Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [39]
Although the McDonald brothers had never encountered the term “throughput” or studied “scientific management,” they instinctively grasped the underlying principles and applied them in the Speedee Service System. The restaurant operating scheme they developed has been widely adopted and refined over the past half century. The ethos of the assembly line remains at its core. The fast food industry’s obsession with throughput has altered the way millions of Americans work, turned commercial kitchens into small factories, and changed familiar foods into commodities that are manufactured.
At Burger King restaurants, frozen hamburger patties are placed on a conveyer belt and emerge from a broiler ninety seconds later fully cooked. The ovens at Pizza Hut and at Domino’s also use conveyer belts to ensure standardized cooking times. The ovens at McDonald’s look like commercial laundry presses, with big steel hoods that swing down and grill hamburgers on both sides at once. The burgers, chicken, french fries, and buns are all frozen when they arrive at a Mc-Donald’s. The shakes and sodas begin as syrup. At Taco Bell restaurants the food is “assembled,” not prepared. The guacamole isn’t made by workers in the kitchen; it’s made at a factory in Michoacán, Mexico, then frozen and shipped north. The chain’s taco meat arrives frozen and precooked in vacuum-sealed plastic bags. The beans are dehydrated and look like brownish corn flakes. The cooking process is fairly simple. “Everything’s add water,” a Taco Bell employee told me. “Just add hot water.”
Although Richard and Mac McDonald introduced the division of labor to the restaurant business, it was a McDonald’s executive named Fred Turner who created a production system of unusual thoroughness and attention to detail. In 1958, Turner put together an operations and training manual for the company that was seventy-five pages long, specifying how almost everything should be done. Hamburgers were always to be placed on the grill in six neat rows; french fries had to be exactly 0.28 inches thick. The McDonald’s operations manual today has ten times the number of pages and weighs about four pounds. Known within the company as “the Bible,” it contains precise instructions on how various appliances should be used, how each item on the menu should look, and how employees should greet customers. Operators who disobey these rules can lose their franchises. Cooking instructions are not only printed in the manual, they are often designed into the machines. A McDonald’s kitchen is full of buzzers and flashing lights that tell employees what to do.
At the front counter, computerized cash registers issue their own commands. Once an order has been placed, buttons light up and suggest other menu items that can be added. Workers at the counter are told to increase the size of an order by recommending special promotions, pushing dessert, pointing out the financial logic behind the purchase of a larger drink. While doing so, they are instructed to be upbeat and friendly. “Smile with a greeting and make a positive first impression,” a Burger King training manual suggests. “Show them you are GLAD TO SEE THEM. Include eye contact with the cheerful greeting.”
The strict regimentation at fast food restaurants creates standardized products. It increases the throughput. And it gives fast food companies an enormous amount of power over their employees. “When management determines exactly how every task is to be done… and can impose its own rules about pace, output, quality, and technique,” the sociologist Robin Leidner has noted, “[it] makes workers increasingly interchangeable.” The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers — those things are built into the operating system and machines. Jobs that have been “de-skilled” can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.
Teenagers have long provided the fast food industry with the bulk of its workforce. The