irrationality connected to “McDonaldized systems” is the fact that the consumers do most of the time work that is not paid. The explanation comes from the fact that when you go in a fast food restaurant you automatically take a platter and you go to say what you want to eat. After that you take your platter you look for a table. Using Karl Mannheim’s term, Ritzer connects customers with the process of “self-observation” which is explained as “self-transformation” (Ritzer, 1998: 27). The individuals “have transformed themselves so that they are pliable participants in these systems” (ibid: 28) and the worst thing is that they permit this to happen, “they give up their individuality” (ibid), they accept the products and the tasks they have to do in order to receive the commodities. In other words, “McDonaldization has brought the customer into the labor process: the customer is the laborer” (ibid: 65). A person that spent most of his life in this kind of system cannot realize what is really happening: he/she is trained every day to accept “an enchanted iron cage” from which “there is no escape, and worse, even any interest in escaping” (ibid: 67). The replacement of labor with consumption cannot be observed by people who have no other standards in their lives.

To sustain the existence of the mentioned irrationalities, Ritzer refers to the replacement of “need” by “wishes” and he employs Karl Mannheim’s term of “substantial irrationality”: “McDonaldized systems seek to manipulate the needs, desires and impulses, the substantial irrationality of customers, in order to get them to become devoted, if not habitual, consumers of their products and services” (ibid: 30). For the institutions of society whose organizing principles are based on rationality, discipline is very important and that is why one can say that they follow the model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, described by Michael Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975). In the Panopticon, as well as in a McDonaldized society, “rigorous discipline is imposed to make people follow the detailed rules imposed by those with power over them” (Smith, 1999: 29). The efficiency, predictability and control in this type of society are used to “hypnotize” the people through “the delights of consumerism” (ibid: 29). “The rationali