Fast Food's Rise to the Top

              You are coming home from work and you send a quick text message to your spouse, “McDonalds or Hamburger Helper?” Likely, the response you are going to get is McDonalds. In fact, you already know the answer and by the time you get a reply you are already in line for the drive thru, giving your regular order. So how did we go from cooking most of our meals at home to relying on the 14 and 15 year old McDonalds employees to supply us with our dinner? The rising popularity in fast food restaurants is in large part due to convenience, lack of time, advertising and lack of cooking abilities. It seems to be a vicious, never-ending cycle.
         
         In the last 5 years, the world’s economy has sky-rocketed, sending prices even higher. The cost of living has greatly increased, and with that, so does the need for having two incomes in a home. With both parents working, the kids also need a place to go after school. Most families opt for enrolling their children in sports or some other extracurricular activity to keep them out of trouble and supervised until they get off work. With all that time spent away from home, the most convenient and time saving option for food is, well you guessed it, The Drive Thru.

         Now that families are becoming accustomed to eating out, any and all cooking abilities become lost. Cooking is a learned skill and just like most other skills, it can easily be forgotten without practice. Making your second home a fast food restaurant is a real easy way to lose your ability to cook decently. A lack of cooking abilities means picking up the phone to order in pizza or Chinese. Already the cycle seems endless and it has only just begun.

         The final culprit in making fast food restaurants more popular is advertising. Remember the other day when you were trying to concentrate on meeting the deadline your boss just gave you and suddenly you hear in your head “Ba da ba ba! I’m lovin’ it!” Now you’re hungry, and you are not hungry for spaghetti. No, you want McDonalds. When we think of fast food restaurants we think of McDonalds, A&W, Pizza 73, Wendy’s, etc. We don’t usually think of Mom’s Pizza down the road. This is because all of these chain restaurants spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per day advertising on the television, billboards and anywhere else they can get our attention and get their annoying catch phrases burned in our memories.

         The rising popularity in fast food restaurants does not come as a surprise. Human nature is to find the easiest and fastest way to do something. We are also creatures of habit. So, when the rising economy sends prices soaring, forcing us to work more and sacrifice the time we spend at home, we find the easiest way to satisfy our hunger and then advertise it. Those are the causes for the rising popularity in fast food.