Word: mcdonaldization
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...Still, McDonald's manages to make its licensees, restaurant managers and burger slingers seem as standardized as its machines and cuisine. Licensees and managers of company-operated restaurants must graduate from a ten-day course at McDonald's "Hamburger University," a gleaming $2,000,000 institution in Elk Grove Village, Ill. The course leads to a Bachelor of Hamburgerology degree, with a minor in French fries. In the field, licensees and managers are incessantly hounded by roving inspectors (called "field supervisors") to make sure that the restaurant floor is mopped at proper intervals and the parking lot tidied...
...takers) and other hired hands must conform to strict rules. Men must keep their hair cropped to military length, and their shoes (black only) highly polished. Women must wear dark low shoes, hair nets and only very light makeup. Viewing the results, Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt describes McDonald's as "a machine that produces, with the help of totally unskilled machine tenders, a highly polished product. Everything is built integrally into the machine itself, into the technology of the system. The only choice available to the attendant is to operate it exactly as the designers intended...
...some critics, the success of that machine is a devastating comment on American values. Pop Sociologist Vance Packard laments: "This is what our country is all about-blandness and standardization." Novelist Vance Bourjaily extravagantly views McDonald's popularity as a sign that America is "a failing culture." He explains: "This country is full of people who have forgotten what good food is. Eating in most countries is a basic pleasure, but people in the U.S. don't eat for pleasure. To them, eating is just something done in response to advertising...
Other critics assail McDonald's for blighting the land architecturally (under pressure from zoning authorities, the chain is rapidly switching from its original garish, candy-striped restaurant design to a more subdued brown brick configuration) and for allegedly sabotaging American nutrition. Harvard Nutritionist Jean Mayer warns that a steady diet of McDonald's fare and nothing else could give a customer scurvy because it would lack sufficient vitamin C. Mayer also says that the menu provides large amounts of fats and calories (557 for a Big Mac, 317 for a chocolate shake, 215 for a small order...
...There is nothing at McDonald's that makes it necessary to have teeth," he says-though he adds: "I am nonfanatical about McDonald's. As a weekend treat, it is clean and fast...