preview

Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation

Decent Essays

Mmm that fast food, the stuff I flock to at an airport, the stuff that I crave after a game on a soccer road trip, the stuff I find myself eating more often than not late on a Friday or Saturday night. I ordered, I ate, and I enjoyed. But I didn't really give much thought, other than that, to fast food. Eric Schlosser really opened my eyes to the world of fast food in his book Fast Food Nation. Little did I know that the so called food that I was eating was the product of decades of work and refinement in the fast food industry. An industry that was built on economic principles and driven by The notion that the principles of microeconomics work well in economics textbooks, but not in the real world is not true because Schlosser provides evidence from various parts of the fast food …show more content…

Their whole objective was to produce output at a greater rate, cheaper. Schlosser explains that, “With innovative technology and the proper organization, a small number of workers can produce an enormous amount of goods cheaply” (69). The technological breakthroughs that were made were extremely beneficial to firms. They could now sell their product for even less. But the advancement of technology wasn’t beneficial for everyone. The breakthroughs decreased the demand for labor because firms simply no longer needed as much labor to produce great quantities of output anymore. With the decrease in demand for labor, there was a subsequent decrease in the price of labor. In a perfectly competitive wage market, the price of labor is set where the supply of labor intersects the demand of labor. This was seen in the 1900s in the fast food industry as the wages were set below the equilibrium price due to technological advancements. The wage market in the fast food industry was another place where economic principles were evident in the real

Get Access