Fast Food Nation: Chapter 3: Behind the Counter Summary & Analysis

Schlosser opens the chapter by describing the “sedimentary” layers of Colorado Springs—its development from an old, Mountain West city, with a downtown and few chain stores, into a sprawling, suburbanized chain of housing developments, with names like “Sagewood.” Academy Boulevard, a high-trafficked suburban road in Colorado Springs, Schlosser notes, resembles the main drags of 1950s Anaheim, which became the home to fast-food franchises like McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr. Schlosser argues that “this resemblance is hardly coincidental.”

Schlosser traces the economic changes that have taken place in Colorado Springs over the past 50 years, which some local residents, who resist these changes, call the “Californication” of the region. As California was a magnet for “disaffected middle-class Americans” looking for work in the 1930s, so, in the 1980s and 1990s, was Colorado Springs, which saw explosive growth in housing—its suburban enclaves like Sagewood—and a matched increase in the kinds of fast-food businesses that crop up along major roads and highways.

Colorado Springs’ economy used to be based primarily on the land—ranching in particular—but over the second half of the 20th century, the aerospace and military industries began relocating there—and this was accelerated by the establishment of the Air Force Academy just outside town after the Second World War. Paired with increased military spending was an increase in the evangelical Christian population, whose figures, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, saw in the Front Range region large, relatively affordable swaths of land, and populations primed to hear their particular brand of Christianity.

Schlosser notes that Colorado Springs now has 21 McDonald’s (at the time of writing), and describes how certain efficiency and time-saving technologies, like computers that mark exactly how long it takes to cook fries, are being debuted in Colorado Springs, since it’s a region with high demand and a growing customer base. Schlosser sees in Colorado Springs another generation, and another market, wherein the philosophies of efficiency and expansion once espoused by Disney and Ray Kroc might be applied.

Schlosser turns to the story of Elisa Zamot, a sixteen-year-old worker at a McDonald’s in south Colorado Springs. Zamot gets up early—often at 5:15—and first prepares the frozen food with one other employee, then mans the cash register for about seven hours, at which point she walks home or takes the bus, to rise again the next day while it’s still dark out. Schlosser notes that Zamot’s story is not unlike a great many others in Colorado Springs and across the country. He states that “there is nothing about fast-food that requires young workers,” but that, instead, employers like young employees because they can be paid less than older ones, and because they are “easier to control.”

Schlosser introduces the industrial-efficiency concept of “throughput,” “the speed and volume of a factory’s flow,” which is far more important in the fast-food industry than “the number of workers a business employs, or the value of its machinery.” In fast food, efficiency is everything, and a better throughput situation maximizes profit for the corporation—if not necessarily making the working conditions pleasant for the employees. Indeed, Schlosser argues, throughput as a defining concept has made working in fast food almost a robotic exercise—“everything’s add water,” says one employee at Taco Bell—“Just add hot water.”

The vast majority of fast food workers are young men and women, often high-school aged, and recent immigrants to the United States—populations that are more likely to be maltreated by employers, especially since many fast-food employees don’t know their rights, or are too scared and intimidated to ask for what they’re guaranteed. Many fast food workers work overtime but are not compensated for it, and others are asked to stay late without being paid.

Employers and franchisers, however, have reported vastly increased profits over the past twenty or thirty years, primarily as a result of increased automation and “throughput” within the industry—but “real wages” of employees (adjusted for inflation) have dropped in the fast-food industry for nearly 30 years. Many employers, rather than pay employees more for the work they do, are encouraged by fast-food corporations to “stroke” their employees—or to laud them with empty praise, which does not result in higher earnings or a more stable job.

McDonald’s is also notorious for its union-busting policies on the corporate level. Schlosser notes that not a single current employee of a McDonald’s restaurant, as of the book’s writing, is in a union; when McDonald’s management in Oak Park learns of potential unionization, as happened in Mason City, Iowa, in the 1970s, or outside Montreal in the 1990s, McDonald’s uses a variety of anti-labor practices to quash the union sentiment—including lie detector tests for employees (asking if unionization has been discussed) or even the closing of entire potentially unionizing stores, as in the case of the restaurant outside Montreal. McDonald’s opposes unions zealously, because non-unionized employees cannot argue as effectively for increased wages, better schedules, or more stable jobs.

Schlosser notes that Elisa Zamot, who works at the McDonald’s in Colorado Springs, works weekends and two evenings a week, and, like many high school students at fast-food restaurants across the country, she does so to earn spending money to help buy and maintain a car—to help her family somewhat with expenses—and because the work, though “monotonous,” provides a certain autonomy for young high-schoolers who are otherwise closely observed in classes or by their parents. Thus Schlosser does not make every fast-food job seem like purgatory; rather, he notes that the enjoyability of a job in the fast-food industry depends largely on the disposition of the manager, who might be kind or strict, depending on the location.

But Schlosser does describe the safety conditions in many fast-food restaurants as sub-par, especially when it comes to the frequency with which these restaurants are robbed, often by former employees with a grudge against their managers. Schlosser cites incidents from across the country, wherein former fast-food workers use information about the layout of the store, and the hours in which it might be most vulnerable, to steal cash from a day’s or week’s business.

Schlosser also describes the disconnect between the boring, unglamorous, often physically demanding work that recent immigrants and high-school students perform in fast-food restaurants, with the Annual Multi-Unit Foodserver Operators Conference, a gathering for managers and franchise owners in fast-food, in which anti-labor and anti-union practices are discussed. The corporate climate at these outings is one of positivity, a kind of relentless cheerfulness, yet speakers tend to undercut discussion of teamwork and the “value of people” as fast-food workers with anti-union diatribes, and arguments against the raising of the minimum wage, which, as one executive puts it, “chills” him. Schlosser implies strongly that he finds the executives’ discussion of teamwork hypocritical at best.