Thursday, March 6, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Will the way we order a burger and fries someday lead society down some slippery slope to an Orwellian future in which choice is obsolete?
Social theorist George Ritzer believes only time will tell.
Speaking to nearly 100 UNLV students Monday, the University of Maryland professor explained the theory he made popular in his text, "The McDonaldization of Society."
"McDonaldization is the process by which the principals of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society, as well as the rest of the world," Ritzer said.
Ritzer said that as a result we now have many McUniversities, McDoctors, McFuneral homes and even McCasinos.
Those entities, he said, are more concerned with profit than providing a desirable human experience.
"McDonaldization has now become a way a person is born, eats, lives and dies," Ritzer said.
Though McDonald's profits in America have been waning lately with the failure of several new campaigns, the corporation continues to flourish overseas, spreading its sphere of influence. Two-thirds of all new McDonald's are opened outside the United States and 58 percent of their profit originates there, Ritzer said.
"Not only do they open in these places, but they adapt to the regions and spawn indigenous imitations," Ritzer said. "For instance in the Philippines you can get McSpaghetti and in Uruguay the McQueso."
In India, there is a chain similar to McDonald's that serves mutton burgers, being that hamburgers would be sacrilegious there.
There are three tenets of McDonaldization, Ritzer says.
The first is efficiency to an extreme -- streamlining the product, limiting choices and putting customers to work in jobs once done by employees such as the bus person and waiter in a restaurant.
"You are now doing jobs for nothing that someone used to be paid to do," Ritzer said.
The second tenet is an emphasis on quantity at the sacrifice of quality.
"It's the Big Mac, not the Delicious Mac or the Wonderful Tasting Big Mac," Ritzer said. "It may not be good, but there is a lot of it."
Ritzer also noted the Whopper, the Big Gulp, Little Caesar's Big Foot and Burger King's Big Fish.
And the third tenet is that the structure contains "a lot more illusion than reality." Fast food is actually not so fast when you consider the time and effort it takes to travel to a place and wait in line at the drive-through window, Ritzer said. He also insists that the scripted interaction and rush to get through customers is dehumanizing for employees and patrons.
The average McDonald's worker lasts less than four months, he said, which leads to a 400 percent annual turnover in employees. That turnover means training and that training requires time and in saving time, i.e. money, more jobs once handled by employees are now being relegated to technology. The french-fry machine now does everything but refill itself and a worker can fill a cup at the press of a button.
Obviously the system has worked wonders for those who have been able to take the model and capitalize on it, but Ritzer believes society has suffered. He used credit card use to explain another branch of McDonaldization -- McCredit, in which "people who have no business having credit" are extended enough to keep them in debt the rest of their lives.
What will happen when franchises rule the world, he asks?
"Just think about whether you want to pay the human cost or social cost of a McDonaldized system," Ritzer said.
archive
