Essay on McDonaldization of Society

The way that Burger King and other fast food restaurant chains do business and markets their products to consumers is due to the change in our society to where the consumer wants the biggest, fastest, and best product they can get for their money. This change in society can be attributed to a process known as McDonaldization. Although McDonaldization can be applied to many other parts of our society, this paper will focus on its impact on Burger King and Taco Bell restaurants. My belief is that the process of McDonaldization has lead our generations toward a more a much more efficient lifestyle, with much less quality. From my observations and studies of these fast food resturants, several themes have become

On McDonalds For my business course, I have been asked to prepare a report for a business at work. I could choose any business to investigate. I decided to do McDonalds because it is globally recognised and of its size. Also because it is a franchise I thought that it would be interesting to see how a franchise operated.

The film introduces the concept of McDonaldization to the food companies. McDonalds first introduced this concept in the first fast food chain; the idea was to make the restaurant more efficient. In the 1930’s, McDonalds own a very successful chain of restaurants, but they McDonald brothers wanted to expand their brand; while doing this they would revolutionize the restaurant industry. They would hire employees to do only one just, such as cooking the fries, and this would be the only thing the employee would do all day at work. The purpose was to be able to get food out faster and hire workers for lower wages because of the small amount of responsibilities the worker would have. The restaurant would fire all the extra employees and simplify the menu, and then the first fast food restaurant would be born. The concept of McDonaldization spread to many other restaurants and is still in use today. The idea of McDonaldization also made its way to meat packing companies; the assembly line concept will be used. Employees do the same demeaning task all day, and their pay reflects the low level of creativity. Many other businesses have incorporated the idea of simplifying decisions and decreasing the time it takes to make a sale. Think about the mall, every store is laid out and organized in a manner where

Chapter one examines the various occupations at McDonalds's. Barbara Garson finds that most workers here tend to dislike their jobs. Due to the tremendous amount of stress created by automated systems such as timers and computer generated productivity statistics McDonald's has a high

Mcdonalds is a company that is all about getting your product ordered, made, and delivered as fast as possible, while using the least resources as possible. The McDonald brothers created a system called the Speedee Service System, which helped make the food as fast as possible. Before the Speedee System, restaurants employed short-order cooks, who specialized in making food that had a short preparation time, to get the food made quickly. The chefs required lots of skill and training however, and were often in high demand. The Speedee system however, used many unskilled workers, each who did a small step in the production repetitively, very similar to how Ford’s assembly line worked. Having each resource, whether it be worker or machine, specially dedicated to doing a certain job makes the whole production line much more productive. One example of this is a worker whose job is to receive calls from a mcdonalds drive through. The worker receives calls from Mcdonalds all across the country, in a special call center. As soon as she finishes taking the order and sending it back to the workers in the McDonalds where the order originally came from, she immediately receives another order from a McDonalds somewhere else in the country. Having a dedicated call center not only cuts labour costs, but also creates a more dedicated customer service. Another example of how McDonalds has

McDonald’s is a drive thru restaurant where customers need to wait in line to order as well as pick up their food. This is likely the most dehumanising aspect of the company since they treated people as parts of an assembly line. Moreover, routinization such as maximising managerial control can be found in McDonald’s and it is related to the idea of Taylorism. Where Max Weber used bureaucratic model to describe the movement of the shifting society, George Ritzer believed the operation of fast food restaurants have become a more suitable contemporary paradigm in modern community. Therefore, Ritzer introduced his idea of McDonaldization in 1993 and it comprises four key dimensions: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Among these components, ‘control’ represents workers become standardized and nonhuman technologies would substitute for them. He declared that the principles of fast food restaurant would dominate more and more regions of American society and throughout the world. In fact, apart from food industry, McDonaldization expands all over the world which include bookstores (B.Dalton’s) and toy stores (Toys R Us) (Ritzer, 1993:1).

Imagine yourself behind the counter or in the drive- through window at McDonalds. You are programmed how to act and what to say. You have been working there for three years and earn a salary of $5.50 an hour. You have never exceeded 29 hours while working there. These circumstances are true for over 40 percent of six million people employed in restaurants today. The reason for these circumstances are due to the change in our society by which the consumer wants the biggest, fastest, and best product they can get for their money. This change in society can be attributed to a process known as McDonaldization. Although McDonaldization can be applied to many other parts of our society, this paper will focus on its impacts on the inequalities

George Ritzer, in his book The McDonaldization of Society, has given a good understanding of the kind of world we live in. He describes the concept of McDonaldization, which is the process in which the principles that form the basis of McDonalds are greatly influencing the rest of society. McDonalds runs its business on the following key elements: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control by non-human technologies. A fifth element, which Ritzer perceives as a disadvantage of McDonaldization, is the irrationality of rationality. This is the idea that a society which is based entirely on rationality is not a normal human society because humans are not

Health care is something that affects every person in this country, and the rising cost is making it nearly impossible for people to afford. In The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer shows how the health care industry is changing and how the phenomenon of McDonaldization is effecting how we receive health care. Healthcare has become more efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlling. In the following sections, I will explore further these aspects of McDonaldization and how they relate to the health care industry.

According to George Ritzer, bureaucracy completely dehumanized the social institutions in America. He sees the bureaucracy as having four components: efficiency, predictability, control and quantification. He terms this dehumanization of an institution as "McDonaldization". One of the most prevalent examples in modern society is the health care institution. In the past, health care was more simplistic in nature. House calls were not unheard of, and doctors knew all of their patients and their families on a personal level. The doctor who delivered your parents would deliver you as well as your future children. Follow-ups were quite normal; doctors were concerned with your progress for their own peace of mind. It is only recently that the

McDonaldization is becoming the new wave of job types where workers are being deskilled, dehumanized and exploited. Machines are taking over tasks which the employees used to do such as bank machines (interact). The McDonaldized jobs now instead of making the employee do all the work they have the customer working too, for example when the customer cleans up after eating. These jobs are becoming less interactive and personal because workers are becoming dehumanized and only allowed to follow a script, there is also the fact that fast food Company’s use drive through, where limited interaction occurs and are many restrictions. These types of jobs which the author George Ritzer labeled

George Ritzer 's book The McDonaldization of Society opened and exposed one of what can be considered societies major flaws: McDonaldization. Ritzer suggests that in the late 20th century the socially structured form of the fast-food restaurant has become the organizational force representing and pushing rationalization further into everyday lives and individual identity. Henry Ford was the first McDonaldization pioneer with his vision of an assembly line for improving the production of automobiles. His revolutionary idea dramatically changed how many automobiles could be produced and was very efficient.

George Ritzer describes McDonaldization as “the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world”. McDonaldization is the idea that our society is becoming more efficient and more fast paced. Rational systems can be defined as “unreasonable, dehumanizing systems that deny the humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within them or are served by them”.1 Today there are many types of businesses that are increasingly adapting the same values and principles of the fast-food industry to their needs. Rational systems are dehumanizing our society and seem to be even more irrational than convenient. “Almost every aspect of

McDonald's is the world’s leading food service retailer with more than 30,000 local restaurants in 121 countries serving 45 million customers each day.

McDonald's has had a global impact on the food industry. McDonald's developed a revolutionary idea known today as fast-food. This impact began in 1930 when Maurice and Richard McDonald left New Hampshire seeking to make a fortune in Hollywood, started up a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino. Unlike so many other food-service operations at the time, McDonald's came up with new ideas that turned the usual slow paced dinner into a finely tuned engine.