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 their 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.
When a new McDonald’s opens, other fast food
restaurants soon open nearby on the assumption that it must be in a good
location. On other hand the fast food industry spent billions on marketing and promotion,
to brainwash their customers, they put ads on radio and TV, just to reinforce
brand loyalty. McDonalds 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 their stores, not only because they
have 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. These workers are just trained to learn the names of
the item on the menu, they speak ‘McDonalds 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.
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