English 102
Critical Response
Assignment: Write a critical response to one topic from selected chapters of Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, after giving your reader a brief summary of the text.
[Instructor comments appear in bold, italic font within brackets below.]
The Workforce of the Fast Food Nation
The Fast Food industry in some eyes has been one of the smartest inventions
this world has seen since the invention of the wheel. It has been driven by
our stomachs and our wallets for 40 to 50 years and it's still growing to this
date. The man who invented it can be called the smartest person, or best business
man, this country has ever seen. The Fast Food Industry is so big that it has
affected our health, changed our culture, and distorted our land ever since
day one. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser is a book about lots of
charges that are backed up by some great research and lots of facts. He shows
how it has changed our country and the people living and working inside. The
book is very against anything that has to do with Fast Food from the way it
was invented to the way it is running now. I agree with everything Schlosser
states and know what he is describing because he describes my job at Chucky
Cheese. It’s amazing how the fast food industry became as successful and
dominant as it did. Out of all the factors that do go into the success, I believe
the workforce will always keep the fast food industry at the top.
[Good – You make a clear “Yes, and” argument: You agree with
the author about the dominance of the fast food industry and then go beyond
the book by arguing that the biggest reason for the industry’s success
is how it treats workers. This argument allows you to offer your own critical
perspective, rather than simply summarizing and repackaging what the author
has said.]
In my opinion the way they run their business has propelled them to where
they are now. It all starts in the Workforce. They prefer unskilled workers
that have absolutely no experience. In their case, teenagers become their ideal
employees. Where I work I talked to about 80% of the workers and asked where
they have worked and for whom. 37 out of the 48 co-workers that I talked to
said they have no experience before our job at Chucky Cheese. The ones that
did have experience are 50 years old and got laid off from their long term jobs,
and have nowhere to go. [Great evidence. You effectively use your
own experience in the fast food industry to comment on the issues raised by
the book. Your interviews with coworkers – and the statistics you include
from those interviews – are especially effective.] It amazes
me how well run fast food is! They target us because we have no experience and
we have no almost no choice in where and what jobs we can get. That way we go
straight to fast food so we can get the so called experience that we need just
to go one step further and work at the mall. “Teenagers have been the
perfect candidates for these jobs, not only because they are less expensive
to hire than adults, but also because their youthful inexperience makes them
easier to control” (68) [You cite Schlosser effectively and
appropriately, but this quote, like others in the essay, is stuck in with no
introduction. Try to transition more smoothly into your quotes by telling readers
whom you are about to quote and how the quote relates to the content you have
been discussing in the paragraph so far]. Schlosser states that
teenagers are willing to accept the low pay and work the high amount of hours
and that way we are the “target” employees. The reason for working
at Chucky Cheese was because I went all through high school looking for a job
and all that was available to me was fast food. Eventually I gave in and this
summer I applied and got the job.
Fast food is not a very hard job to do; everything is set up just for us so
it won’t be a difficult job and that a person with a third of a brain
or less can do it. The hard thing about fast food is the amount of work. Fast
Food Nation describes how everything is set up like the assembly lines
in Detroit. Everything is done in steps from start to finish; it has all been
prepared so it won’t be time consuming and there is a lot of output in
a small amount of time. Schlosser states how all fast food restaurants have
manuals, explaining how everything should be done. Some manuals were as long
as 75 pages explaining how the burgers should be cooked and how they should
be placed. It was almost like he was describing my training because I had to
almost completely memorize a 50 page manual describing how I should weigh things
and how and for how long things should cook. Then we were tested just to show
them that we did look over the manual and if we didn’t get a certain score
we could have lost our job without even working a single second [Again,
you effectively use personal examples and paraphrases from the book to explain
your response].
The way we are treated is also exactly the way Schlosser states. Fast food
managers spend more time motivating the members of the workforce than really
running the store. They want to make them feel like they are doing something
special and exciting. “In absence of good wages and secure employment,
the chains inculcate “team spirit” in their young crews” (74).
He explains how if in some way the workers relax they are disappointing the
coworkers and in the end they are giving them more work. That way they can motivate
the workers to always be on time and go to work every day. ”One of these
techniques is called “stroking” – a form of positive reinforcement,
deliberate praise, recognition that many teenagers don’t get at home.”
I can easily say that I see this everyday. I never noticed it until I read that
exact quote. It blew me away when I started to look back and I noticed how almost
everyday if I did something wrong it was okay. All they would say is try not
to do it next time or that eventually I won’t make those mistakes.
Fast food corporations employ more people than other corporations in the world.
They are paying their workers minimum wage for long hours and a job that demands
too much work in such a small amount of time. The hours can be really rough
too. I’ve worked until 1 or 2 a.m. in the morning on some weekdays and
weekends closing the store. I never knew that scrubbing and preparing the store
for the next day could take so long. They will also try to cut hours for other
workers and they put the whole shift on our shoulders and that makes even more
work for us. Schlosser gives some great stats about how many people they employ
and exploit just to run hundreds of thousands of fast food joints: “The
three big corporations (known as: McDonald’s, Burger King, and Tricon
Global Restaurants also known as taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC) now employ 3.7
million people worldwide” (71). [This is a good way to incorporate
statistics to demonstrate your point.] They have employed about
90 percent of people for the new jobs in the United States. Soon they will end
up employing a whole country if everything pans out: “An estimated one
out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed
by McDonalds” (4). The company hires about a million people each year.
In a couple of years though, I think these figures should double.
There are thousands of fast food joints on every corner today; from every
fast food restaurant it seems as though 5 more pop out. Imagine how many workers
they go through in a year. While they are trying to force feed us fast food
they are making money at the expense of teenagers and unskilled workers just
to make a wad of dough. They attract us by the bright colors and manipulate
our senses just to make them a buck, while Carlos is in the back, in the kitchen
working his butt off for $7.25 an hour, trying to make it through another day
of making pizza. The three big corporations open a new fast food restaurant
every two hours, not counting Chucky Cheese. I could only hope that the working
conditions change and we get paid more but I really know that that’s never
going to happen. These companies are too smart and well run that only the consumer
can stop it.
There are lots of factors that contributed to the rise of the fast food industry. From the way they market to kids as their target customer, to the way they sell their food. However, in my eyes the workforce is and will be what keeps these corporations making billions of dollars. I can now say that I’ve seen some of the factors myself over the last couple of months. Will this evil empire eventually fall and what will drive it to the ground? Will it be the workers trying to do something about the work conditions and the low pay? These are some of the things that we can’t tell until the future becomes the present. All I could do is hope that eventually it does get better. [Conclusion wraps up paper effectively].
Instructor end comment:
[This essay is very well organized, with a clear central thesis, focused paragraphs that develop the thesis, an effective introduction and conclusion, and good transitions between topics. As you move through the essay, you make it clear when you are summarizing something from the author and when you are offering your own commentary or examples. Areas for improvement: your opening summary of the book could have been a bit more specific, you could have used more statistics to demonstrate the dominance of the fast food industry, and you could have pushed your ideas further, such as exploring why this factor is more important than other factors. In terms of language, you also often use more words than you need, which makes your writing less powerful. In your editing process, try to focus on tightening up your sentences by being more direct and concise. You also need a “works cited” page (bibliography) at the end of the paper listing the sources used.]
** Minor mechanical errors/typos have been corrected by the creators of CHARLIE