The Price of Fast Food

Many technologies and innovations within popular culture today were designed with the purpose of improving our lives. McDonald’s designed, improved, and revolutionized the fast food industry. The restaurant began in 1940 when Dick and Mac McDonald were searching for a way to improve their restaurant in California. They decided to change their methods to speed up service, lower prices, and increase production. These initial ideas were the basis for the next sixty plus years in the fast food industry.   In order to drastically change efficiency, the brothers thought of an elaborate plan to remodel their whole restaurant. They closed their store to entirely revamp and create a new system of fast food. Paper products replaced dishwashers, creating more space in the kitchen.   The brothers then condensed their 25-item menu to nine items, later adding two more items, the French fries and milkshakes. By reducing their menu, they increased their production and decreased the amount of time spent in preparation, ultimately to increase their profit.   The reduced menu also increased precooking and allowed McDonald’s to be run by unskilled labor.   This “limited menu allowed [McDonald’s] to break down food preparation into simple, repetitive tasks that could be learned quickly even by those stepping into a commercial kitchen for the fist time.”   They also created an assembly line kitchen, sometime referred to as McFord. The assembly line also increased speed, efficiency, and production. This increased production capacity drastically reduced the prices, which made McDonald’s affordable to the consumers and profitable to the owners. This new productive system laid the groundwork for McDonald’s and fast food to become expanded all over the nation in the succeeding decades.

McDonald’s became popular in American “melting pot” culture because it united many different people, values, and backgrounds around the nation. Besides transformed the fast food industry, it changed American...