Dark Side of the American Meal

Cark N. Karcher was one of the founding fathers of the fast food industry. In 1937 Carl moved to Anaheim, California because his uncle offered him a job out there. So from the farm boy life Carl moved to Anaheim, which was still a small farming community. Carl worked for his uncle, Ben, at his feed store for a few years, then he met his future wife, Margaret Heinz. Carl retured briefly to Ohio but when he came back to California he started working for a bakery delivering bread to restaurants and markets in west Los Angeles. During these deliveries Carl was astonished by the number of hot dog stands there were, and the number of buns they went throught every week.

When Carl heard that a hot dog cart was for sale on Florence Avenue across from the Goodyear factory he decided to purchase it. Carl borrowed $311 from the local bank and $15 from his wife and went into business for himself. Five months after Carl bought his hot dog stand the United States entered WWII, and the Goodyear plant became very busy. People started buying so many hot dogs that Carl soon had enough money to buy a second stand. So he did. Carl's wife, Margaret, ran the second stand by herself, while raising their daughter. This marked the beginning

of the fast food industry.

Also during this time in Southern California automobiles became a very popular item for people. Drive in restaurant

s sprang up all over the place, which led to the first drive through restaurant

, opened by the MCDonald brothers from New Hampshire. They started out running a drive-in restaurant

in Pasadena, trying to make profit from the new fad. They soon moved to a larger building in San Bardino and opened the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In. By the end of the 1940s the McDonalds' were tired of the drive-in business. They fired all their car-hops, closed their resturant, installed larger grills, and reopened three months later with a new method of food preparation. Fast food. The McDonald brothers eliminated everything from their previous establishment including the fork, dishes, and most of their menue. They now sold hamburgers and cheeseburgers. They got rid of the glass dishware and replaced them with paper cups, paper bags, and paper plates. They divided the workload among their employees, and made a sort of assembly line process in producing the meals. In this chapter Schlosser outlines the startup of the fast food industy, who the main ground breakers were, and how they made their restaurant

s become what they are today. I like how nearly all of the opposition started doing the same things and the people who were suceeding. If there would have been some copyrites sent in that would have nearly eliminated most of the competition because of the ways the food is produced. In my opinion.

Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Henry Ford, and the way Ford got his workload done. They saw the efficiency of the assembly lines, and how they could use this new technology to make things at the lowest prices available. Kroc used this simple procedure in the manufacturing of his milkshake machines, and Disney in his production of cartoon character sketches. Disney paid his workers exceptionally low wages for the tasks they preformed. He blamed the strikes of his workers on communism. Low wages is the root of the profitability in the fast food business. Throughout the history of the fast food industry the workers were mainly teenagers and immigrants, who were eager for a job, and would work for low wages, in usually

poor working conditions. As the chapter moves on it switches its focus to children. Disney and McDonalds both target children, and the children are what make both companies their "chedda". Pardon my pun. The companies use bright colors and cartoon characters to draw in the children's attention, much like Michael Jackson's method(LOL), to make a profit off their parents.

Behind the counter starts out talking about the layout of Colorado Springs, the people who live in the city, and the newcomers. The people who reside in Colorado Springs, and the jobs they perform on a regular basis. Chapter moves on to talk about the sixteen year old McDonald's worker by the name of Elisa Zamot. Elisa arrives at work when its still dark, helps the cleaning crew and manager set up for the days work, at 7:00 am the restaurant

finally opens, Elisa works all day behind the counter taking orders from breakfast to lunch. She does the same thing the rest of the weekend, waking up at 5:30am. McDonald's workers make minimum wage, and the opportunity for advancement is extremely limited. Managers and assistant managers make around $23,000/year and usually receive

medical benefits, as well as some form of bonus or profit sharing, but they have to work long hours without overtime...fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week! Crews have informal "rap sessions" to help with disgruntled employees, at these sessions the workers are encouraged to share information about the union's plans and the names of union sympathizers. In 1973 a group of San Francisco employees of McDonalds claimed that managers had forced them to take lie detector tests, interrogated them about union activities, and threatened them with dismissal if they refused to answer the questions. All in all the fast food industry went from actually caring about their employees when the restaurant

s started out as small mom and pop businesses, but when they started expanding in rapid succession

the business started not giving a damn about the workers. They were a commodity, many others available to take their place.

Dave Femster, ex pro hockey player, who got severiouly injured playing hockey. The Chicago Black Hawks let him go because of the injury. Femster was out of work and injured, with no way to make money, so he bought a piece of the Little Cesars franchise. Franchises are bought from large companies from those who want to produce the type of product that the main company sells. The franchisee pays an initial start up fee, and then a certain percentage of every years earnings, in return the franchisee gets to produce those products, which, usually sell fairly rapidly. Today Femster owns five restuarants, five in Pueblo and one in the nearby town of Lamar. He pulls in around $2.5 million/year.

The J.R. Simplot plant in Aberdeen, Idaho runs twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and ten days a year turning potatoes into french fries. They produce roughly one million pounds of potatoes per day. Simplot went into business for himself growing and shippind potatoes when he was sixteen years