Fast Food Workers

If you go around to most people and ask for their opinion of fast food work, most will tell you that it isn’t a real job. The general idea is that fast food jobs are meant for teenagers looking for spending money. Sometimes this is true, but after reading “Next Time Someone Says Fast Food Isn’t A Real Job, Remember This.” by Emily Cohn, I quickly realized that is frequently not the case. I chose this article because I have worked in the fast food industry for over a year and seen a variety of age groups working. The article brings together several studies to reinforce the idea that fast food is a legitimate job. In one of the studies, data was collected to see the percentage of fast food workers in each age group. The study concluded that “70 percent of fast food workers are 20 or older these days.”(Cohn) This is important when trying to generalize the average fast food worker. You begin to realize that most fast food workers are at that point in life that they have to support themselves. Not only that, the same study shows that “1 in 4 fast-food workers have a child.” Now we see that not only are they supporting themselves, but they are also supporting a child. Which is not an easy talk
From personal experience, I can say that fast food has a tendency to be more stressful than other jobs. You aren’t necessarily doing heavy labor, or mentally difficult labor. However, being on your feet, having to do fast, non-stop work for customers and managers that you can’t seem to please can be mentally tasking. Then after reading the article I noticed that fast-food work has an overall larger availability than other job fields. The article then continues to use factual evidence to prove this idea. Out of all of the jobs that have been added in the past four years, 44 percent of those have been for lower-wage jobs, which includes fast-food