Fast Meals and Dispenseable People

As many people in and out of the US probably know, fast food is an actual and irreplaceable part of the American lifestyle. However, is this Fast Food Nation starting a social breakdown in which burgers and pizzas are the main enemy? The truth is that the large fast food chains all over the country are creating some serious problems, and most of them go much, much further than only obesity. Restaurants are constantly pursuing one single goal: accelerate the production of food, and in this way, increase the earnings. Nevertheless, this uncontrolled growth, besides decreasing the food’s nutritive value, also is becoming the human work in something extremely easy, repetitive and monotonous, which also makes the employees easily exchangeable and dispensable.

Currently, the most important part of the fast food chains’ workforce is formed by teenagers, immigrants or elder people, in a few words, people easy to control and to dismiss. All of these groups are also people who usually need money and will be happy and glad to receive any payment, even though it’s not enough to cover almost any need.

Besides that, nowadays, most of these chains are more interested in improving productivity or throughput rather than quality, this fact has transformed these restaurants in some kind of factories which now depend more on machines than human force. This accelerates the work and besides that, makes the employees easy to exchange.

However, this means that these employees are being put under pressure and they have other types of responsibility; actually most of these fast food chains have some sort of “Bible” in which they teach everything a good employee needs to know, and of course, these people have to memorize and learn these procedures. According to this, these “easy” jobs in Mcdonalds or Burger King, are not totally bad, in some way, they encourage the teenager to develop certain responsibilities that may help him in the future to get a better job. Still, teenagers must be aware that under the eyes of these companies, they are pawns, who can be substituted at any moment.

In summary, for better worse, we can say that, although, in these works, people don’t receive good payments, and is treated like objects; fast food is part of the way Americans live, and for some teenagers, working in Mcdonald’s, Burger King, Dominoe’s Pizza or Pizza Hut, is some sort of ritual, that they must complete in order to become adults. In the same order of ideas, these chains also allow some sectors of the population such as the elderly and the inmigrants, to have a worthy job and to earn some money.