Burger King’s way is no longer mine

Burger King will understand. I am only doing as they once advised. Like many Americans, I came to know the fast-food chain during the 1970s, when it mounted a legendary advertising campaign promoting consumer discretion. “Have it your way,” it urged people pondering the list of toppings on its signature hamburger sandwich.

“Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us,” went the jingle devised by the BBDO agency for Pillsbury, Burger King’s owners of the time. “All we ask is that you let us serve it your way.”

I was among the converted. While still in my teens, I became a Burger King man, opting at any opportunity for a Whopper over the Big Mac of rival McDonald’s. The fresh slices of onion and tomato on the former stirred my senses. The “special sauce” slathered on the latter, by contrast, reminded me of industrial sealant or prescription salve.

But Burger King lost me for good this week when the company, now controlled by a Brazilian private equity outfit called 3G Capital Management, revealed an $11.4bn deal to acquire Tim Hortons, a Canadian coffee-and-doughnuts chain.

The transaction left a sour taste in my mouth because it was structured as an “inversion”. That’s the word used nowadays for a US company that combines with a business in a lower-tax jurisdiction – in this case the Canadian province of Ontario – and shifts its domicile there, reducing its potential obligations to the US Treasury in the process.

My beef with such manoeuvres is that they can lead to greater burdens on the taxpayers – like me – who remain in the US. It is left to us to shoulder the costs of government, such as all the bombs our military has been dropping on Iraq in recent weeks to prevent the slaughter of Christians and other alleged infidels by people waving black flags.

Burger King and its backers, including Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, which is providing $3bn in financing for 3G, maintain that the move to Canada is being made for reasons that go beyond taxes. That may very well be the case; Mr Buffett is a clever fellow and his deals typically work on more than one level.

But if Mr Buffett and his buddies go their way, I’ll go mine. As far as I’m concerned, the people at Burger King can hold the pickle, the lettuce and anything else they care to slip between the halves of a bun. I am not buying any of it. That’s my way.

In making this declaration, I mean our friends in Canada no offence. From what I have read, Tim Hortons is a formidable operation in both the English and French senses of the term. So beloved is its pièce de résistance – a bite-size doughnut hole called the Timbit – that on the occasion of the fried doughball’s 35th birthday in 2011, the Toronto Sun proclaimed: “If laid end to end, the number of Timbits Canadians have consumed ... would stretch to the moon and back almost five times.” As Bob and Doug McKenzie might have put it: cosmic, eh?

I also realise that Burger King is hardly the only wannabe inverter in our midst. Roughly a score of US companies have announced mergers or acquisitions with tax inversion twists in the past three years, according to Dealogic.

The difference is that Burger King is less well placed to get away with this kind of behaviour than its all-too mobile predecessors. Most of them were pharmaceuticals companies whose products can mean the difference between the life and death of the user. It is hard to imagine anyone in their right mind rejecting the latest cancer drug or cholesterol medication because of the tax strategies of the manufacturer.
But American consumers don’t have to take whatever Burger King dishes out. The company needs our love – and it isn’t going to get any from me by leaving for the lower tax rates of the Great White North.
I can dine elsewhere. If the truth be told, my ardour for Burger King began to cool long ago. The time passed when I could eat a couple of Whoppers with cheese, wash them down with a sugary soda and squeeze into the same pair of jeans later in the same week. Fast-food outfits with fresher approaches arose to satisfy my cravings. The Whopper eventually came to figure in my calorie-counting middle age as the petite madeleine did during Marcel Proust’s celebrated moments of reflection. It only took one now and then to bring back the past. 
So, thanks for the memories, Burger King. It was good while it lasted. But the time has come for me to say goodbye.