McDonaldization in the
United States has been an ongoing and growing
issue. The problem stems from a compilation of causes, tracing their ancestry back to the spread of the then-revolutionary
McDonald's fast food chain. McDonaldization, while it may have improved our “
standard of living”, it has contributed to the degradation of the means by which we achieve that. The theory of McDonaldization was developed by
George Ritzer and outlined in his 1993 book
The McDonaldization of Society. His theory suggests that corporate influence upon the population of the world has dramatically increased through the four methods of
predictability,
calculability,
efficiency, and
control. Ritzer personally defined the word 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."
No longer is the
quality of
workmanship a consideration. The
Almighty Dollar now controls business decisions and
the direction of progress. We do not consider if a decision will yield a higher quality product, nor do
American business tactics encourage us to
invest in the well-being of the
workforce that produces our goods. Instead we seek for every possible way to cheapen those
values, and the driving force behind our willingness to sacrifice it all is the American
dollar.
McDonaldization owes its origins to the McDonald’s
restaurant chain. The start of the
business ethics and methods that have allowed this to occur over time can be attributed to
Ray Kroc. McDonald’s, being a restaurant with new concepts back at its origin, sought to create a chain of
identical restaurants.
Standardization was one of the main goals. Their aim was so a
customer could go to a McDonald’s in
San Francisco, California and get the same taste in a similar looking restaurant at a McDonald’s in
Syracuse, New York. However, changes would have to be made in how things traditionally worked in order to achieve this McDonalds standard.
Tradionally,
skilled workers are hired to use their abilities to make, prepare, and
cook the food for customers. Skilled workers received their training from different sources, and usually have slightly different ways of preparing the same item. Due to the fact that these
jobholders have gone through training and have these needed skills, they receive very good
wages. In addition, skilled workers use their creativity and ingenuity to come up with “better” ways to do their job, to be more
efficient, or to produce a
better product. The strict standardization brought on by these "McDonaldization"
business practices allows for no such progress by the people who not only work first hand with the process, but are
knowledgable and educated about it.
However, thanks to the so-called “
progress” we have achieved through McDonaldization, the process of making each item, such as a
burger patty, has been broken down into a process of
repeatable actions to achieve the same result. By giving
instructions to
unskilled workers off the streets, and providing each location with the same
frozen meat products, a McDonald’s (or any other business for that matter) can train this person to produce an “ideal” burger patty, same in
taste,
appearance, and
physical characteristics as the patty served up by a different unskilled worker, being paid only
minimum wage, following the same
procedure, at a McDonald’s across the
continent.
McDonald’s has achieved their goal. They can produce a standard burger patty at any of their locations, and they cut their cost by utilising unskilled people. They met their ends, but do not care about the effects of the means they have used. They now have greatly lessened the
demand for the skilled workers, because they are not wanted to work at such standardized
workplaces. They have
cheapened the value of human labor, because McDonald’s knows that they can easily find many people willing to work for very little per hour doing the same task over and over. There is a large
pool of unskilled workers looking for work that they can tap. The fact that this
nation has a minimum wage proves this point. The
government had to set a limit at how low companies could pay their
employees, because they knew that McDonaldized
corporations could (and would want to) pay their employees
petty change -
a sad reality when one comes to think about it.
McDonald's also knows that it will have to invest little into the workers it does
hire, so that if they leave, McDonald’s is not at a loss of an
investment. Since executives know there will always be a pool of unskilled people they can draw from easily, they have no
incentive to treat their workers properly or respecfully.
This contributes to a high
turnover rate of
workers, and does not provide
stable jobs for people. It does not truly provide “
job experience” for employees of such companies either. The employees do not pick up useful skills they can use later on, in a future job offer. They have only learned the exact process that McDonald’s wants a burger patty cooked and little else. This further hurts the
underpaid employees because they do not gain anything
long-term out of their
employment at these companies.
McDonaldization has had effects on many other aspects of the economy and
American culture as well, besides employment; more specifically the production aspect. The McDonald’s fast food chain is now the largest buyer of
potato and
meat in the United States. Over time, production of meat has
centralized to about a dozen
meatpacking houses in the entire
continental US. Because of the high
expansion of chains such as McDonald’s, the demand for
ground beef has increased. Thus, need for production speed has increased as well. The
meatpacking industry has therefore had to convert to standardized practices and McDonalize their
production lines.
Instead of a crew of
skilled butchers each working on individual
cattle, the
meat industry has since fired such skilled workers, and hired unskilled workers to do a single,
repeatative task of the process. The procedure of processing a
cow was broken down into actions, and each person assigned one. The
meatpacking industry hired unskilled workers to do each task, to speed up the process.
Accuracy and quality of the job is now
sacrificed for
speed of production. The increased speed of production has caused more
accidents in the process and more inaccuracies. The workers are highly
mistreated and work in horribly
unsafe conditions because the meatpacking companies know if people quit, they can easily find others to replace them - as their jobs require hardly any training or investment on the company’s behalf.
McDonaldization has caused so many more effects on our nation, disregarding the employment and
economic factors. For example, the fast food industries expansion directly relates to a charted increase in
obesity in the American
population. While the concept of McDonaldization does not apply soley to the
fast food industry, it is where it was
pioneered and where it has obviously flourished as a business practice. It has made those high on the
corporate ladder richer, and
devalued the employees that got them there. While it has expanded all the way across the world, a McDonalds burger in
London, England is no more exciting than a McDonalds burger from
Loudonville, New York. They look the same and they taste the same. While they have managed to cut costs and increase the speed of production and the supply of their
raw materials, they have demoted quality, workmanship, creativity, and
integrity of the product in the process. The business tactic of McDonaldization puts the
goals of the company first. The goal of standardization,
increased return and
minimized losses, does not account for the means. Any means by which these goals can be met,
legally, is acceptable to the corporate heads.
While on the outside, it may appear as though progress has been made, we have simply achieved
regression in so many areas instead. McDonaldization is not healthy for the
American people in the
long run, but that must be okay because
corporations say that it’s better!