Word: mcdonaldization
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Nonstop Munching. McDonald's statistical accomplishments are staggering. To illustrate: if all the 12 billion McDonald's hamburgers sold to date were to be stacked into one pile, they would form a pyramid 783 times the size of the one erected by Snefru. If a man ate a McDonald's hamburger every five minutes, it would take him 114,000 years of nonstop munching to consume 12 billion burgers. If all the cattle that have ever laid down their lives for McDonald's were to be resurrected for a reunion, they would stand flank-by-jowl...
Statistics alone cannot adequately measure the impact of McDonald's on U.S. life. The company's relentless advertising campaign ($50 million budgeted this year) has made the McDonald's jingle, You Deserve a Break Today, almost as familiar as The Star-Spangled Banner. But the chain's managers have wrought their greatest achievement by taking a familiar American institution, the greasy-spoon hamburger joint, and transforming it into a totally different though no less quintessentially American operation: a computerized, standardized, premeasured, superclean production machine efficient enough to give even the chiefs of General Motors food...
...every McDonald's outlet, winking lights on the grills tell the counterman exactly when to flip over the hamburgers. Once done, the burgers can be held under infra-red warming lights for up to ten minutes, no more; after that, any burgers that have not been ordered must be thrown away. Cybernetic deep fryers continuously adjust to the moisture in every potato stick to make sure that French fries come out with a uniform degree of brownness; specially designed scoops make it almost physically impossible for a counterman to stuff more or fewer French fries into a paper...
Customers get almost as little discretion as the help; their burgers come wrapped, with ketchup and mustard applied in precise, premeasured splats. A rugged individualist can order his burger "without," but he will have to discover that concession on his own; McDonald's does not advertise it. One sandwich is unalterable: the Big Mac, a double burger whose interstices are occupied by alternating dollops of onions, pickle chips, cheese, lettuce shreds and a "special sauce," the formula for which is guarded like an atomic secret (see diagram next page...
Machinery and equipment cannot do everything, of course. Human beings are involved too-some 130,000 employees in nine countries, from Western Europe to Japan and Australia. McDonald's has grown from a uniquely American to a truly global operation, and it faces some special problems in making employee performance uniform. The company operates directly only some 750 of its 2,500 restaurants; the rest are run by holders of McDonald's franchises (the firm prefers to call them licenses). The hired help are mostly youths who work at a McDonald's for a few months...