Fast Food

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Wendy Woloson

White Castle hamburgers were so tasty, affordable, and increasingly ubiquitous that there was a marked increase in beef production in addition to the mass consumption of hamburgers. As historian David Hogan has remarked, "White Castle advanced food production and distribution to the volume demanded by the expanding population, and it gave an American democracy an accessible, egalitarian, and standardized style of eating. It also supplied America with a distinctive ethnic symbol: people the world over now readily identify fast-food hamburgers as the food of Americans." By the end of the decade, White Castle had brought their burgers and cultural ethos to Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Chicago, and finally to the east coast in 1929, inspiring successful imitators wherever they went, and making "White Castle" almost a generic name for hamburgers by the end of the 1920s.

The hamburger fulfilled economic as well as cultural needs. During the Depression, affordable food like that found at the local hamburger stand was a godsend, especially to those who were unemployed; White Castle's hamburgers, for example, cost just five cents each until 1946, when the price doubled due to beef shortages caused by World War II. At the end of 1930, the company had sold over 21 million hamburgers; at the end of 1937, this number had increased to over 40 million.

Even though the first drive-in restaurant, Royce Hailey's Pig Stand in Dallas, Texas, was opened in 1921, it was not until nearly three decades later that the drive-in restaurant enjoyed a degree of success. Drive-ins, another fast food institution, celebrated the cultural importance of the automobile, allowing the car itself to be a dining room of sorts, from which people could order their food and eat it in the open air without having to unbuckle their seatbelts. "Car hops," as they were also called, became familiar congregation centers for teenagers as well.

At the same time, various businessmen, impressed by the enduring success of hamburger stands, especially White Castle, capitalized on these cultural shifts by developing sophisticated franchise operations to run new fast food companies. The franchise was a distinct business strategy that standardized not only the specific product sold, but the very institution that sold it. This form of organization exploited economies of scale and therefore was highly successful; as one entrepreneur remarked, there was "more money to be made selling hamburger stands than hamburgers."

Franchises were not unique to the 1950s; they had been around since the early decades of the twentieth century, patronized by a public increasingly used to and insistent upon the supposed reliability and trustworthiness of branded goods. White Castle was one of the first successful franchises, but was quickly followed by A & W Rootbeer in 1925, and Howard Johnson's, which began operations in 1935. But it took the ideals of postwar culture to wholly support the fast-food franchises and make many of them into companies worth billions of dollars. The idea of the franchise operation itself was attractive, melding otherwise conflicting postwar desires: after the War, the big business economy was a reiteration of American power; that this economy was made up of small businesses simultaneously expressed traditional American values.