blog#6 Behind the Counter

Prof. Smith.

ENG101           

Diana Coll

03/29/14

Blog#6

BEHIND THE COUNTER

In chapter three of Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser explain with detail how the fast food industry has been influencing our culture especially the younger generation and how they have manipulated the system by advertising for there own benefit.

 Today the largest private employers in the state is the restaurant industry, Schlosser chose Colorado as an example and emphasized how the restaurant industry has grown much faster than the population there, over the last three decades the number of restaurants have increased five-fold and the number of chain restaurants have increased ten-fold. Now, Colorado has twenty-one McDonald’s.

When a new McDonald’s opens, other fast food restaurants soon open nearby on the assumption that in must be a good location. On other hand the fast food industry spent billions on marketing and promotion, to brainwash their costumers, they put ads on radio and TV, just to reinforce brand loyalty. McDonald's has created computer software called Quintillion that combines   satellite imagery with detailed maps, demography information and sales information for existing stores, so they can spy on their costumers with the same equipment once used to fight the cold war. Moreover, fast food kitchen often seem like a scene from some movie where all the actors are children pretending to be adults because no other industry in the United States has a workforce so dominated by adolescents. About two thirds of the nation fast food workers are under the age of twenty.

Fast Food Industry has found teenagers as the perfect candidates for there, not only because there less experience than adults, but also because their youthful inexperience make them easier to control and manipulate but since the number of baby-boomer teenagers declined, the fast food chains began to hire other marginalized workers: recent immigrants, the elderly and the handicapped. Now English is the second language of at least one sixth of the nations restaurants and about one third of the group speaks no English at all the just trained to learn the names of the item on the menu, they speak ‘McDonald's English’ and the fast food industry pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion of its workers than any other American Industry. We may not realized how fast food has impact our culture turning commercial kitchens into small factories and changed familiar foods into commodities that are manufactured.