In January 2013 the Daily Telegraph ran a story on the refusal of the inhabitants of the famed old neighbourhood of Montmartre, in Paris, to accept the arrival in their midst for the first time of a Starbucks coffee shop. The Paris Pride heritage association denounced this “attack on the place’s soul.” A resident said “we must do everything to stop this disfiguring, as it opens the door to any old rubbish.” Twenty years previously, said local sources, McDonald’s had tried to open, but they had been forced out. Now the invader was back, just with a different disguise.

What is it about these world-wide American food and drink experiences which can still set off such resistance in local communities wherever they choose to land? Of course this is by no means a universal reaction, in time or place, otherwise there would not be 1,700 Starbucks shops across Europe (including Russia), or 7,300 McDonald’s restaurants, with more coming even in the crisis. But the multi-faceted power of these companies, and their apparently unstoppable will to expansion, has provoked a variety of antagonisms over the years. Starbucks’ historian, Bryant Simon, talks of “pushback”. More serious is the “brand backlash” that a New York Times correspondent saw in the targeting of McDonald’s around the world at the time of the Iraq war.