Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (38 page)

Although I did a great deal of firsthand reporting and research for this book, I also benefited from the hard work of others. In these notes I’ve tried to give credit to the many people whose writing and research helped mine. Robert L. Emerson’s
The New Economics of Fast Food
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990) offers a fine overview of the business. Though many of its statistics are out of date, the book’s analysis of relative labor, marketing, and franchising costs remains useful.
Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age
, by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), is less concerned with the workings of the industry than with its impact on the American landscape and “sense of place.” McDonald’s has played a central role in the creation of this industry, and half a dozen books about the company provide a broad perspective of its impact on the world. Ray Kroc’s memoir with Robert Anderson,
Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s
(New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1987) conveys the sensibility of its charismatic founder, an outlook that still pervades the chain. John F. Love’s
McDonald’s: Behind the Arches
(New York: Bantam Books, 1995) is an authorized corporate history, but an unusual one — fascinating, thoughtful, sometimes critical, and extremely well researched.
Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), by Max Boas and Steve Chain, looks behind the McDonald’s PR machine and finds a company whose behavior is frequently cynical and manipulative. John Vidal’s
McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial
(New York: New Press, 1997) uses a narrative of the McLibel case to provide an indictment of McDonald’s and globalization. George Ritzer’s
The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Ridge Press, 1996) applies the theories of Max Weber to contemporary America, tracing the wide-ranging effects of McDonald’s zeal for efficiency and uniformity.
McDonaldization Revisited: Critical Essays on Consumer Culture
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), edited by Mark Alfino, John S. Caputo, and Robin Winyard, attests to the current influence of Ritzer’s work in the field of sociology. With a much less theoretical emphasis, Stan Luxenberg’s
Roadside Empires: How the Chains Franchised America
(New York: Viking, 1985) examines the fast food industry’s role in helping to create America’s postwar service economy. I
found a great deal of interesting material in trade publications such as
Restaurant Business, Restaurants and Institutions, Nation’s Restaurant News, and ID: The Voice of Foodservice
. For years some of the best reporting on the fast food industry has appeared in the
Wall Street Journal
.

Page

1
Cheyenne Mountain sits:
The description of Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station is based upon my visit to the facility, and I am grateful to Major Mike Birmingham of the U.S. Space Command for his subsequent help in obtaining additional information.

3
about $6 billion on fast food… more than $110 billion:
Both of these estimates were provided by the National Restaurant Association.

more money on fast food than on higher education
: My calculation is based on figures contained in “Personal Consumption Expenditures in Millions of Current Dollars,” U.S. Commerce Department, 2000. According to the Commerce Department, 1999 consumer spending on fast food exceeded spending on higher education ($75.6 billion); personal computers and peripherals ($25.9 billion); computer software ($8.4 billion); new cars ($101 billion); movies ($6.7 billion); books and maps ($29.5 billion); magazines and sheet music ($19 billion); newspapers ($16.7 billion); video rentals ($8.6 billion); and records, tapes, and disks ($12.2 billion).

about one-quarter of the adult population
: This is my own estimate, based on the following information from the National Restaurant Association: about half of the adult population visits a restaurant on any given day, and more than half of the restaurant industry’s annual revenues now come from fast food. Since the average check at a fast food restaurant is much lower that that at a full-service restaurant, my estimate may be too conservative (and the actual number of daily fast food visits may be higher).

4
the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker:
By “average” I mean workers assigned to nonsupervisory tasks. See “Real Average Weekly and Hourly Earnings of Production and Non-Supervisory Workers, 1967–98 (1998 Dollars),” Economic Policy Institute, 1999; “Average Hourly and Weekly Earnings by Private Industry Group, 1980–1998,”
Statistical Abstract of the United States
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1999), p. 443.

about one-third of American mothers… today almost two-thirds:
See “Labor Force Participation Rates for Wives, Husbands Present, by Age of Own Youngest Child, 1975–1998,”
Statistical Abstract,
p. 417.

Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni:
See
Working in the Service Society
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), edited by Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni, p. 2.

A generation ago, three-quarters of the money… Today about half of the money:
The comparison is between money spent on food for consumption at home and money spent on foodservice. See Charlene Price, “Fast Food Chains Penetrate New Markets: Industry Overview,”
USDA Food Review
, January 1993; “Personal Consumption Expenditures,” U.S. Commerce Department.

90 percent of the country’s new jobs:
Cited in Macdonald and Sirianni,
Service Society
, p. 1.

4
An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States:
Cited in “Welcome to McDonald’s,” McDonald’s Corporation, 1996.

annually hires about one million people
: This is my own estimate, based on the following: McDonald’s has about 14,000 restaurants in the United States, each employing about 50 crew members; a conservative estimate of the turnover rate among McDonald’s crew members is about 150 percent; having a workforce of roughly 700,000 and an annual turnover rate of 150 percent requires the hiring of about 1 million new workers every year. In its promotional literature, the Mc-Donald’s Corporation claims to have “surpassed the U.S. Army as the nation’s largest training organization.” Given how McDonald’s actually “trains” its workers, I have used the word “hires” as a synonym. See “Welcome to McDonald’s.”

the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes… the second largest purchaser of chicken:
See Love,
Behind the Arches
, pp. 3–4; Mark D. Jekanowski, “Causes and Consequences of Fast Food Sales Growth; Statistical Data Included,”
USDA Food Review
, January 1, 1999. McDonald’s role as the leading pork purchaser was described to me by a pork industry executive who prefers not to be named.

the largest owner of retail property in the world:
See Bruce Upbin, “Beyond Burgers,”
Forbes
, November 1, 1999; Love,
Behind the Arches
, p. 4.

earns the majority of its profits
: McDonald’s has an unusual franchise arrangement, serving as landlord for its franchisees and adjusting lease payments according to sales levels. About 85 percent of the McDonald’s in the United States are operated by franchisees. See Emerson,
New Economics of Fast Food
, pp. 59-62;
Love, Behind the Arches
, pp. 154–57; “Welcome to McDonald’s.”

spends more money on advertising and marketing:
Interview with Lynn Fava, Competitive Media Reporting.

the world’s most famous brand:
See “McDonald’s Wins Top Spot in Global Brand Ratings,”
Brand Strategy
, November 22, 1996.

more playgrounds than any other private entity:
Its nearest rival, Burger King, operates about one-quarter the number of playgrounds.

one of the nation’s largest distributors of toys:
According to the British newspaper the
Evening Standard,
in 1998 McDonald’s purchased 1.3 billion toys from Chinese manufacturers. Cited in Lachlan Colquhoun, “McDonald’s Soars to Success in Chinese Fast Food Market,”
Evening Standard,
October 21, 1999.

96
percent could identify Ronald McDonald:
Cited in “Welcome to McDonald’s.”
The only fictional character with a higher degree:
Max Boas and Steve Chain express some reservations about the accuracy of this study, which was conducted by McDonald’s, but I find it credible. A more recent study, conducted by an independent market research firm, found that at least 80 percent of the children in the nine foreign countries surveyed could recognize Ronald McDonald. See Boas and Chain,
Big Mac
, p. 115; Love,
Behind the Arches
, p. 2; and “Barbie, McDonald’s Find Common Ground,”
Selling to Kids
, September 30, 1998.

more widely recognized than the Christian cross:
A survey by a marketing firm called Sponsorship Research International — conducted among 7,000 people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, India, and Japan — found that 88 percent could identify the golden arches and that 54 percent could identify the Christian cross. The most widely recognized symbol was the interlocking rings of the Olympics. See “Golden Arches More Familiar Than the Cross,”
Plain Dealer
, August 26, 1995.

5
“
the McDonaldization of America
”: Jim Hightower,
Eat Your Heart Out: Food Profiteering in America
(New York: Crown, 1975), p. 237.

“
bigger is
not
better
”: Ibid., p. 3.

the final remains of one out of every nine Americans:
Cited in Erin Kelly, “Death Takes a Holiday,”
Fortune
, March 15, 1999.

“
We have found out… that we cannot trust
”: Quoted in Love,
Behind the Arches
, p. 144.

6
America’s largest private employer:
The health care industry employs more workers, but a large proportion of them work at publicly owned and operated facilities. See “Employment by Selected Industry, with Projections 1986–2006,”
Statistical Abstract,
p. 429.

the real value of wages in the restaurant industry:
See Patrick Barta, “Rises in Many Salaries Barely Keep Pace with Inflation,”
Wall Street Journal,
February 1, 2000.

roughly 3.5 million fast food workers
: The figure was supplied by the National Restaurant Association.

by far the largest group of minimum wage earners in the United States:
Interview with Alan B. Krueger, professor of politics and economics at Princeton University.

The only Americans who consistently earn:
Fast food workers are at the bottom of the restaurant industry’s pay scale, and the industry pays the lowest wages of any nonagricultural endeavor. Similarly, migrant farm workers are at the bottom of the agricultural pay scale. Although some farm laborers earn a decent hourly wage, many are paid the minimum wage — or less. See “Non-Farm Industries — Employees and Earnings, 1980–1998,”
Statistical Abstract
, p. 436; and Eric Schlosser, “In the Strawberry Fields,”
Atlantic Monthly
, November 1995.

approximately three hamburgers:
My estimate is based on the following: Per capita consumption of ground beef is now about thirty pounds a year, with the vast majority consumed as hamburgers. A regular hamburger patty at McDonald’s weighs 1.6 ounces; using that as a standard, Americans eat about three hundred burgers a year (five to six a week). Using a Quarter Pounder as the standard, Americans eat about 120 hamburgers a year (at least two a week). The consumption figure that I’ve used assumes an average patty weight somewhere between 1.6 and 4 ounces. See “Hamburger Consumption Takes a Hit, But a Reversal of Fortune Is in Offing,”
National Provisioner
, August 1999.

four orders of french fries every week:
Per capita consumption of frozen potato products (a category that is almost entirely french fries) is about 30 pounds a year. A regular order of french fries at McDonald’s weighs 68 grams. Converting the pounds to kilograms and then dividing that number by 68 leaves you with the number of annual french fry servings: 205 (about four per week). See “Potatoes: U.S. Per Capita Utilization by Category, 1991–1999,” USDA Economic Research Service, 2000.