Fast Food Nation ch1 analysis

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser begins with the story of Carl Karcher a businessman who made his success in the fast food industry. How Carl started as a mere hotdog salesman/bakery deliveryman and became the founder of the 4th largest burger chain in the United States. How he faced fierce competition and battled numerous lawsuits. It's a story that summons a great faith in the American way, that of hard work and a creative mind you too can be a successful entrepreneur. "He [Carl] kept his job at the bakery and hired two young men to work the [hotdog] cart during the hours he was delivering the bread", the concept itself is nice; you do honest work, raise enough money for a small business and hire some workers for someday they might start their own business with the money they made. It would be nice if this was how it worked but if the steps are analyzed thoroughly another perspective shows different light, after all monarchy is a great idea when you ask a king. Firstly, he is getting paid for work he simply isn't doing. I honestly don't know any other way to put it; he gets paid for other's work. The counter argument would be "Well John, Carl started the business he should be entitled to his rightful cut", so what strenuous work did Mr. Karcher do for the business to start it? So far he just had the idea of buying a hotdog cart. That's not an original idea by any means nor is him hiring workers, all of this has been done before. So his extra work for the business that Carl did amounts to about roughly zero. So why then is he making money off these men when the only thing that seperated Carl from the workers is the amount of money he had before hand?

Now for the second important tid-bit; that at one point Carl was in the same scenario as these two workers are in the story, he was as they say making honest pay from honest work. YES HE HAS! I'd say but that still doesn't make the situation any better, what we should be asking is why didn't Carl invest in opening a bakery instead? He has a fair amount of experience with it, he worked as a farm hand and has delivered baked goods, it's more insight than what he had for a hotdog business. This is why. The baked goods already had dominating businesses that the lonely Carl wouldn't have been able to compete with, whereas hotdog selling was only in competition with people who were on the same level as him. That’s a pretty sweet idea, you compete with others at the same level as you, but then of coarse someone will do something better and they will dominate that business. Then those who worked for Carl get better jobs and get more money and life is good, right? WRONG! The workers he used were of no use to Carl in a growing business they had no skills that were necessary for them to climb the latter, so assuming their jobs were safe they would have been given another lowly position just as they had before. This would probably make them want to leave that business just as Carl did to the bakery. But now what new thing can they go to? They can't just start a fast food joint, something they have some experience in, that as we know is dominated by Carl. Nor can they start a bakery, as time goes on these businesses dominate the given field and surely as the sun sets in the west each field will have a group of ruling corporations and there will be no room for an aspiring small business.