Today we are going back to Eric Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation" and discussing chapters 3, 4, and 5. In these chapters, Schlosser reveals some devastating truths about employment and success within the fast food industry, and about the flavoring companies that work hand in hand with fast food companies.
Behind the Counter
Schlosser tells us in the beginning of this chapter that "Colorado Springs today is what Los Angeles was fifty years ago - a mecca for the disenchanted middle class, a harbinger of cultural trends, a glimpse of the future." (61) Colorado Springs became this way when WW2 broke out, causing much of the economics of the area to depend on military spending. Even today, nearly half of the jobs in this area are still dependant on military spending (Schlosser, 62). In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion of aerospace, biotech, computer, telecommunications, and other industries of the future coming to Colorado Springs. However, amidst all of this, the largest private employer in the state is the restaurant industry (Schlosser, 65). While Colorado Springs only had a total of twenty chain restaurants in 1967, it now has twenty-one McDonald's alone (Schlosser, 65)! The major chains that can be found in places like Colorado Springs must rely on the fact that 70% of fast food visits are "impulsive" (Schlosser, 66). Thus, the fast food restaurant must be seen in order to have success.
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| Colorado Springs |
In order to run these fast food joint, the industries completely rely on teenagers to run their companies. "No other industry in the United States has a workforce so dominated by adolescents," Schlosser tells us. "About two-thirds of the nation's fast food workers are under the age of twenty." (68) Why is this? According to Schlosser, the industry seeks out part-time, unskilled workers who are willing to accept low pay instead of finding a small, stable, well-paid, and well-trained workforce (68). Rather, these companies are all about throughput, or the ability to increase the speed of assembly in order to make more faster. Schlosser tells us that at restaurants like Taco Bell, the food is "assembled", not prepared (69). Even the food comes in such a way that all you have to do is add hot water to make it become real food. This make it unnecessary to have management that depends on talents or skills, the talents and skill have been build into the machines instead so that jobs can be de-skilled and filled cheaper. Today, the fast food industries do not only depend on teenagers to work for them, but also on recent immigrants, the elderly, and the handicapped; all of which can be paid lower wages (Schlosser, 70). In addition to lacking the skills that would normally be trained with employees like recent immigrants, many of these worker also lack the knowledge of the English language. Instead, these workers are taught just enough to know the names of the menu items; what Schlosser refers to as "McDonald's English" (71).
Lowering the cost of training is one of the common goals among all fast food companies, Schlosser tells us (71). However, while these companies are paying enormous amounts of money to research how to eliminate employee training, these fast food companies are also accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies for "training" their workers (Schlosser, 72). Since the companies can then pay their untrained workers a lower wage, the turnover rate for fast food jobs is very high. According to Schlosser, "American taxpayers have in effect subsidized the industry's high turnover rate, providing company tax breaks for workers who are employed for just a few months and receive no training." (72) In fact, the typical fast food worker is fired or quits about every three to four months. This high turnover rate further allows the industry to keep paying low wages, making it the industry who pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion of worker than any other American industry (Schlosser, 73). Interestingly, "while the wages paid to restaurant workers has declined over the decades, the earnings of restaurant company executives have risen considerably" (Schlosser, 73). Schlosser tells us that "according to a 1997 survey in Nation's Restaurant News, the average corporate executive bonus was $131,000, an increase of 20% over the previous year." However, "increasing the federal minimum wage by a dollar would add about two cents to the cost of a fast food hamburger." (73) Since the money aspect of working for a fast food company does not allow much incentive for its workers, the companies have adopted a method of positive reinforcement, called stroking, to provide incentive for working. Stroking is giving deliberate praise and recognition to workers to make them feel values, many of which never receive any praise at home. Stroking has been shown to be extremely successful at motivating workers and is much less expensive than raising wages or giving overtime (Schlosser, 74).
Fast food companies are always extremely scared of their workers banding together to form unions, and thus look for their number one preferred trait for their workers: obedience. In order to test employee's obedience and loyalty, they were often submitted to lie detectors and threatened to be fired if they would not submit to them (Schlosser, 78). This practice was later ordered to be halted by the labor commissioner.
In addition to trying to attract teenagers to work for fast food companies, the industry further tries to hire in teenagers that come from extremely poor communities. Some of these teens take the jobs just to help their families, but most take the jobs to be able to afford luxury goods like a car (Schlosser, 79). However, these teens are usually overworked - working late into the night, begin to neglect their homework, and come to school exhausted. According to a paper published in 1998, "the long hours many American teenagers now spend on the job pose a great risk to their future educational and financial success. Numerous studies have found that kids who work up to twenty hours a week during the school year generally benefit from the experience, gaining an increased sense of personal responsibility and self-esteem. But kids who work more than that are far more likely to cut classes and drop out of high school." (Schlosser, 80) Teenagers who must take on these jobs are by far overworked and are also disrespected by many customers. Schlosser tells us that during many of his interviews, he heard "numerous stories of fifteen year olds working 12 hour shifts at fast food restaurants, and sophomores working long past midnight." (82) Sometimes, a good manager will allow their employees to keep up on their studies and allow for scheduling changes, but many are not as reasonable; they behave arbitrarily, pick on workers, yell at workers, and make unreasonable demands of them (Schlosser, 83).
On top of low pay, long hours, and dealing with entitled customers, teenagers are also the most likely employees to incur an injury while on the job and, fast food workers especially, often have their lives at risk by working as well. According to Schlosser, "roughly four or five fast food workers are now murdered on the job every month, usually during the course of a robbery." (83)"Two thirds of the robberies at fast food restaurants," he continues, "involve current or former employees." (Schlosser, 84) With the risks of working late at night or early in the morning at a fast food restaurant, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommended some guidelines for safety; like putting more lights in the parking lots to help with visibility (Schlosser, 85). The restaurant industry, however, has done everything in their power to fight the regulations OSHA has recommended and did not even want to supply the government with statistics on robbery statistics (Schlosser, 85). Instead, the fast food chains have increase their spending (millions) on new security measures; including video cameras, panic buttons, drop-safes, burglar alarms, lighting, etc (Schlosser, 85). However, as Joseph A. Kinney (president of the National Safe Workplace Institute) put it, "raising wages and making a real commitment to workers will do more to cut crime than investing in hidden cameras. No other American industry is robbed so frequently by its own employees." (Schlosser, 86)
Fast Food Restaurant owners every seem to stick to the idea of keeping wages as low as possible and making work fun in order to keep their employees happy. But as James C. Doherty put it, "the restaurant industry needs to move away from relying on a low-wage workforce with high levels of turnover and to promote instead the kind of labor policies that would create long-term careers in foodservice. How can workers look to this industry for a career when it pays them the minimum wage and provides them no health benefits?" (Schlosser, 88)
Success
In this chapter, Schlosser starts by describing a man who was brought up in Detroit, went to college to get a degree in business, and lived the luxury life playing hockey for the Chicago Black Hawks for many years: Dave Feamster. But then, in 1984, Feamster incurred a terrible back injury during a game that ended his hockey career forever. After leaving the world of hockey, Feamster decided to use his college degree to open up a Little Caesars franchise business (Schlosser, 93).
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| Feamster |
According to Schlosser, "becoming a franchisee is an odd combination of starting your own business and going to work for someone else. One provides the brand name, a business plan, expertise, access to equipment and supplies. The other puts up the money and does the work." (94) While many companies like the automobile, oil, and motel companies began growing using a franchise business plan, it was the fast food industry that truly perfected and turned franchising into a real business. When Ray Kroc took on the idea of franchising, he asked his people to "give up their former lives and devote themselves fully to McDonald's" (Schlosser, 95). He would build their stores really far from their homes and require them to drive all the way there to work, and forbade them from engaging in another other business (Schlosser, 95). Most of all, according to Schlosser, Kroc wanted loyalty and utter devotion from his franchisees, in return he promised to make them rich (Schlosser, 96). The corporate executives, to make more money, decided to actually buy up a bunch of properties and then to lease them to their franchisees with a 40% markup. In this way, they became not only the supplier of the brand and products, but also the landlord of their franchisees. Kroc's business partner Harry J. Sonneborn expressed that the McDonald's Company is "not basically in the food business". He continues in saying that "we are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us our rent." (96) After the franchise business was perfected by these fast food companies, other industries began to catch on as well. In 1969, the first retail store took on the selling tactics of the fast food industry by offering jeans at stores all over, marketing towards youth, and choosing a name that "would appeal to counterculture teens alienated by the 'generation gap'": Gap Inc. (Schlosser, 97).
According to Schlosser, "today it costs about $1.5 million to become a franchisee at Burger King or Carl's Jr.; a McDonald's franchisee pays roughly one-third that amount to open a restaurant." (98) In 1998, an International Franchisee Association (IFA) survey claimed that 92% of all franchisees said that they were successful. This fact may have been more than a little bias, however, since they only interviewed franchisees who were still in business (Schlosser, 98). In another study, it was found that within four to five years after opening, 38.1% of new franchised stores actually failed (Schlosser, 98). The rate of independent businesses, on the other hand, had failure rates 6.2% lower than fast food companies (Schlosser, 98)!! Schlosser tells us that many of the companies, as the American market for fast food became larger and larger, became guilty of encroachment, or placing the same food chain closer to one another (Schlosser, 99). While this really bothered the franchisees, the franchisors (who obtain the bulk of their profits from royalties based on total sales) believed that more restaurants usually means more sales and higher pay for themselves (Schlosser, 99). In this business, it is truly the franchisee that tends to get walked all over and taken advantage of. According to Schlosser, "although franchisees must obey corporate directives, they are not covered by federal laws that protect employees. Although they must provide the investment capital for their business, they are not covered by the laws that protect independent businessmen. And although they must purchase all their own supplies, they are not covered by consumer protection laws." (99) In fact, they often must sign a waiver in order to franchise a restaurant that waives all of his or her legal rights, that forces them to agree to buy only from approved suppliers regardless of price, to sell the restaurant only to a buyer that is approved by the chain, and to accept termination of their contract for any cause, at the discretion of the chain (Schlosser, 99).
When Subway was founded in 1965, they came up with a whole new way of creating lots of stores and expanding rapidly, through creating "development agents" (Schlosser, 100). These agents received their pay based on the number of restaurants that open in their territory, encouraging them to keep opening more Subways, even if it means opening them nearby already existing stores and effecting the revenues of these Subway franchisees (Schlosser, 100). In 1999, Congressman Howard Coble finally devised some legislation that would make franchisors obey some of the same fundamental business principles as other
American companies by limiting their ability to encroach on already existing stores without "good cause" (Schlosser, 101). Naturally, the IFA and the fast food chains strongly oppose Coble's bill. After a hearing in 1999, the IFA claimed that "federal regulation of franchising would interfere with free enterprise contract negotiations and seriously harm one of the most vital and dynamic sectors of the American economy" (Schlosser, 101). However, "despite their public opposition to any government interferance with the workings of the free market, the IFA has long supported programs that enable fast food chains to expand using government backed loans" (Schlosser, 101). While the fast food chains have been using the Small Business Association (SBA) to finance new restaurants for decades, they have been causing the true small business to be eliminated and have used the SBA backed loans to "experiment" with store location and success (Schlosser, 102). In one example that Schlosser gives us, the SBA backed thirteen loans to Burger King franchisees, but eleven of them defaulted. When this occurred, Burger King did not lose any money, rather it was the American taxpayers that had covered the franchisee fees, paid for the buildings, real estate, equipment, and supplies (Schlosser, 102).
After Dave Feamster opened up his first Little Caesars restaurant, it took him three years to pay off his initial debt. Unlike when Schlosser visited many other rival pizza chains, Feamster did not fly in the company publicist to accompany him but simply allowed Schlosser to tour through his store and interview anyone he wanted in private. Feamster knew he really had nothing to hide (Schlosser, 103). Feamster prides himself on running his business ethically and takes good care of his employees. He pays some of the college tuition of his regular employees, so long as they maintain a 3.0 grade average or higher (Schlosser, 103). He pays his managers an average of $22,000 a year for a fifty hour workweek, gives them health insurance, and contributes a few thousand dollars annually to their pension funds (Schlosser, 104). When Feamster found about an event called "Success" that was being held nearby, he paid $90 a ticket to bring fourteen of his workers with him to hear the speakers, to show them that "there's a world out there, a world beyond the south side of Pueblo." (Schlosser, 104) When the Little Caesars employees got to the event, they were seated in an arena with 18,00 other people, almost all of which were white, clean-cut, and prosperous. When "Success" speaker Peter Lowe took the stage, he revealed to the crowd what is ultimately necessary for success in the business world. He says, "Lord Jesus, I need you. I want you to come into my life and forgive me the things I've done." (Schlosser, 106) Schlosser informs us that "the meek shall no longer inherit the earth; the go-getters will get it and everything that goes with it. The Christ who went among the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, among lepers and prostitutes, clearly had no marketing savvy." (106)
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| Peter Lowe |
When one of the last speakers, Christopher Reeve takes the stage a silence goes over the crowd. Reeve tells them about his life, his successes, and his neglect of his family. He tells the audience, "Since my accident, I've been realizing… that success means something quite different. I see people who achieve these conventional goals. None of it matters." (Schlosser, 107) Schlosser tells us that the men and women up and down the isles, who have been coming up with the latest schemes to market and subdivide and franchise their way up, whatever the cost, are touched by not only what Reeve has said, but also wipe away tears as they are taken by "a sudden awareness of something hollow about their own lives, something gnawing and unfulfilled" (107)
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| Christopher Reeve |
Why the Fries Taste Good
Aberdeen, Idaho is one of the nations largest growers of russet potatoes and is where the John Richard Simplot plant, that runs 24 hours a day turning potatoes into french fries, is located. This small factory that was built in the late 1950's now processes over a million pounds of potatoes a day (Schlosser, 111). In 1941, Simplot opened up his first Dehydrating plant and changed the creation of onions and french fries forever. After perfecting a way of dehydrating and freezing fries, Simplot became one of the largest producers of frozen french fries, the supplier to McDonald's, and one of the richest men in the United States (Schlosser, 115). Since Americans have long consumed more potatoes then any other food except dairy and wheat flour, the production and selling of french fries became one of the most profitable items on fast food restaurant menus. According to Schlosser, "In 1960, the typical American ate 81 lbs of fresh potatoes and about 4 lbs of french fries. Today the typical American eats about 49 lbs of fresh potatoes every year - and more than 30 lbs of frozen french fries. 90% of which are bought at fast food restaurants." (115)
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| J.R. Simplot |
Today, Simplot is not the only fry maker in the world and is not even the largest supplier. There are, in fact, three main fry processing companies: J.R. Simplot, Lamb Weston, and McCain. These three companies are in constant competition for contracts and have thus allowed the prices of frozen french fries to go down significantly (Schlosser, 116). Today, fast food companies purchase frozen fries for about 30 cents a pound. They then reheat the fries in oil and sell them for about $6 dollars a pound (Schlosser, 117). While the profit margins on fries are very high, very little actually trickles down to the farmer; who receives about 2 cents for every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries (Schlosser, 117). According to University of Missouri professor of rural sociology William Heffernan, "the American agricultural economy now resembles an hourglass. At the top there are about 2 million ranchers and farmers; at the bottom there are 275 million consumers; and at the narrow portion in the middle, there are a dozen or so multinational corporations earning a profit from every transaction." (Schlosser, 119)
In selling products like french fries, the distinctive tastes of the food that can bring in so much praise do not come from the type of potato, the technology that processes them, or the restaurant that fries them (Schlosser, 119). Rather the taste is largely determined by the cooking oil used to fry the foods as well as the flavoring artificially put into the foods themselves. After receiving a lot of criticism over using cooking oil with 93% beef tallow in it, McDonald's had to find a way to make their fries taste the same while only using vegetable oil. The McDonald's fry now contains a mysterious ingredient near the end of the list called "natural flavor" (Schlosser, 120). All processed food today contains either "natural flavor" or "artificial flavor", both of which are man made additives that give the food its taste. While people who buy these products can list off the brand names and producers of the products, very few people can name a company that is responsible for the products taste. Many of these companies make both flavoring and perfumes. This is because the aroma of foods are just as important for how we perceive the taste of the food as what is actually in the product itself. Man-made flavorings were first used in baked goods, candies, and sodas until the 1950s, when the sales of processed foods began to soar (Schlosser, 123). Today, the American flavor industry has annual revenues of about $1.4 billion, but the cost of putting flavor into products is surprisingly inexpensive (Schlosser, 124). It costs only about half a cent to put the flavoring in one 12oz can of Coke (Schlosser, 124).
While these flavoring may contain more ingredients than some of the foods they are giving their taste to, the FDA does not require flavor companies to disclose their ingredients, so long as the chemicals are considered by the agency to be Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) (Schlosser, 125). Since consumers now do not like the term artificial flavoring and believe that natural flavoring is healthier, companies have been switching over to natural flavoring more and more. However, consumers may not know that the chemicals found in natural flavors are actually the exact same chemicals found in artificial flavoring, they are just extracted from natural sources (such as herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables, and animals) through different methods (Schlosser, 126). With the FDA allowing these natural and artificial flavoring ingredients to remain secret from society, problems have arisen in recent years with vegetarians not being able to know if the flavoring in some of their foods actually comes from animal products. The Vegetarian Legal Action Network is currently petitioning for the FDA to issue new food labeling requirements for food containing natural flavors (Schlosser, 128).
Join me next week in the continuation of Eric Schlooser's book (Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9) where we will uncover and learn even more about the rise of the fast food nation.
Exercise: Today is the second Yoga day of the week. Today I went to a Vinyasa I class (which means it is easier than Monday's class) although my legs are a little sore today… So today I want to encourage you to get out your yoga mat, and head into a class, follow along to a DVD, or do some of your own flows for an hour long workout.
Eat: While I was eating my dinner in the Life Café, I had a ticket number (for my food order) that had an interesting fact about Spinach that I want to share with you. As it turns out, spinach actually helps you to get your metabolism going and to process 120% more protein, which helps to rebuild and restrengthen your muscles after a really good workout. So when you go home to eat dinner tonight after your workout, find a way to include some spinach in your meal… even adding a baby spinach salad!
Relax: Today I wasn't really feeling the greatest in terms of health (woke up with a stuffy nose and a bit lethargic). If you are ever feeling this way, I want to recommend that before you throw on your comfy PJs and fuzzy socks, take a super hot and long shower. Allow yourself to take in the heat of the water and breathe in the steam from it as well. It will help to clear your sinuses a bit and get you nice and cozy warm.
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