Cookie Wisdom

In the past few weeks, I’ve been frequenting Chinese buffets more than I’d like to, thanks to my gluttonous colleagues. Surprisingly, in our immediate landscape, Chinese restaurants outnumber McDonalds – the mighty Mickey D weed that has been fuelling this morbidly obese superpower nation to fill up the generous seats of their monstrous SUVs and trucks. Anyway, coming back to the proliferation of Chinese restaurants, how did this happen? McD’s is known to use business mapping to choose its locations according to this excerpt:

“McDonald's is renowned for making smart decisions about the location of its restaurants. Ever wondered why the Golden Arches can be seen in all the busiest and best locations? It’s because McDonald's uses census data and MapInfo to help choose new sites.”

While McD’s is busy mapping stuff, our Chinese buddies Skee Ming and Boo Fay Chow are making their move. Under the shadow of the monstrous golden arches, Ming and Chow quietly move in with their woks and setup ‘Royal Imperial Buffet’ and ‘China Dragon’. For the price of a super-sized McD’s meal, our friends from China open up lanes of soups, thin and thick noodles, fried rice, steamed rice, dumplings, stir-fried veggies, eggrolls, springrolls, meat cooked in every possible fashion you can imagine, fruits (more melons than you can name), jelly (red, yellow, green and more), cookies, cakes, ice-cream, sushi, shrimp, boiled eggs… stuffed yet? Alright, here’s some friendly advice: leave while you can still move, leave while you can walk with your belt loosened, pants unbuttoned and dignity intact. But hang on, don’t forget to take your fortune cookie. Yes, how about some Confucius and some lucky numbers? Sounds good, the fun never ends! Flip it over and learn a chinese word too. Now, that’s value-addition and culture promotion in a neat little package! Recently I got this message in a cookie: “ Exchanging compliments is intellectual back scratching”. Boy, I can imagine Chow and Ming scratching the hell out of each other’s backs while folks at the golden arches scratch their heads.