McDonaldizing the World, One Chicken at a Time
George Ritzer coined the term “McDonaldization” in 1995 to describe the stranglehold that the fast food chain had on the American consumer’s mindset (and was beginning to have on the mindset of every consumer across the world). At the time, McDonald’s was dominating the fast food market. However, it rarely led the industry in terms of innovative food offerings. Lately, it’s nothing but more of the same old with McDonald’s. The company added a “Southern Style Chicken Sandwich” to its fast food menu this month that bears a strong resemblance to Chick-fil-A’s staple sandwich.
Ritzer explained that McDonald’s rose to supremacy because it managed to epitomize the Enlightenment notion of rationality. Back in the 1940s, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that the rationality put forth by the Enlightenment begot a homogenized culture industry in which everything was indistinguishable from all of its near relatives. The recent culinary plagiarism enacted by McDonald’s is just another example of how the corporation has managed to make a fast food world stuffed with homogeneity. The future of food looks grim based on this trajectory; it will consist of only a few choice products that have passed McDonald’s standards of exclusion. People will have to buy whatever McDonald’s sells even if they do not necessarily want to buy it, even if there isn’t any real substantive reason to be selling it. Is a chicken sandwich really that good? McDonald’s planned a promotion effort on May 15 to test out its “new” chicken sandwich. The company found that the new ’wich didn’t do as well as expected, the New York Times reported. Chairman of McCann Erickson New York Nina DiSesa weighs in on the idea of corporate manipulation and whether or not anyone can sell anything to anyone else that that person does not want to purchase.
