fact that the “consumer society has achieved a previously unimaginable feat: it reconciled the reality and pleasure principles by putting, so to speak, the thief in charge of the treasure” (Bauman, 2001: 16). To explain this strategy it is worth mentioning George Ritzer’s “McDonaldization” process which refers to “an increase in efficiency, predictability and control” (Ritzer, 1998: 3) in the functioning systems of society. The model is taken from the American chain of McDonald’s fast food restaurants and their organizing principles. This process is connected with rationalization, which is the replacement of values, traditions, emotions with thoughts and actions which appear to be more rational. The rationalization process can be related to Max Weber’s concept of “iron cage” which refers to the amount of constraints that a materialistic society imposes on individuals and they accept all these constraints in order to receive the false happiness of possession and consumption. Because for the consumers “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