JingJing Lin
Professor Jason Smith
ENG101
22 March 2014
Fast Food Chains and the Young Generation
Children are the future of the world,
but the victims of the fast food nation. As a matter of fact, the fast food companies
target their business on the youth since most of their employees are teenagers,
and kids are their major customers. The companies attract the eyes of kids
through advertising and provide work chances to teenagers by lowering their
requirement. The fast food companies gain huge profits by taking advantage of marketing
on the young generation.
In the eyes of the fast food marketers, kids are the most
profitable customers of all. According to Ray Kroc and Walt Disney, a person
starts to build his/her “brand loyalty”(Schlosser43) at the age of two, which
is even before this person learns how to read his/her own name. In order to
help kids develop their brand loyalty toward the fast food companies, big companies
such as McDonald’s and Burger King have generated innumerable advertisements
through “playgrounds, toys, cartoons, movies, videos, charities, and amusement
parks, through contests, sweepstakes, games, and clubs, via television, radio,
magazines, and the internet.”(Schlosser51) However, it is impossible for young
kids to ignore the existence of the advertisements and the information that the
advertisements give to them; therefore, the innocent kids are “brainwashed” by
the companies and are going to start buying products from these companies.
Since the kids are still kids, they will now nag their parents to buy these
products for them and in the future the kids might buy the products over and
over again to feed themselves and moreover, to feed their own kids and so on.
Today’s fast food companies would not run properly
without the participation of teenager workers. In other words, the teenage
worker is a very important component of the fast food companies. The teenage
workers are hired since the companies updated their service system in which “the management no longer depends upon
the talents or skills of its workers—those things are built into the operating
system and machines.”(Schlosser70) The change helped the fast food companies to
save lots of money for maintaining their stores, because it avoids the need of
skilled workers who were paid with higher wages and gives many work
opportunities to the teenagers. The teenagers are unskilled and inexperienced,
thus they would like to accept lower wages. However, many teens are unsatisfied
with their wages and then leave for better paying jobs. For this reason, the
staff resignation rates among the companies are always high, but it seems not
to be a problem to the managers since the works are “de-skilled”(Schlosser70)
and the workers can be replaced by others easily.
Most American kids
somehow have experiences with the fast food companies. They may be the customers
or the employees. Tons of advertisements are used by the fast food companies to
grab the attention of minor kids and bring up their brand loyalty. De-skilled
and low-paid work opportunities are provided to the inexperienced teenagers.
The fast food companies have certainly made the best use of our inexperienced young
generation. In short, all the benefits go to the fast food companies. On the
other side, the kid customers being fed with junk food. Moreover, on the side
of the teenage workers, they are being paid with wages that are even lower than
the required minimum wage. To protect our young generation from the fast food
companies, people must do their best to feed our kids with healthy food, and
fight for the rights of teenagers so the teens can receive the wages that they
deserve to have.
No comments:
Post a Comment