Teenage Success

Further along in Eric Schlosser’s book, he elucidates on the fact that a significant reason for fast food restaurants success is their employment of teenagers. He states how they pay them below minimum wage and how they were able to do because of the deal they made with the government which allowed them to pay underage workers a few cents an hour below minimum wage. Then how restaurants make it so that teenagers won’t have to do much because all of the food is basically made by a machine. Schlosser is now not only trying to exploit fast food corporations use of appeals to children but also how they are capitalizing on making more money’s off of teens by paying the below minimum wage. According to Schlosser behind closed doors fast food restaurants will hire just about anyone who they know won’t mind the below minimum wage pay. Fast food restaurants are basically just taking advantage of teens and others who they know will accept just about any amount of pay so that they could increase their revenue without having to pay more for expenses.

How do you feel about what fast food restaurants are doing to make money? Do you think its ok just because the people who work for them don’t mind working for little pay to pay them barely enough to get buy. Do you think this below minimum wage pay is ok because their workers really don’t do any work because they do have machines basically doing everything for them?

Fast Food Nation Chunk #2

So far Eric Schlosser's novel, Fast Food Nation, focuses on how fast food companies target kids as their sole customers in order to trap them and their parents as "full-time" customers. Eric demonstrates how these companies attempt to trap kids into getting their parents to buy them McDonald's or whatever fast food restaurant it may be at a young age. He gives examples of this by how fast food restaurants try and give toys with kid's meals or build play grounds so as to attract kid's to their restaurants’ and with them their parents. He states their purpose is to get them young so that they will become life customers. Eric also shows how they use advertisements more and more to attract kid's and how fast food companies spend a lot of research figuring out what get's kid's going or what they like. Then he takes readers "behind the scenes" of fast food restaurants in order to show how it’s like to be an employee and how most employees are teens. And how teens are the most likely to get injured on the job. So far Eric is exploiting how fast food corporations try to seem as though they are your friend and one reason of why there is a problem with fast food restaurants.

How is that a fast food corporation who targeting kid's and trapping them or basically "controlling" them seeing as they are manipulated into getting their parents to take them a fast food restaurant not deemed as uncivil or morally unjust?

How will a nation that is represented by fast food, ultimately shape America's way of living or morals?