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Fast Food in America

I was driving in the car today and started talking with some friends about the convience of fast food restaurants.

According to one of my friends, the mother of a two year old, fast food becomes much more attractive once you have a child. Conveinience, speed, and overall less hassle for the parent. She also mentioned how her son didn’t always eat what was bought for him - much different than those who grew up with relatively little eating out and thought it a treat every time they did go out.

This got me thinking, though, about how fast food is marketed. Do restaurants like McDonald’s market themselves to parents as a good place to bring their kids? Or directly to kids so they tell their parents they want to eat McD’s?

The question was answered for me when my friend said that her son, just barely two years old, would hum the McDonald’s jingle when they passed a McDonald’s in the car. How did a kid who can barely speak know to hum the jingle to a fast food restaurant. (When this first happened, he had only eaten there twice.) The answer: McDonald’s support Sesame Street, and shows one commercial at the begging of the show and one at the end. The son watched Sesame Street every day.

Can there be any doubt that marketers know exactly what they’re doing?

Of course, this doesn’t even get into things like the upcoming movie Supersize Me (trailer on apple.com) or an article from Harvard magazine called The Way We Eat Now. Though the article is quite long, it is a great read to see America’s eating habits laid out for us.