Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 17, 1993 TAG: 9309170004
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This Roanoke Valley is, it seems, a place that appreciates the expected, the routine and the bland. In The Roanoker magazine's poll earlier this year - deeply flawed but all we've got - readers selected Pizza Hut as the best pizza available here, Applebee's as the best new restaurant, WaldenBooks as the best bookstore, Toys R Us as the best toy store and Kroger (!) as the best bakery.
You can't read those poll results without concluding that some, maybe even most, of us love our valley homogenized and franchised and served with a heaping dollop of flavorless pabulum.
But George Ritzer forged ahead Thursday at the fore of a room packed to overflowing with Roanoke College students - a generation weaned on Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets.
Ritzer packages the thoughts of German social theorist Max Weber in McDonald's terms - even though Weber died 35 years before the first McDonald's restaurant opened in 1955.
"Everyone wants to be like McDonald's," said Ritzer, a University of Maryland sociologist visiting the Salem college as part of a regular speakers series. "They're on college campuses, on highways, in sports arenas and on airlines."
Where has that omnipresence led us?
Says Ritzer: We've developed an obsession for measuring, and for assessing quality by size. Just a look at fast food, from Big Macs to Big Gulp to the Whopper to Biggies to Bigfoot, is revealing. None describes quality.
Size and speed have become the standards by which we measure success.
"In a McDonaldized society," he said, "quality takes a back seat" to everything, including efficiency.
"We don't care what we're efficient at, as long as we're efficient," said Ritzer.
By eliminating chance, by controlling technology, by subscribing to the McDonald's philosophy of boiling all activity down to routines that emphasize size and speed and efficiency, society has painted itself into a bleak corner, argues Ritzer.
"If you accept my premise - that McDonald's is the most serious threat to humankind since Attila the Hun, what can be done?"
Precious little, save for individuals fighting the overwhelming pressure to McDonaldize by eating less fast food, watching less television and patronizing more humanized businesses, says Ritzer.
"In the end, our actions will fail. McDonaldization will continue, inexorably, to expand," he concluded
Earlier this year, after returning from a tour of Italy, a high schooler from New River had this to say: "After experiencing another country, you realize how lucky you are to live here. The people were pretty friendly, but the cultures vary so much from city to city."
That's a pretty serious flaw to a kid who has bobbed his entire life on a sea of McDonaldization.
by CNB