and molecular data extracted from coprolites (fossilized fecal matter) is used by Paleoethnobotanists to extrapolate a much more in-depth picture of the daily life of these ancient people than any study of a monument could hope to achieve.”

What picture will future archaeologists draw of late twentieth century America? Scholars have filled bookshelves to bursting with musings on that question; coincidentally enough, landfills are filled to bursting with an unprecedented depth of “data” for future archaeologists to pick through. At first glance, Disposable Enculturation seems to stand out.

Of all the archaeological analyses of modern garbage, Letcher’s is unique. Letcher focuses exclusively (and might I add “exhaustively”) on one specific type of garbage: the fast food tray liners of McDonalds. Her reading of tray liners has shown “that the interactions of family and marketing, society and public relations, are closer knit than previously suspected.” Is picking through Disposable Enculturation worth the effort? Letcher and her publisher and employer, the University of Maryland Press, certainly want us to think so.

“These seemingly innocuous slips of paper are designed by multi-million dollar advertising companies to garner a minute, but not negligible, share of the potential consumer’s attention and to convey as much information as possible in the span between counter and dustbin. The balancing act they play is perilous; we ignore them at our own risk.” Letcher shows that the company has spent billions researching an ideal balance between message and subterfuge. Nonetheless, their purpose is “to provide a continual stream of marketing-oriented images/text while customers sit at the table and a final message as the customer exits the restaurant.”

Disposable Enculturation reads like a history of advertising, one focused on garbage design and told from an archaeologist’s point-of-view. Halfway through the examination of the various socio-cultural transformations reflected in the tray liner content of the early 1970’s, I found my attention wavering. Other than to illuminate a previously ignored aspect of McDonald’s marketing team in the 1970’s , Letcher imparted no information that wouldn’t be readily apparent to any person willing to think about the matters for more than a few minutes. And that seems to be Letcher’s audience: people who would rather be told the obvious truths than to think up the answers themselves.

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, it’s apparent that the proliferation of garbage in our information-economy countries is as unparalleled in its quantity as it is in its artfulness. The lengths to which contemporary designers have gone to design garbage is unprecedented.

Letcher’s examination stretches from the simple tray liner content of the early 1970’s, when a Republican Party pollster and strategist, Jerry Wirthlin, took over management of McDonald’s marketing team, to the busy, to the hyper-messaged liners of the early 21st century. Interspersed throughout are sidebars on different involved marketing elements: puzzles, clipout coupons, coloring pages, political messages, corporate advocacy campaigns (particularly for the plastics industry), surveys and, more recently, the introduction of Q-code Internet addresses, “making liners, for the first time, a truly interactive experience extending past the walls of the fast food giant.” Letcher even goes so far as to make a few predictions as to the future of the tray liners: “Given recent developments in electronic ink and smart paper, it is not unreasonable, to expert video commercials, touch-activated messages, even video games. These tray liners might even act as a computerized menu system whereby customers enter the restaurant, are given the tray, take it to their table, and then order their meals by touching the smart paper tray liners emblazoned with eye-catching pictoglyphs.”

Back in the 1970’s, two things happened to transform tray liners from a simple means of keeping the amount of in-store cleaning to a minimum to powerful message media. One was that the U.S. Census, a division of the Department of Commerce, developed a service that sold complex demographic data about the population to commercial enterprises. Of course, the message and marketing potential of the tray liners were never neglected. Most of the images and messages of these early tray liners focused on selling toys and convincing children to come back to the store. In 1973, McDonald’s hired Jerry Wirthlin, a political pollster who developed several marketing simulation models for business during the experimental polling years of the late sixties and early seventies. Wirthlin, subject of the recent Creating Worlds, Creating Needs: Incremental and Non-Continuous Narratives in Children’s Marketing (Singer, et al), took the standard tray liner games and advertisements and cross-marketed them with other available products from subsidiary companies or, utilizing many of the tricks he learned campaigning for the Regan campaign, encouraged children to complete “fun surveys to help McDonald’s help you”.

The rise of polling during these years generated a standard sequence of events for the corporation’s public-relations activity, a sequence that is actually a loop both starting and ending with the consumer: (1) conduct an attitudinal survey that identifies image problems; (2) mount an advocacy ad campaign and other news management strategies based on the survey; (3) reflect back the values of the surveiled subject. The key point, according to Letcher, was that nowhere in this loop did the company actually change anything about its operations.

“Fast food tray liners have always been designed to be discarded. Yet, in the time between counter and dustbin, they are meant to garner a minute, but not negligible, portion of the customer’s attention. The company has spent uncountable billions researching an ideal balance between message and Viewer-Ego-Guard filtering—that system by which the brain filters out messages which conflict too strongly with perceived values. Nonetheless, the purpose of tray liners has remained the same: to provide a continual stream marketing messages.”

A fine balance had to be maintained. The design of these liners could not exceed certain limits of visibility. The key function of the liner was to be seen, yes, but also to be thrown away. For the customer to perceive the liners as a type of marketing was considered a failure. “Liners should be inconspicuous. Messages, images, symbols, should be allowed sufficient time for exposure. However, and this was most difficult, the liners should also provide a sense of comfort, a certain lack of intensity, an absence of purpose”—a Trojan Horse allowing messages to enter the unwitting consciousness.

Though Lecher does not divide the evolution of tray liners into such discrete categories as decades, she does note that the 80s were witness to a revolution in marketing: the inclusion of celebrity images on tray liners. It was at this time that McDonalds began purchasing the rights to celebrity images and putting them on the liners. “These images provided complex and potentially volatile connotations which were difficult to control and, worst of all, to predict, but, with few exceptions, resulted in positive image benefit to the restaurant.”

Hundreds of pages of analysis later, Letcher finally comes to the current stage of tray liner development, which she notes, "[reflects] the corporation’s most active PR attempts to combat current negative publicity and establish a solid defensive psychological bulwark against potential future attacks.” The book was published in 2005, but the symbols Lecher discusses are current today (I went and checked). Whichever McDonalds you go to, in any country in the world, you will find images of physically healthy and attractive people, sports-oriented activities, even Ronald McDonald engaging in a variety of X-sports. The message couldn’t be clearer: Healthy people eat at McDonalds (too). However, as Letcher points out, this is merely one type of imaging, taking a relatively small example and extrapolating it to cover the whole population. It’s funny that we needed this book to make us aware of this; but this is one of the ways this “stealth” advertising works. Who pays attention to the message on liners? Very, very few, Lecher’s ilk excluded.

Environmentalism became a strong political force in the 90s; concurrently, tray liners carried an increasing number of messages about recycling, the use of biodegradable packaging, the use of American beef as opposed to beef imported from the Rain Forest regions of the Amazon. In fact, McDonald’s early proactive campaigning in the 80’s “actually foresaw the rise of environmentalism in popular American consciousness, and tailored its messages to help shape an entire generation’s emotional response to the subject.” One can’t help but be reminded of the December 1988 issue of National Geographic, an issue largely dedicated to questioning humanity’s impact on the earth. The front cover was a double-hologram depicting planet Earth. Viewed from one angle, the holographic image shows a whole planet; viewed from a different angle, the image shows the planet breaking apart, an image of chaotic breakdown and eventual destruction. The back cover is also a double-hologram, created using the same technology, but this one depicts a McDonald’s restaurant. Viewed from one angle, the image shows the restaurant in full daylight with people inside; viewed from a different angle, the restaurant is seen at night, with the lights on and people still inside. The connotations are clear: in a world threatened with environmental destruction, McDonald’s offers a safe haven, a place free from change, one that will always be there. As Joyce Nelson writes in Sultans of Sleaze: “conceived as the reassuring counterpart to the disturbing image . . . on the front of the magazine, and appearing as the ‘last word’ in an issue devoted to environmental pillage, the McDonald’s institutional hologram reveals the stunning finesse with which corporate public relations now operates.”

By starting now, the company has a better chance of influencing people’s thinking in the days ahead; by no means a form of direct control, but one of subtle influence in the long-term. Letcher is quick to point out that there exists no direct evidence supporting this hypothesis, but the reasoning is consistent with common sense: long-term exposure to certain message or ideas will affect peoples’ thinking. One of the best examples I could think of this type of proactive campaigning was by the plastics industry back in the early nineties, with commercials detailing all the benefits were get from the use of plastics. When a friend of mine caught my amused expression at the first appearance of one of these PR commercials, he asked me to explain what was so funny. It seemed obvious to me that this was just a way for the industry to do a little image makeover in light of increasing environmental-minded opposition to the pollution traced back to plastics. “I didn’t even notice the commercial,” he admitted.

If people can sit in front of a TV and not even notice certain messages being directed at them, what chance is there that they will notice such messages on tray liners, which are garbage by design? Nevertheless, the communicative possibilities of this media are worthy of attention, which is why Lecher’s book is worth reading. As one of the first significant volumes dedicated to this study of fast food tray liners, this volume provides novices to this growing field of advertising literature and studies and/or contemporary archaeology with a substantive, eye-opening look into the world around them, one through which we walk in a “gentle snow fall of images, each image striving for perfection: the perfect crystalline sphere reflecting ourselves back to us, just a little better than we are now”—a snow fall so warm, so comforting, we hardly notice its presence.



(Author's note: Please, please, please keep in mind that this book does not actually exist; I imagined the entire thing. However, the National Geographic issue and Sultans of Sleaze are real; as for other things, if you are interested enough, research them yourself to see if this is real or not. Thank you for reading.)