Essay on Chain Fast-food Restaurant

Submitted By gerberbaby
Words: 504
Pages: 3

In recent years, there seems to be a growing number of devices and systems that assist us throughout our daily lives to get things done faster with more efficiency, calculability and predictability that wasn’t provided by systems (or lack of) available in the past. Not only is rational action heavily embedded in fast-food restaurants, I agree with George Ritzer that a form of “McDonaldization” is increasingly organizing larger aspects of our everyday lives.
If you go to a chain fast-food restaurant such as McDonalds for breakfast, you can expect your dining experience to be practically identical if you return for lunch and then later for dinner. It will also generally be the same if you return a week or a month later. This is because fast-food restaurants are geared towards emphasizing and maximizing efficiency, predictability and calculability. To more broadly look at the structure of a fast-food restaurant, employees work in a robotic and rehearsed way to meet the company’s goal of obtaining capital by meeting the customers wants and keep them coming back. A way a company may do this is by maintaining a familiar and predictable menu. Many customers can quickly express their order by simply saying, “I’ll have a number one”. The employee who is (most likely) familiar with the order will press a button or two and voila, they are already prepared to take the next customers order. If you go to a private more intimate restaurant and there is a new chef, you may notice the difference in the way the dish is prepared or a difference in the taste of the meal. On the contrary, at McDonalds, every employee has a standard regimented way of making each meal; if there were new cooks, I guarantee you wouldn’t even notice! This, in turn, makes each visit unchanging; thus, displaying rational action. One may wonder how the way fast-food chains operate relates to the inner workings of our lives. George Ritzer, influenced by the works of Max Weber, believes that the McDonaldization effect imposes