Review of Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society
             Sociologist George Ritzer sees the thousands of McDonalds restaurants that dot the U.S. landscape, and increasingly, the world. They provide a much greater significance than just the convenience of fast hamburgers and french fries. He created the term the McDonaldization of society to refer to the increasing rationalization of the routine tasks of everyday life.
             Ritzer emphasizes that "McDonaldization" does not refer just to the robot-like assembly of food. Rather, this process, occurring throughout society, is converting our lives. Shopping malls are controlled environments of accepted design, logo, colors, and opening and closing hours. Travel agencies haul middle-class Americans to ten European capitals in fourteen days, each visitor encountering precisely the same hotels, restaurants, and other predictable settings. No one need fear meeting a "real" native. USA Today generates the same bland, instant news, in brief, unanalytical pieces that can be read amid gulps of the McShake or McBurger.
             Ritzer vindicates that these things are not necessarily bad. He focuses on the four foundations of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. These are the consecrated commandments of any rationalized corporation. Individuality, unpredictability, and attention to quality have no place in these dehumanized systems. Ritzer points out that the irrationality of rationality, as all of the theoretical benefits of McDonaldized systems backfire: waiting in long lines, suspect quality, little or no customer service, the illusion of large quantities for low prices, and severely limited selection or choice. He states that efficiency does bring reduced prices. He also argues that at a cost, a loss of something difficult to define, an eminence of life is washed away by rationalization. He continues that in any event, the tenden...