nsumers “freedom is about the choice between greater and lesser satisfactions and rationality is about choosing the first rather than the second” (Smith, 1999: 107), they become the prisoners of consumption and they are manipulated to accept their “roles as happy consumers” (ibid: 30) through advertisements which greet you from “the moment you can blink at a television screen” (ibid: 157).

In his book The McDonaldization Thesis. Explorations and Extensions, George Ritzer comments upon the irrationalities involved in the “McDonaldization” of society. This process cannot be stopped “as long as there are material interests that push it and stand to benefit from its expansion” (Ritzer, 1998: 6). Ritzer relates McDonaldization to the “compulsion to act in a functionally rational matter” (ibid: 23) and underlines the fact that in “a McDonaldized society the majority of workers are accustomed to being told what to do and begin to lose the ability to interpret situations for themselves” (ibid: 24). The irrationalities of “McDonaldization” have to do with the customers, but also with the workers. Beside the customers, “the McDonaldization of the larger society has, in turn, served to further rationalize the work world” (ibid: 60). The term employed to describe this situation is “McJobs”. These jobs “lead to a variety of irrationalities, especially the dehumanization of work” (ibid) because the tasks required are predictable and the workers need only to perform them as quickly as possible. Another reason is the fact that technology is employed to control all the actions and the people who work become robot-like because of the continuous repetition of the tasks. The employees of this kind of systems do not have possibility to maintain a real conversation, because they deal with “scripted interaction” (ibid: 63).

Another 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.