Resources:
Food, Inc. Movie
This website is for the movie that came out in 2009 called Food, Inc. Over the summer, I was able to watch the movie and learned a lot about where fast food chains get their food products and what issues there are around the topic. It was very eye opening and hopefully other viewers felt the same way. The website conveniently provides more information about the issues, how to get involved, and further sources to look at for information.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Franchising
When looking at the advantages and disadvantages of franchises, this website was helpful with providing straight-forward information. I also like how it was laid out with all the different aspects that go into a franchise and all the important things the company, owner, and even the workers care about.

Franchising and Globalization
For my first blog post, I gave a semi-brief overview of franchising and fast-food restaurants around the world. It provided some insight on reasons why the franchise idea is so successful and what it does to make the most profit. One thing that not many people realize is that even though the franchise industry has grown very fast, it does provide hundreds of thousands of jobs for people (including myself at the moment!) all over the world, and this helps our economy. I also liked how it talked a little bit about the future of franchises and what direction they are expected to go in the future.

McDonals Globalization and Culture
McDonald’s is one of the most famous fast-food franchise restaurants in the world. This website provided information about the globalization of the McDonald’s company and how much it has grown. One big step for not only McDonalds, but all franchises, is the expansion outside of their “home” country. The article talks about how the public and general economy reacted when McDonalds went global and grew to the popularity that it has today.


Food Franchises
I thought this website was useful for two reasons. First off, it gave me some background information about how McDonalds went from being a small chain of restaurants to an actual franchise. It also talked about the history of franchising as a whole and how the idea of became so successful in the United States and other countries.


Globalization vs Local Culture
In this shorter article, there was more of a personalized feel as to how fast-food restaurants have affected various cultures. The author talks about how she went to India and watched how the American culture influenced small changes in other countries. When various American franchises expanded outside the United States, the different cultures began to catch on to the fast-food market and showed interest in these popular chains growing around their cities. I thought this was interesting to read a real account of what these people thought of the franchises.


Fast Food Restaurant
This website concentrated on the history of fast-food, even dating back to the Middle Ages in Europe. Obviously, the idea of fast and convenient food has been around for centuries, but it was interesting to see the development from local street vendors to enormous fast-food chain restaurants like we have throughout our cities today. It also touched on some of the issues that franchises have to deal with, like health problems, labor violations, and how much they are present in our society.


The Globalization of McDonaldization
The article on this website focuses on the globalization of McDonalds and what tactics the company uses to increase profit. It mentions four ways that McDonalds (and I’m assuming other franchises) uses to structure their business around. They are efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. These four aspects are helpful for my topic because I could look into them and see how each company factors these elements into their business, and why exactly they are so successful.

Subway's Healthy Food?
In our society today, the theme of eating health any losing weight has become very popular. This, however, is not a good trend for fast-food restaurants, which tend to sell unhealthy, deep-fried, and heavily processed food. I thought this was helpful because it talks about one aspect that the companies try not to broadcast much, but is still a big issue. Recently, these companies have come out with menu options and ad campaigns to keep their sales strong. What many people may not know though is that the “healthy” options might not be as healthy as they think.

A New Fast-Food Invasion
This Time magazine article is about how fast-food restaurants have exploded in out of the United States and into other countries. When this happens, it inspires other business men and women to open up their own fast-food restaurant because they see how successful other restaurants are. However, this idea just adds to the problem of globalization and the number of franchise chains there are all over the world. I could use this source to add support to the idea of how the globalization of franchises has affected different communities around the world.

The Dominance of Western Fast Food
On this website, there is a collection of three articles specifically on how fast food chains have influenced the Asian culture. Before there was much globalization, Asia didn’t see very many restaurants with American food. This spread of franchises has had a large impact on their culture and the type of food they eat today. I think it is a valuable source because it is looking at globalization of restaurants from another country’s point of view.


Globalization and Culture
What I liked about this article is how it explains the convenience that fast food restaurants provide for their customers so they can get their food, fast. The concept is something that sit-down restaurants usually can’t provide, and when families are running around going from point A to point B, a drive-thru restaurant is the perfect solution to getting a meal or snack.

Fast Food
I used this website page to get some general information about fast food restaurants, their history, the overall idea of fast food, and criticisms of it. At the bottom of the page, it also provided additional links that could add more sources for my final project. I felt that the article page was well written and the information was correct, despite the fact that it is from Wikipedia.

The History of Franchising
As the title suggests, this article is about the history of franchising. It is a little weird to think about the fact that there will probably never be a day where there are no franchise restaurants. I found this article useful because it did a good job of laying out the course fast food restaurants followed in the past two hundred years and how they came to be where they are today.


Fast Food's Hidden Dangers
I thought this webpage did a good job of talking about some of the controversial issues with the fast food industry. Health problems, the safety of meat packaging factories, and food poisoning are all very present problems in our world today. It is very important to make sure these issues are known and the right information is out there, because as fast food companies grow bigger and bigger, so do the problems. These companies will do anything they can to not expose negative information that could possibly cause them to lose business.