The Effect McDonald has On Our Society In 2050
Fast food is self-explanatory. It is a convenient place where you may get your choice of burger, fries, and a soft drink within a short period of 3 to 7 minutes. The fast food industry has been an important part of life of all Americans since the mid-twentieth century, when the first McDonald’s started the business in southern California.
McDonald’s is one of the America’s most popular fast food restaurants which became also the best-known fast food brand in the world. Presently, the McDonald’s Corporation has opened over 31,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 121 countries. It produces $104.9 hundred millions in annual revenues, serves 46 millions customers each day, and opens a new restaurant every three hours. And, what is the most important, for many poeple all over the world it has come to symbolize the hopes and the fears of the Americanization of the global culture. McDonald’s has revolutionized the food industry, affecting the lives of both the people who prepare the food and those who consume it. The industry has grown fast and it is still growing.

However, there are also many people against McDonald’s. As McDonald’s attractive trademark, the golden arches, is spreading all over the nation, the ever-growing McDonald’s changes economic and social systems in America significantly. Because McDonald’s provides convenient services, American people spend less time to eat with their families. Popularity of McDonald’s also shows that most American people save time and money which for them is more important than saving their health.
The golden arch is the symbol of McDonald’s spirit. The arch symbolizes that McDonald’s products are good as gold. McDonald’s uses the arch to promote its name and products, and it has deeply entrenched values in America culture. The company’s brand-makers have created the yellow arches because it is the easiest color to recognize. This shows that McDonald’s goal is to make all Americans to be able to recognize the restaurant. Golden Arches connote a high value on McDonald’s products. The brand has created the image of the company that promotes high quality products. That is the image that McDonald’s attempts to portray in its brand.
For a long time McDonald’s was changing the eating habits of Americans, and has eventually changed the family life traditions. McDonald’s portrays themselves as a good place for American families to dine together. Actually it has replaced the American family tradition of gathering at the family table for dinner. It became history. They invented Happy Meal to attract more kids to eat in McDonald’s and show that McDonald’s is a perfect place to eat for everyone in the family. According to Critser the author of the book Fat Land, “The Happy Meal became one of the company’s most enduring (if annoying) success stories.” (Critser, P113) Happy Meal definitely is one of the most important factors for parents to bring their children to McDonald’s. Because McDonald’s provides cheap and fast food, people start to dine out more. The cheap foods also provide working class people being able to eat and could afford to feed their kids restaurant foods. The food is “fast”, so it fails to give the family the same amount of time to interact with each other had they been home having dinner. In the past, people were more willing to spend half an hour or even an hour cooking dinner, now consumers demand that they get their food in no less than ten minutes. Even though McDonald’s has different kinds of foods to satisfy everyone in the family, however, it did not bring the family together because every family member can eat at anytime. They do not have to go together. And families no longer need to go home to get a quick/cheap meal. This makes a healthy cooked meal at home seem like a undesirable task. McDonald’s declines the family value.
The fact that McDonald’s promotes high quality products does not necessary mean that the company is actually producing good foods for American people. Because McDonald’s foods are cheap, Americans do not care about the quality of the foods as much as before. McDonald’s spends most of the money on advertising instead of improving the quality of the food. The customers usually feel that the sizes of the actual products are smaller than the ones they have seen in the commercial. Because of the foods are cheap, teenagers have become major customers of McDonald’s. Critser has also said in his book Fat Land, “This it did by forcing its advertising agencies to come up with new ways to measure the impact of youth advertising.” (P113) Because the teenagers do not have much money, the bad qualities of foods easily satisfy teen’s needs. The teens eat out more often with their friends instead of with their families.
McDonald’s not only changes the family life of American people, but also changes the employment environment in the United States. McDonald’s changes employee makeup, employment issues and practices, and pervasive use of the minimum wage reflects important trends and issues in American life. Schlosser states that, “The McDonald’s Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America’s service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country’s new jobs.” (Schlosser, P4) McDonald’s definitely has great impact on the labor’s market. The jobs in McDonald’s require low-skilled workers. They consist of largely part-time workers who are over-worked. The company has a high turnover rate between 200-400%. Employees are interchangeable and rarely receive any benefits, which keeps down the cost of operation. As the result of the technology improvement, the jobs in McDonald’s are open to almost everyone, instead of highly skilled workers. Because the jobs only require little training, so if employees leave they can replace labors quickly. The job eliminates creativity or initiative, imparts few useful skills, and allows almost no room for growth.
McDonald’s has become one of the teen’s favorite places to find part-time jobs. They are willing to work few hours, accept low pay, possess little skills, and are easier to control than adults. Today, as many as 2/3 of high school juniors and seniors hold part time jobs. Teens make up the bulk of fast food workers, and those teen’s employees are under the age of 20, a far greater percentage than any other industry. Today, teen’s are responsible for buying their own things. The temptation to drop out of school and work more hours is high.
McDonald’s also employs many minorities workers, especially immigrants, because they are willing to work for minimum wages. As the population of teenagers has declined over the years, fast food chains hired larger percentage of minorities, elderly, handicapped, and female employees to fill the increasing demand for workers who are willing to work for a low wage. Minorities dominates the workforce, comprising 21% of fast food employees, and these minorities worker speak no English beyond ”McDonalds English”. At the restaurants companies that contribute to production for fast food attract employees from the low-income families.
The success of McDonald’s fast food business has also led to the foundation of other fast food restaurants. Schlosser also states, “The enormous success of McDonald’s spawned initiators not only in the fast food industry, but throughout America’s retail economy.” (P97) The founders of other fast food restaurants learned the increasing popularity of fast and cheap foods. The power of the American fast food industry increased dramatically. As the number of the fast food restaurants is increasing, the restaurants compete for the price of the products. Because of the keen competition, most of the fast food restaurants sale cheaper products, for example, McDonald’s “Dollar Meals,” which makes the fast foods even more affordable. Now the American consumers have more choices for place to dine out. Again, the more American people dine out, it decreases the family value.
McDonald’s sales affordable meals for most of the American people. It competes in prices with other fast food restaurants. However, they did not compete in the quality of their meals with other restaurants, and their products are unhealthy for American people. For keeping the low prices, McDonald’s uses bad beef and unhealthy oil for their hamburgers and French fries. Today, the typical American eats about 49 pounds of fresh potatoes every year and more than 30 pounds of frozen French fries. 90% of those fries are purchased at McDonalds restaurants. The reason fries taste so good, because McDonalds cooked its French fries in a mixture of about 7% cottonseed oil and 93% beef tallow. The mix gives the fries their unique flavor and more soaked beef fat per ounce than in McDonalds hamburger. During the research, the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5% of food was contaminated with salmonella, 11.7% was contaminated with listeria monocytogenes, 30% was contaminated with staphylococcus aureus, and 53% was contaminated with clostridium perfringens. All of these pathogens can make people sick. Food poisoning caused by listeria generally requires hospitalization and is fatal in about one out of five case. In the USDA study, 78.6% of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. Otherwise, a McDonald’s employee confessed that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. There were once a case which a worker who works in the kitchen failed to wash his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees provided details about cockroaches that crawl out from the milk-shake machine and armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls that were left out to thaw in the kitchen every night. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make people seriously ill, there is scumbag in the meat.
McDonald’s serves foods that provide little or no nutrition value. This causes health problems such as fat and cancer. McDonald’s provides foods that cause obesity, one of the major leading causes of death in America. More than half of the American adults and about one forth of the American children are now obese or overweight. Those figures have soared during the last few decades, along with the consumption of fast food. The rate of obesity among American adults is twice as high today as it was in the early 1960s and the rate of obesity among American children is twice as high as it was in the late 1970s.
Today about 44 million American adults are obese, an additional 6 million are super-obese. They weigh about a hundred pounds more than they should. No other nation in history has gotten so fat so quickly after fast food was introduced in the country. Obesity is now second only to smoking cause of mortality in the United State. The centers for disease control estimate that about 280,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of being overweight. Obesity has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, infertility, and strokes. Young people who are obese face not only long-term, but also immediate threats to their health. Severely obese American children, aged six to ten, are now dying from heart attacks caused by their weight. The U.S now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world. The message is America’s fast food chain go, waistlines start expanding and it is killing us.
Even thought almost all of the Americans know that McDonald’s foods are unhealthy, they still consume it. Because McDonald’s promotes cheap and fast foods, most of the American feel that they are too busy to cook for themselves when they have choice to go to McDonald’s. The consumers want to save more time and money and not care about the quality of foods, even when those meals may risk their health.
The advertisement of McDonald’s also changes the American life. Fast food displays the changing values in society by incorporating political, social, and economic trends into their advertisements. McDonald’s advertise the family values, and portray McDonald’s as the best restaurant for children with the Happy Meal. Soon, the numbers of parents bringing their children to eat in McDonald’s will increased. The advertisements today focus on consumer driven culture and fast paced society. McDonald’s starts the drive-thru service and saves more time for American people. It also offers super size French-fries and drinks that tells American “bigger is better.” As McDonald’s portray its restaurant as the best place to dine in quick and cheap, the Americans start to consume more in fast food restaurants and causes more health problems and decrease the family value.
I think that in 2050 McDonald’s popularity will decline. It may be still profitable outside America, but in the United States it will be almost excluded. People will start to pay more attention to what they are eating and will become more health conscious. Time will be even more valuable (if possible) for people, but there will appear new fast food restaurants that offer healthier food for the same money in the same amount of time. It is also possible that McDonald’s will start to offer products with better quality. It will have include in its menu some diet products. More and more people are on some kinds of diet and their number may even grow in the future.
For many years, one of the main advantages of McDonald’s was the cheap food. According to forecasts, the well being of the nation will improve significantly by 2050. Households will be able and willing to spend more for the food. So paying more money, they will demand a better quality. McDonald’s will not be the case anymore.
Most of the McDonald’s restaurants built in America have already depreciated and even greater number will depreciate by 2050. It will be expansive and unprofitable to invest in new buildings since McDonald’s is becoming less popular regardless of the restaurant looks. It will be more beneficiary for the company to invest money in new restaurants outside the U.S.
The McDonald’s hires mainly low-skilled low-paid workers. In many other industries, such labor force has moved out of the United States to other countries. By 2050 only very small number of people will be willing to work at such kind of job. New opportunities will emerge by that time.
McDonald’s had a great success because for a long time it was one of a kind and had no competitors. In the future, the number of chain fast-food restaurants will increase causing even tougher competition than today. Most of the restaurants will offer higher prices and better quality, which will become more important for the Americans.
During the past years, McDonald’s had very bad publicity. There were stories in mass media about the bad quality of products and terrible preparation of food. It made many people turn away from McDonald’s. The number of them will probably only increase in the future since more and more bad facts about the restaurant are becoming publicly known.
The information about the number of people who have problems with their health and those who have died because of bad nutrition is threatening. It is a signal to many people to think more about the health. The sooner we realize it the better.

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