Fast Food Nation

Alban Haxhiu

The way that fast food restaurant chains do business and market their products to consumers is due to the change in our society to where the consumer wants the biggest, fastest, and best product they can get for their money. This change in society can be attributed to a process known as McDonaldization. Although McDonaldization can be applied to many other parts of our society, this paper will focus on its impact on Burger King and Taco Bell restaurants. My belief is that the process of McDonaldization has lead our generations toward a more a much more efficient lifestyle, with much less quality. From my observations and studies of these fast food restaurants, several themes have become apparent to me.

 This particular image can be interpreted in many different ways. We can start by first looking at stereotypes of Africa. We notice the giraffe,(which is a typical animal that Africa is associated with), on an African savanna. The fact that the giraffe is "obese" can illustrate a message of McDonald commercialization and the negative aspects of fast food. The picutre seems to illustrate that although Giraffes and people in Africa are known to be skinny or underweight that if you eat McDonalds you'll "fatten up" like this Giraffe. We can also look at globalization. Mcdonnals is a world wide corporation targeting almost every city, county, state, country, and continents including Europe, Asia, and Africa. The overall message that be presented here is that fast food functions as an epidemic throughout the world.

The first and overall theme that emerges from the idea of fast food is that the employees of these establishments seem to work more as machines, rather than people offering a service to the public. A second theme that can be identified from my observations would be that the people visiting these fast food restaurants are more or less searching for the most efficient way to get what they want, giving little or no regard to the quality put into it. Upon walking into Burger King restaurant, I found that most of the people waiting in line to place their orders or receive their order were younger or middle-aged, and had children or were students. All of these people shared a common attitude of being hungry and impatient. The people gave little to no regard to how hard the employees behind the counter were working or struggling to work faster. Many patrons were short tempered, rude, or incredibly ill-tempered when placing their orders yet the employees still smiled at the next person in line, repeating the same phrases over and over, Can I help the next person in line please, or, would you like a drink or fries with that? These repetitive phrases and actions of the employees of both Burger King and Taco Bell were small examples of the machine-like theme identified in the work setting of fast-food restaurants.

Furthermore, employees were taught to disregard disgruntled patrons and move through the line as fast as possible so that each patron would be served in a timely and satisfying fashion. Just as a machine would pull items in at the beginning of the assembly line and throw them out at the other end of the line, so did the employees treat the patrons of their establishment. This is achieved by calling them to the counter and filling their order then sending them on their way with a kind, almost sarcastic, Thank you, have a nice day! Owners of these businesses are only concerned with serving as many people as they can in as short amount of time as possible. Bureaucracies, which have become a standard feature or modern life, are a powerful form of social organization. Bureaucracies depend on impersonality, as displayed by the workers of both Taco Bell and Burger King restaurants. They also rely on divisions of labor, which make it so that each worker has a specific task to fulfill, which in turn makes it so that when all of these tasks are fulfilled, then the establishment works as intended and goals are met. Although there are some benefits of McDonaldization, in general, this process can be viewed as harmful to our society.

Finally, McDonaldization is a very large-scale example of the bureaucracies of our society. I feel that fast-food restaurants have opened up a whole new world for our generations that make it clear that things can be done more quickly and efficiently, though quality if of little importance. This is an unacceptable way of thinking for modern America. If we let people get away with the idea that quantity is more powerful than quality, than the structure of our society will begin to disintegrate more than it already has.