Fast Food Nation and McDonaldization

According to the US English dictionary, fast food is the term given for food that can be prepared quickly and easily and is sold in restaurants and snack bars as a quick meal or to be taken out: The term fast food was recognized in a dictionary by MerriamWebster in 1951. In this paper I am going to present how did the fast-food industry made its world wide way and I will try to make a point with an application on some of the fast-food franchisees, McDonalds in particular. I think that the McDonaldization phenomenon affected our lives not only in what concerns our health, but the society in general. This is why I want to define the benefits and the detriments of it. Therefore, I will start my paper with some statistic numbers about the fast-food industry globally, then I will remind historical events on how the fast-food industry has developed, after what I will get to detail the McDonaldization phenomenon. There are more than 300,000 fast food restaurants in the U.S. alone. Americans now spend more money on fast food - $110 bn last year - than they do on higher education. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music - combined. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food. In 2006, the spending rose to nearly $142 billion. Global fast food sales are projected to reach $239.7 billion in 2014. There are numerous other fast food restaurants located all over the world. In particularly, McDonald's is located in 126 countries on 6 continents and operates over 34,000 restaurants worldwide. Burger King has more than 11,100 restaurants in more than 65 countries. KFC is located in 25 countries. Subway is one of the fastest growing franchises in the world with approximately 39,129 restaurants in 90 countries as of May 2009. Pizza Hut is located in 97 countries, with 100 locations in China.Taco Bell has 278 restaurants located in 14 countries besides the United States. The first ever fast food restaurant is generally considered to be the White Castle restaurant in Wichita, in 1916. The restaurant concept was based on offering a limited menu based around the hamburger; producing high volumes, at high speed and low cost. This was the start of the fast food chain mentality in America. White Castle, started by J. Walter Anderson and Edgar Waldo Billy Ingram, is considered to be the first fast food restaurant. Its major product was a hamburger, which had been sold as sandwiches by street vendors since the 1890s. They worked hard in the 1920s to dispel the hamburgers tawdry image. White Castle placed their grills in direct view of customers, claimed that fresh ground beef was delivered twice a day, chose a name with connotations of purity, and even sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota in which a medical student lived for thirteen weeks on nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. In 1937, they opened a drive-in restaurant in Pasadena, trying to cash in on the new craze, hiring three carhops and selling mainly hot dogs. A few years later they

moved to a larger building on E Street in San Bernardino and opened the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In. The McDonald brothers Speedee Service System revolutionized the restaurant business. An ad of theirs seeking franchisees later spelled out the benefits of the system: Imagine No Carhops No Waitresses No Dishwashers No Bus Boys The McDonalds System is Self-Service! Entrepreneurs from all over the country went to San Bernardino, visited the new McDonalds, and built imitations of the restaurant in their hometowns. Our food was exactly the same as McDonalds, the founder of a rival chain later admitted. If I had looked at McDonalds and saw someone flipping hamburgers while he was hanging by his feet, I would have copied it. Glen W. Bell, Jr., was a World War II veteran, a resident of San Bernardino who ate at the new McDonalds and decided to copy it, using the assembly-line system to make Mexican food and founding a restaurant chain later known as Taco Bell. Keith G. Cramer, the owner of Keiths Drive-In Restaurant in Daytona Beach, Florida, heard about the McDonald brothers new restaurant, flew to southern California, ate at McDonalds, returned to Florida, and with his father-in-law, Matthew Burns, opened the first Insta-Burger-King in 1953. Dave Thomas started working in a restaurant at the age of twelve, left his adoptive father, took a room at the YMCA, dropped out of school at fifteen, served as a bus-boy and a cook, and eventually opened his own place in Columbus, Ohio, calling it Wendys Old-Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant. The story of Harland Sanders is perhaps the most remarkable. Sanders left school at the age of twelve, worked as a farm hand, a mule tender, and a railway fireman. At various times he worked as a lawyer without having a law degree, delivered babies as a part-time obstetrician without having a medical degree, sold insurance door to door, sold Michelin tires, and operated a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He served home-cooked food at a small dining-room table in the back, later opened a popular restaurant and motel, sold them to pay off debts, and at the age of sixty-five became a traveling salesman once again, offering restaurant owners the secret recipe for his fried chicken. The first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant opened in 1952, near Salt Lake City, Utah. Lacking money to promote the new chain, Sanders dressed up like a Kentucky colonel, sporting a white suit and a black string tie. By the early 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States, and Colonel Sanders was a household name. In my opinion, this imitations of the restaurants constituted the first steps to the McDonaldization. Since back then and over the years, this trend has been accentuated and brought to what is called now McDonaldization. The therm of McDonaldization was introduced by George Ritzer, in his The McDonaldization of Society book and it was intented to describe mind-numbing sameness. He sais that McDonaldization,... is the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world. (Ritzer, 1993:1). The therm is used as a metaphora for our times, to describe the principles of the fast-food restaurants, where the effect is more indirect than direct.

"In the 1980s and 1990s McDonaldization has extended its reach into more and more regions of society, and those areas are increasingly remote from the heart of the fast-food business." (Ritzer 1994:137). The McDonaldization phenomenon is not something that affects just food and restaurants. It entered in almost all social fields, following the same principles. There is the McDonaldization of the University and Education in general, the McDonaldization of the Church, McDonaldization of the Police Force or the Military. Ritzer outlines five dominant themes within this McDonaldization process: Efficiency, Calculability, Predictability, Increased Control, and the Replacement of Human by Non-human Technology. Efficiency means the optimal method for accomplishing a task. In our context, it implies the fact the McDonaldization requires for the customers a way to get from being hungry to being full. This principle organization is geared toward the minimization of time. Calculability changes a well-known theory and imposes the idea that quantity equals quality. McDonaldization developed the notion a large amount of product delivered to the customer in a short amount of time is the same as a high quality product. The main idea is to make people believe that they are getting a large amount of product for not a lot of money. In this way, people appreciate the speed they get their order instead of the quality of the work. Predictability applies both for the standardized and uniform services, as for the service and receive product every time the customer is interacting with the McDonaldized organization. It means that no matter where a person goes, they will face the same atmosphere and service and products with exactly the same taste and flavour. This also applies to the workers in those organizations. Their tasks are highly repetitive, highly routine and predictable. Control and the Replacement of Human by Non-human Technology are two elements closely linked. Specifically, it means that everything is pre-packaged, premeasured, automatically controlled. The human employee is not required to think, just follow the instructions and push a button now and then. In this way, the population is confronting with two major problems: extremely distructive with peoples health and the dehumanizing. All of these themes point out the fact that people are accostumed by the McDonaldization, with the no need in being creative or skilled. People are dehumanised and forced unconsciously to follow welldefined concepts, without realizing that they are being robotized. Along with these, is created a mass tendency to want everything McDonaldizated. Particularly, McDonaldization is everybody having the same experience over a wide geographic location. We are slowly sliding into a mass group of sameness. It leads people to want everything fast, to have a limited attention span. You dont have patience anymore to read the entire newspaper and so you read McPaper. You dont have patience to watch a lengthy newscast, so you watch the little news McNugget. We can also se see it in education nowadays, in a generation of students who've been raised in a McDonaldised society. They want things fast, they want idealic nuggets from professors, they don't want sort of slow build up of ideas, you gotta keep them

amused, you gotta come in with the Ronald McDonald costume and quip a series of brilliant theoretical points or else they're going to turn you off. Ritzer also outlines Irrationality of Rationality as a fifth aspect of McDonaldization. "Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them." (Ritzer 1994:154) Ritzer introduces this during Chapter Two of his book "The McDonaldization of Society" in the sub-section Irrationality and the "Iron Cage." He states that "Despite the advantages it offers, bureaucracy suffers from the irrationality of rationality. Like a fast-food restaurant, a bureaucracy can be a dehumanizing place in which to work and by which to be served." In short, "settings in which people cannot always behave as human beings". For example, McDonalds hire people without a wide-ranging skill sets, on a low wage. In fact, to be productive, they only need to know how to complete a single task, which keeps training costs low. Since single-task employees require the least amount of education, they can be paid the lowest wages. This leaves them with little bargaining power to negotiate with their employers since they are so easily replaced. The McDonalds Corporation has become a powerful symbol of Americas service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the countrys new jobs. In 1968, McDonalds operated about one thousand restaurants. Today it has about thirty thousand restaurants worldwide and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonalds. The company annually hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonalds spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the worlds most famous brand. McDonalds operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States. It is one of the nations largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonalds on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

All the same, there are things that we need to take into consideration before condamning definitely the fast-food industry. Some people think that you can't eat healthy at fast food restaurants. But if you compare with the recommended daily allowance you will see that you can eat healthy and get fast food Calories 2000 McDonalds Total Fat 65 Saturated Fat Carbohydrates 20 300

A hamburger, grilled chicken salad deluxe with fat-free herb vinaigrette dressing, and a small Sprite. Saturated Calories Total Fat Carbohydrates Protein Fat 530 22 7.5 61 18 Also, eating at fast-food restaurant might be dangerous for our health only if we eat there constantly, every single day. Otherways it could bring no major harm to our health. Eeven if there are some benefits of McDonaldization, after an overview of this process, I think that it can overall be viewed as harmful to our society. In fact, Ritzer calls the McDonaldized society a system of "iron cages" in which all institutions come to be dominated by the same principle. If we continue to live in this McDonaldized world, where is less and less choice because we are in cage, I think we have to know what the cause, the dangerous and the risks are. "Although I have emphasized the irresistibility of McDonaldization throughout this book, my fondest hope is that I am wrong. Indeed, a major motivation behind this book is to alert readers to the dangers of McDonaldization and to motivate them to act to stem its tide. I hope that we are able to resist McDonaldization and can create instead a more reasonable, more human world." (Eric Schlosser)

Bibliography: 1. Ritzer George. The McDonaldization of Society, Pine Forge Press, August 1993, USA 2. Ritzer George. McDonaldization: The Reader, Pine Forge Press, 2010, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc., USA 3. Schlosser Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, UK, 2001 4. Stillman Todd. McDonald's in Question: The Limits of the Mass Market, October 2003 5. Interviews with George Ritzer: http://www.sagepub.com/mcdonaldizationstudy5/videos/index.htm 6. Interviews with George Ritzer: http://www.mcspotlight.org/people/interviews/ritzer_george.html 7. http://facts.randomhistory.com/2009/06/27_fast-food.html 8. http://www.mcdonaldization.com/whatisit.shtml