Read Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World Online
Authors: Eric Schlosser
Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (9 page)
The new corporate partnerships often put school officials in an awkward position. The Coca-Cola deal that DD Marketing negotiated
for Colorado Springs School District 11 was not as lucrative as it first seemed. The contract specified annual sales quotas. School District 11 was obligated to sell at least seventy thousand cases of Coca-Cola products a year, within the first three years of the contract, or it would face reduced payments by Coke. During the 1997–98 school year, the district’s elementary, middle, and high schools sold only twenty-one thousand cases of Coca-Cola products. Cara DeGette, the news editor of the
Colorado Springs Independent
, a weekly newspaper, obtained a memorandum sent to school principals by John Bushey, a District 11 administrator. On September 28, 1998, at the start of the new school year, Bushey warned the principals that beverage sales were falling short of projections and that as a result school revenues might be affected. Allow students to bring Coke products into the classrooms, he suggested; move Coke machines to places where they would be accessible to students all day. “Research shows that vendor purchases are closely linked to availability,” Bushey wrote. “Location, location, location is the key.” If the principals felt uncomfortable allowing kids to drink Coca-Cola during class, he recommended letting them drink the fruit juices, teas, and bottled waters also sold in the Coke machines. At the end of the memo, John Bushey signed his name and then identified himself as “the Coke dude.”
Bushey left Colorado Springs in 2000 and moved to Florida. He is now the principal of the high school in Celebration, a planned community run by The Celebration Company, a subsidiary of Disney.
T
HE VIEW OF COLORADO SPRINGS
from Gold Camp Road is spectacular. The old road takes you from the city limits to Cripple Creek, once a gold mining town with real outlaws, now an outpost of casino gambling full of one-armed bandits and day-trippers from Aurora. The tourist buses drive to Cripple Creek on Highway 67, which is paved. Gold Camp Road is a dirt road through the foothills of Pikes Peak, a former wagon trail that has narrow hairpin turns, no guardrails, and plenty of sheer drops. For years, kids from Cheyenne Mountain High School have come up here on weekend nights, parked at spots with good aerial views, and partied. On a clear night the stars in the sky and the lights of the city seem linked, as though one were reflecting the other. The cars and trucks on Interstate 25, heading north to Denver and south toward Pueblo, are tiny, slow-moving specks of white. The lights dwindle as the city gives way to the plains; at the horizon the land looks darker than the sky. The great beauty of this scene is diminished when the sun rises and you can clearly see what’s happening down below.
Driving through the neighborhoods of Colorado Springs often seems like passing through layers of sedimentary rock, each one providing a snapshot of a different historical era. Downtown Colorado Springs still has an old-fashioned, independent spirit. Aside from a Kinko’s, a Bruegger’s Bagel Bakery, a Subway, and a couple of Starbucks, there are no chain stores, not a single Gap in sight. An eclectic mixture of locally owned businesses line Tejon Street, the main drag. The Chinook Bookshop, toward the north end, is as fiercely independent as they come — the sort of literate and civilized bookstore going out of business nationwide. Further down Tejon there’s an ice cream parlor named Michelle’s that has been in business for almost fifty
years and, around the corner, there’s a western wear shop called Lorig’s that’s outfitted local ranchers since 1932. An old movie palace, nicknamed “the Peak” and renovated with lots of neon, has a funky charm that could never be mass produced. But when you leave downtown and drive northeast, you head toward a whole new world.
The north end of the city near Colorado College is full of old Victorian houses and Mission-style bungalows from the early part of this century. Then come Spanish-style and adobe houses that were popular between the world wars. Then come split-level colonials and ranch-style houses from the
Leave It to Beaver
era, small, modest, cheery homes.
Once you hit Academy Boulevard, you are surrounded by the hard, tangible evidence of what has happened in Colorado during the last twenty years. Immense subdivisions with names like Sagewood, Summerfield, and Fairfax Ridge blanket the land, thousands upon thousands of nearly identical houses — the architectural equivalent of fast food — covering the prairie without the slightest respect for its natural forms, built on hilltops and ridgetops, just begging for a lightning strike, ringed by gates and brick walls and puny, newly planted trees that bend in the wind. The houses seem not to have been constructed by hand but manufactured by some gigantic machine, cast in the same mold and somehow dropped here fully made. You can easily get lost in these new subdivisions, lost for hours passing from Nor’wood, to Briargate, to Stetson Hills, from Antelope Meadows to Chapel Ridge, without ever finding anything of significance to differentiate one block from another — except their numbers. Roads end without warning, and sidewalks run straight into the prairie, blocked by tall, wild grasses that have not yet been turned into lawns.
Academy Boulevard lies at the heart of the new sprawl, serving as its main north-south artery. Every few miles, clusters of fast food joints seem to repeat themselves, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, Subways, Pizza Huts, and Taco Bells, they keep appearing along the road, the same buildings and signage replaying like a tape loop. You can drive for twenty minutes, pass another fast food cluster, and feel like you’ve gotten nowhere. In the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the evening rush hour, when the cars and the pavement and the strip malls are bathed in twilight, when the mountains in the distance are momentarily obscured, Academy Boulevard looks just like Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, except newer. It looks like countless other retail
strips in Orange County — and the resemblance is hardly coincidental.
THE NEW HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS
in Colorado Springs not only resemble those of southern California, they are inhabited by thousands of people who’ve recently left California. An entire way of life, along with its economic underpinnings, has been transposed from the West Coast to the Rockies. Since the early 1990s Colorado Springs has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. The mountains, clear air, wide-open spaces, and unusually mild climate have drawn people tired of the traffic, crime, and pollution elsewhere. About a third of the city’s inhabitants have lived there less than five years. In many ways Colorado Springs today is what Los Angeles was fifty years ago — a mecca for the disenchanted middle class, a harbinger of cultural trends, a glimpse of the future. Since 1970 the population of the Colorado Springs metropolitan area has more than doubled, reaching about half a million. The city is now an exemplar of low-density sprawl. Denver’s population is about four times larger, and yet Colorado Springs covers more land.
Much like Los Angeles, Colorado Springs was a sleepy tourist town in the early part of the twentieth century, an enclave of wealthy invalids and retirees, surrounded by ranchland. Nicknamed “Little London,” the city was a playground for the offspring of eastern financiers, penniless aristocrats, and miners who’d struck it rich in Cripple Creek. The town’s leading attractions were the Broadmoor Hotel and the Garden of the Gods, an assortment of large rock formations. During the Great Depression, tourism plummeted, people moved away, and about one-fifth of the city’s housing sat vacant. The outbreak of World War II provided a great economic opportunity. Like Los Angeles, Colorado Springs soon became dependent on military spending. The opening of Camp Carson and Peterson Army Air Base brought thou-sands of troops to the area, along with a direct capital investment of $30 million and an annual payroll of twice that amount. After the war, Colorado Springs gained a series of new military bases, thanks to its strategic location (midcontinent, beyond the range of Soviet bombers), its fine weather, and the friendships formed between local businessmen
and air force officers at the Broadmoor. In 1951, the Air Defense Command moved to the city, eventually becoming the North American Aerospace Command, with its outpost deep within Cheyenne Mountain. Three years later, 18,000 acres north of town were chosen as the site of the new Air Force Academy. The number of army and air force personnel stationed in Colorado Springs subsequently grew to be larger than the city’s entire population before World War II.
Although the local economy is far more diversified today, nearly half the jobs in Colorado Springs still depend upon military spending. During the 1990s, while major bases were being shut down across the country, new facilities kept opening in Colorado Springs. Much of the Star Wars antimissile defense system is being designed and tested at Schriever Air Force Base, a dozen miles east of the city. And Peterson Air Force Base now houses one of America’s newest and most high-tech units — the Space Command. It launches, operates, and defends America’s military satellites. It tests, maintains, and upgrades the nation’s ballistic missiles. And it guides research on exotic space-based weaponry to attack enemy satellites, aircraft, and even targets on the ground. Officers at the Space Command believe that before long the United States will fight its first war in space. Should that day ever come, Colorado Springs will be at the center of the action. The motto of a local air force unit promises a new kind of American firepower: “In Your Face from Outer Space.”
The presence of these high-tech military installations attracted defense contractors to Colorado Springs, mainly from California. Kaman Services arrived in 1957. Hewlett Packard followed in 1962. TRW, a southern California firm, opened its first Colorado Springs branch in 1968. Litton Data Systems moved one of its divisions from Van Nuys, California, to Colorado Springs in 1976. Not long afterward Ford Aerospace sold ten acres of land in Orange County and used the money to buy three hundred acres in Colorado Springs. Today a long list of defense contractors does business in the city. The advanced communications networks installed to serve those companies and the military have drawn computer chip manufacturers, telemarketers, and software companies to Colorado Springs. The quality of life is a big selling point, along with the well-educated workforce and the local attitudes toward labor. A publication distributed by the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce notes that in the city’s private industry, the rate of union membership stands at 0.0 percent. Colorado
Springs now views itself as a place on the cutting edge, the high-tech capital of the Rockies. Business leaders promote the town with nicknames like “Silicon Mountain,” “Space Mountain,” and “The Space Capital of the Free World.”
The new businesses and residents from southern California brought a new set of attitudes. In 1946, R. C. Hoiles, the owner of the
Orange County Register
and later the founder of the Freedom Newspaper chain, purchased the largest daily newspaper in Colorado Springs, the
Gazette-Telegraph
. Hoiles was politically conservative, a champion of competition and free enterprise; his editorials had attacked Herbert Hoover for being too left-wing. In the 1980s the Freedom Newspaper chain purchased the
Gazette’s
only rival in town, the
Colorado Springs Sun
, a struggling paper with a more liberal outlook. After buying the
Sun
, Freedom Newspapers fired all its employees and shut it down. In 1990, James Dobson decided to move Focus on the Family, a religious organization, from the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona to Colorado Springs. Dobson is a child psychologist and radio personality as well as the author of a best-selling guide for parents,
Dare to Discipline
(1970). He blames weak parents for the excesses of the sixties youth counterculture, advocates spanking disobedient children with a “neutral object,” and says that parents must convey to preschoolers two fundamental messages: “(1) I love you, little one, more than you can possibly understand… (2) Because I love you so much, I must teach you to obey me.” Although less well known than Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Dobson’s Focus on the Family generates much larger annual revenues.
The arrival of Focus on the Family helped turn Colorado Springs into a magnet for evangelical Christian groups. The city had always been more conservative than Denver, but that conservatism was usually expressed in the sort of live-and-let-live attitude common in the American West. During the early 1990s, religious groups in Colorado Springs became outspoken opponents of feminism, homosexuality, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. The city became the headquarters for roughly sixty religious organizations, some of them large, some of them painfully obscure. Members and supporters of the International Bible Society, the Christian Booksellers Association, the World Radio Missionary Fellowship, Young Life, the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, and World Christian Incorporated, among others, settled in Colorado Springs.
Today there is not a single elected official in Colorado Springs — or
in El Paso County, the surrounding jurisdiction — who’s a registered Democrat. Indeed, the Democratic Party did not even run a candidate for Congress there in 2000. The political changes that have lately swept through the city have also taken place, in a less extreme form, throughout the Rocky Mountain West. A generation ago, the region was one of the most liberal in the country. In 1972, all of the governors in the eight mountain states — Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, even Idaho and Utah — were Democrats. By 1998, all of the governors in these states were Republicans, as were three-quarters of the U.S. senators. The region is now more staunchly Republican than the American South.
As in Colorado Springs, the huge influx of white, middle-class voters from southern California has played a decisive role in the Rocky Mountain West’s shift to the right. During the early 1990s, for the first time in California history, more people moved out of the state than into it. Between 1990 and 1995, approximately one million people left southern California, many of them heading to the mountain states. William H. Frey, a former professor of demography at the University of Michigan, has called this migration “the new white flight.” In 1998, the white population of California fell below 50 percent for the first time since the Gold Rush. The exodus of whites has changed California’s political equation as well, turning the birthplace of the Reagan Revolution into one of the nation’s most solidly Democratic states.
Many of the problems that caused white, middle-class families to leave southern California are now appearing in the Rocky Mountain states. During the early 1990s, about 100,000 people moved to Colorado every year. But spending on government services did not increase at a corresponding rate — because Colorado voters enacted a Taxpayers Bill of Rights in 1992 that placed strict limits on new government spending. The initiative was modeled after California’s Proposition 13 and championed by Douglas Bruce, a Colorado Springs landlord who’d recently arrived from Los Angeles. By the late 1990s, Colorado’s spending on education ranked forty-ninth in the nation; fire departments throughout the state were understaffed; and parts of Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs were clogged with three times the number of cars that the highway was designed to hold. Meanwhile, the state government had an annual surplus of about $700 million that by law could not be used to solve any of these problems. The development along Colorado’s Front Range is not yet as all-encompassing as the sprawl of Los Angeles — where one-third of the surface area is
now covered by freeways, roads, and parking lots — but someday it may be.
Colorado Springs now has the feel of a city whose identity is not yet fixed. Many longtime residents strongly oppose the extremism of the newcomers, sporting bumper stickers that say, “Don’t Californicate Colorado.” The city is now torn between opposing visions of what America should be. Colorado Springs has twenty-eight Charismatic Christian churches and almost twice as many pawnbrokers, a Lord’s Vineyard Bookstore and a First Amendment Adult Bookstore, a Christian Medical and Dental Society and a Holey Rollers Tattoo Parlor. It has a Christian summer camp whose founder, David Noebel, outlined the dangers of rock ’n’ roll in his pamphlet
Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles
. It has a gay entertainment complex called The Hide & Seek, where the Gay Rodeo Association meets. It has a public school principal who recently disciplined a group of sixth-grade girls for reading a book on witchcraft and allegedly casting spells. The loopiness once associated with Los Angeles has come full-blown to Colorado Springs — the strange, creative energy that crops up where the future’s consciously being made, where people walk the fine line separating a visionary from a total nutcase. At the start of a new century, all sorts of things seem possible there. The cultural and the physical landscapes of Colorado Springs are up for grabs.
Despite all the talk in Colorado about aerospace, biotech, computer software, telecommunications, and other industries of the future, the largest private employer in the state today is the restaurant industry. In Colorado Springs, the restaurant industry has grown much faster than the population. Over the last three decades the number of restaurants has increased fivefold. The number of chain restaurants has increased tenfold. In 1967, Colorado Springs had a total of twenty chain restaurants. Now it has twenty-one McDonald’s.
The fast food chains feed off the sprawl of Colorado Springs, accelerate it, and help set its visual tone. They build large signs to attract motorists and look at cars the way predators view herds of prey. The chains thrive on traffic, lots of it, and put new restaurants at intersections where traffic is likely to increase, where development is heading but real estate prices are still low. Fast food restaurants often serve as the shock troops of sprawl, landing early and pointing the way. Some chains prefer to play follow the leader: when a new McDonald’s opens, other fast food restaurants soon open nearby on the assumption that it must be a good location.
Regardless of the billions spent on marketing and promotion, all the ads on radio and TV, all the efforts to create brand loyalty, the major chains must live with the unsettling fact that more than 70 percent of fast food visits are “impulsive.” The decision to stop for fast food is made on the spur of the moment, without much thought. The vast majority of customers do not set out to eat at a Burger King, a Wendy’s, or a McDonald’s. Often, they’re not even planning to stop for food – until they see a sign, a familiar building, a set of golden arches. Fast food, like the tabloids at a supermarket checkout, is an impulse buy. In order to succeed, fast food restaurants must be seen.
The McDonald’s Corporation has perfected the art of restaurant site selection. In the early days Ray Kroc flew in a Cessna to find schools, aiming to put new restaurants nearby. McDonald’s later used helicopters to assess regional growth patterns, looking for cheap land along highways and roads that would lie at the heart of future suburbs. In the 1980s, the chain become one of the world’s leading purchasers of commercial satellite photography, using it to predict sprawl from outer space. McDonald’s later developed a computer software program called Quintillion that automated its site-selection process, combining satellite imagery with detailed maps, demographic information, CAD drawings, and sales information from existing stores. “Geographic information systems” like Quintillion are now routinely used as site-selection tools by fast food chains and other retailers. As one marketing publication observed, the software developed by Mc-Donald’s permits businessmen to “spy on their customers with the same equipment once used to fight the cold war.”
The McDonald’s Corporation has used Colorado Springs as a test site for other types of restaurant technology, for software and machines designed to cut labor costs and serve fast food even faster. Steve Bigari, who owns five local McDonald’s, showed me the new contraptions at his place on Constitution Avenue. It was a rounded, postmodern McDonald’s on the eastern edge of the city. The drive-through lanes had automatic sensors buried in the asphalt to monitor the traffic. Robotic drink machines selected the proper cups, filled them with ice, and then filled them with soda. Dispensers powered by compressed carbon dioxide shot out uniform spurts of ketchup and mustard. An elaborate unit emptied frozen french fries from a white plastic bin into wire-mesh baskets for frying, lowered the baskets into hot oil, lifted them a few minutes later and gave them a brief shake, put them back into the oil until the fries were perfectly cooked, and
then dumped the fries underneath heat lamps, crisp and ready to be served. Television monitors in the kitchen instantly displayed the customer’s order. And advanced computer software essentially ran the kitchen, assigning tasks to various workers for maximum efficiency, predicting future orders on the basis of ongoing customer flow.