Service Before Sympathy

Submitted by Raymond Trinh:

George Ritzer used the term "McDonaldization" to describe anything with the characteristics of a McDonald’s restaurant. In this sense McDonaldization is to apply a process in which everything is performed with maximum efficiency. This term was created to describe the background setting of a McDonald’s. It uses the application of timing things and doing everything exactly the same – every time. The main concept of Mcdonaldization is to increase budget and lower spending through means of control, predictability, calculability and in turn efficiency.

Because of trying to achieve a maximum profit there is usually the effects of: job cuts such as relinquishing themselves from the need to have waiters or bus boys, demanding staff be flexible and ready to work whenever they are called upon, limiting and or completely eliminating any means of innovation, and abandoning human interaction. With the demands that the McDonald’s make, they are basically asking their employees to be at the mercy of the company at large. 

Assembly lines are the means in which food is made for consumers in McDonald’s. Each person on this assembly line has a specific task to make the process as fast as possible. The order is taken every time with the exact same words and sent almost instantaneously through a computer so the people in the kitchen (if you can call it that) can do their specific jobs (I.e. one person for bread and cheese, the next for meat, and the next for sauce and pickles, etc.). Through this is the predictability factor in which everything must always be exactly the same, otherwise it is wrong and employees are penalized. There is no love for the work and employees are now acting the roles of robots so that the process is as fast and smooth as possible.

At the end of the day for any company that is using the McDonaldization process, it really does not matter how satisfied the customer or even the worker is. It is all about running efficiently and the profit.