Fast Food Nation: Chapter 2: Your Trusted Friends Summary & Analysis

Schlosser describes a visit to One McDonald’s Plaza in Oak Brook, IL, where he goes to the McStore—an enormous gift shop for the company—and the Ray Kroc Museum. Schlosser is impressed and slightly confused by the overwhelming amount of McDonald’s merchandise for sale, many items of which include the stars and stripes of the US flag. Schlosser notes that the tone of the McDonald’s museum, and indeed its entire corporate complex, is “Disneyesque,” and he argues that this is not a coincidence, since Kroc—the man who took the McDonald’s brother’s small company and made it a behemoth—and Walt Disney have a great deal in common.

Both Kroc and Disney were self-educated, and their training facilities they christened “universities,” to make employees at Disney and McDonald’s feel that they were entering an institution of higher learning by becoming part of the company. Both Kroc and Disney, Schlosser continues, were “great salesmen,” who were skilled especially at “selling things to children.” Kroc was trained as a salesman in Oak Park, Illinois, and was selling “milk-shake mixers” to the McDonald’s Speedee Self-Service restaurant in San Bernardino, CA, in 1954, when he “envisioned putting a McDonald’s at busy intersections all across the land.” “Kroc convinced the McDonald’s brothers to sell him the right to franchise McDonald’s nationwide,” as Schlosser puts it, and the brothers, content to retire on what was then a significant (but not astronomical) amount of money, thus agreed to let Ray Kroc become head of the soon-to-be McDonald’s corporation.

Schlosser notes that, after purchasing McDonald’s franchising rights, Kroc sent a letter to Disney, then already quite famous as head of the Disney movie studio, to ask to sell McDonald’s products at the soon-to-open Disneyland theme park in Anaheim. Disney was polite but ultimately dismissed Kroc’s advances—something Schlosser attributes to the relatively small size of McDonald’s at the time, versus the corporate heft and buying-power of Disney.

Schlosser explains Disney’s methods for making cartoons during the 1930s and ‘40s: for Disney, his studio was “a machine for the manufacture of entertainment.” Schlosser argues that exactly this quality, of a machine producing something customers, especially children, might want, was deeply influential for Kroc, who imagined the McDonald’s Speedee Service System nationwide, as a blueprint for the efficient production of burgers and fries.

Disney, as Schlosser notes, was a strong supporter of Republican causes. Ronald Reagan, a former movie star who would go on to be a Republican Governor of California and President of the United States, was, for example, part of the Disneyland opening ceremony. Schlosser argues that Kroc’s politics were harder to trace, since Kroc tended not to get involved in national political issues—unless they directly affected his business. Thus, in the early 1970s, Kroc donated a large sum to Nixon’s reelection campaign, in part because Nixon supported a bill that would allow fast-food restaurants to pay high-school-age workers less than the minimum wage—a bill men like Kroc staunchly argued for.

Disney was also greatly enamored with “progress,” not unlike Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl’s Jr. In particular, Disney’s progress, like Kroc’s, involved an America that looked more suburban, and required families to drive on major interstate highways. Disney’s Tomorrowland amusements at his theme parks promoted exactly this type of future, and coupled it with something he called corporate “synergy,” wherein other companies would sponsor exhibits in Tomorrowland and across Disneyland, as a way of promoting a clean, corporate—and, by Schlosser’s reckoning, pro-capitalist and anti-communist—future.

Kroc also believed in this kind of progress. He tried, for a time, to plan a McDonald’s theme park, also in the LA area, but settled, as Schlosser writes, for smaller “McDonaldlands” and PlayPlaces, situated at McDonald’s franchises across the country. Kroc also helped introduce what would become McDonald’s most recognizable corporate embodiment—after the Golden Arches themselves—Ronald McDonald, the red-and-yellow-suited clown who would go on to achieve even broader name recognition than Mickey Mouse, according to polls conducted in the 1970s in the United States.

Schlosser argues that McDonald’s and Disney were part of a broader shift in the American economy, in the late 1970s and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, wherein sales and marketing were directed increasingly to children. There were many reasons for this, although, in part, children’s tastes were relatively easy to predict—indeed, to mold—and McDonald’s and Disney pioneered the practice of making their burgers, fries, movies, and theme parks seem irresistible to younger consumers, who would then convince their parents to spend cash. Schlosser points to the increasing amounts of television watched nationally in the US in the 1980s as a major contributor to advertiser’s access to children, since spots could be placed in with cartoons and other kid-friendly programming.

Schlosser writes that corporate synergy reached a new zenith in 1996, when McDonald’s and Disney signed a ten-year agreement for cross-promotion of products between the companies—especially the marketing of Disney films as part of McDonald’s toys in happy meals. “McDonald’s also began to sell its hamburgers and French fries at Disney’s theme parks,” Schlosser notes, stating that “the life’s work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle.”

Schlosser describes other situations in which the “synergy” between companies and consumers is more suspect—even somewhat invasive. Schlosser notes that, by the 1990s, McDonald’s was concerned that families were no longer buying McDonald’s food out of loyalty to the brand, since some consumers thought that other fast-food establishments had better burgers for less money. Thus McDonald’s circulated internal memos arguing that the company should be considered, by families, a “trusted friend,” such that parents believe they are doing something special for their children by taking them out for a burger and fries.

In public schools, too, McDonald’s, and other large fast-food and beverage companies, began in the 1990s to ink contracts that would enable their products to be marketed and sold on the school grounds. The beverage companies, in particular (like Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper) believed that aggressive marketing to younger consumers could create a “brand loyalty” that would increase sales of the product long-term, after the students had left school. Although some of these partnerships were more profitable than others, one such agreement, in the schools of Colorado’s Front Range, allowed a school administrator named John Bushey to leave his job in the Colorado Springs district, and to move to Florida to become “principal of the high school in Celebration, a planned community run by The Celebration Company, a subsidiary of Disney.”