This should help you if you’re struggling with understanding the four features of McDonaldization, and trying to come up with your own examples of how they operate (which I strongly encourage).

Efficiency

Remember what Ritzer says:

• Streamlining processes–getting customers in and out more quickly, making sandwiches more quickly, dealing with rush hour traffic through the store/restaurant. Getting students registered. Changing that oil in 10 minutes. A half-hour haircut with no appointment needed (hmmmm …)! An online degree, from your home, that you can do in the evenings and fits your busy lifestyle!
• Getting customers to perform unpaid work. Do they fill their own drink orders? Rewind their own videotapes? Clean off their own tables? Check out their own groceries? Fill out their own health history and insurance forms? Re-use their hotel towels and sheets? Some of this may be a good idea, but it all saves companies labor and other costs.
• Reducing choices. Think of the McDonald’s menu–limited choices makes it easier for employees, who then don’t require extensive training and can be paid low wages, (making them of little value to the company and likely increasing turnover rate). How about radio stations? Do they have simplified menus, formulas? Do mainstream movies deal with an extremely limited range of topics, in extremely limited ways that involve sexual tension, some gun-related violence, possibly massive retribution of demonized villains, and heroic white male characters? What about the local commercial radio stations? How often do you hear something that doesn’t sound like the song before or after it? Are they all between three and five minutes, with a couple of verses, a solo, one more verse, etc. What about the nightly network news? Candidates for political office? Debates? How many issues do they deal with and in what complexity?

Remember this key question: efficiency for whom? Who really benefits from efficiency? The workers? Customers? Owners? Shareholders?

Control

All control shouldn’t be equated with McDonaldization. Just because a company doesn’t let its employees work in bikini thongs or unpatriotic T-shirts doesn’t mean that it’s controlling them in the sense Ritzer describes. You might think about control in different way:

1. Control over employees might mean they have to follow scripts, have to wear uniforms, have to perform their tasks in a very specific way, have little to do besides watch machines, etc. Control helps to standardize products or services, which leads to greater, what? (fill in the correct feature–you have a 1 in 3 chance… ). At the extreme end would be companies or organizations that have employees posing as customers to enforce the standardization of their behavior. The ‘secret shopper’ phenomenon. Random reinforcement works (see Orwell’s 1984). Even many politicians stick to the scripts, as per their consultants’ orders. Why?
2. Control over customers can be seen when you examine the ubiquitous theme parks–the way visitors to the parks are herded around, to avoid crowds, to keep flow constant, handle parking, to take them to the gift shops, create the illusion they’re almost at the front of the line for a ride, etc. We’ve all seen the ‘take a number’ system, or the ‘can I help the next in line.’ For a while there were those chutes in fast food restaurants. Airport security uses these. So do feedlots.
3. Control over image–check out Thomas Kinkade’s home page. Kinkade passed away in 2012, but his website and art merchandising thrives. How much of the artist’s image was part of his management group: the MAGI marketing group’s efforts to market Kinkade as a commodity to sell more paintings to the broadest possible audience? Check out WalMart’s web page, where professional workers come to work in business suits, but submit to wearing blue vests in the name in the name of all that’s good in communities and family values everywhere. Three members of the WalMart family may be among the top 10 richest in the US, but they’re not above being engaged community neighbors, as this page clearly shows (the big question: are these models or workers on sanctioned 15-minute breaks?).

Calculability

There are a couple of key points here:

• Quantity over quality. Does the quality of the product or service suffer because they’re trying to crank out a lot of it, to mass produce it? If so, they’re likely to emphasize things like the size of the drinks or hamburgers, or the number sold. Often times presidents won’t talk about the quality of their policies, they’ll talk about their ‘approval ratings.’ News media will report these because they’re numbers, they can turn it into some sort of ongoing narrative, let the viewers at home keep score, interview ‘experts’ about what the ‘numbers’ mean. And keep ratings high. If quality isn’t suffering, this may not apply. But if a company begins to franchise, wants to standardize its product, implement greater control over employees and their behavior in the workplace, and increase profit, then they may have to compromise quality in some way. WalMart doesn’t say they offer the best brands in the world–just everyday low prices and refund policies when your plastic stuff breaks. If a firm is in the business of mass production, it is likely making a choice that quantity is more important than quality, and will find ways to justify this choice (for instance, lots of people want Thomas Kinkade’s prints, so he’s just making it available to a wider audience). Usually there’s a cost break. In other words, McDonaldized enterprises are offering ‘cheaper’ goods or services, going after that segment of consumers that is less concerned about status or quality.
• The money thing. The business model. How meticulous is the company in trying to control costs? For instance, some factories in Mexico will ask applicants to do an hour of unpaid ‘probationary’ work, to see if they have the skills and qualifications to do the job. No doubt this is part of the business model–the more hours of unpaid labor, the greater the profits for the company. Over the course of a year those hours add up to thousands, hundreds of thousands, of labor costs ‘saved.’ Local, independent stores are less likely to look at their operations in terms of profits. For some businesses, the most important product wasn’t the product at all, but the atmosphere–people may come to a coffee house for the conversation, the ambiance, for instance. So not all firms look to go this route, in fact some work to distinguish themselves from McDonaldized outfits.

Predictability

• Give the people what they think they want, or what you want them to think they want. The idea behind predictability is that people don’t like getting something different every time they visit–a certain percentage of consumers–this is the kind of research marketers commission–want the same product. The research says that there are enough people that want the same floor plan, that want basically the same house their neighbor has (because if their neighbor paints her house purple, property values might dip), that want the same smiling faces in the same brightly colored uniforms saying the same sunny scripted phrases (because statistically this might increase the chances we’ll come back again–(just in case the need for a complete happy meal collectible character collection isn’t sufficient motivation), that a system that tries to control these variables will produce predictable sales and income.
• It’s about the business model. Predictability doesn’t just mean knowing the store will be there next time you visit, or you’ll have a place to park the car–most all places of business pay attention to those factors (for instance, having the cash registers in the front of the store–true it’s good, and it’s efficient, but it’s also standard business practice). It’s about doing things in such a way that you create some loyalty to your products, hopefully to your brand, and you create repeat customers–they like the predictable products and services, the business likes the predictable customers. Again, not all consumers want this, but there are enough of them to encourage companies to compete for their business.

Ever wonder why every Disney cartoon is between 75 and 83 minutes, includes jokes for the adults, subplots featuring furry woodland creatures or utensils found in the kitchen, has an evil villain with a goofy sidekick, a few famous celebrity voices, etc.? Coincidence, you say? Ever wonder why some music groups seem to stick with the same ‘sound,’ especially groups where actual musical talent might be in short supply, but where good marketing can be the difference between Britney Spears and The Shaggs? Predictability is often tied up with ‘branding.’ Corporations often market not the products they make these days, but their ‘brand.’ Disney sells ‘magic‘ and ‘family,’ for instance, and if it isn’t about magic and family, then they sell it under a different ‘brand’ (like Touchstone Pictures, or Miramax).