'Fast Food Culture' Promotes Impatience

In 1960 McDonald's operated 200 restaurants. By 2012 they had 31,000 restaurants. In 2012 there were more than a quarter-million fast-food restaurants in America, and on any given day one in four Americans will eat at least one meal at a fast-food restaurant. For many people around the world fast-food symbolises speed, efficiency, and convenience.
Sanford DeVoe, a researcher at the University of Toronto, wanted to explore if our "fast-food culture" was changing our lives in ways beyond just our eating habits. So DeVoe and another colleague conducted a series of experiments in which researchers subliminally flashed corporate logos for McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King, Subway, and Wendy's. A control group saw other images but no fast-food logos. When the two groups were asked to do an unrelated task, the fast-food group tried to complete it much faster than the non-fast-food group. In another experiment, flashes of fast-food images made students less able to sit back and enjoy music. A third experiment found that people exposed to fast-food logos showed a greater reluctance for saving.
Based on these experiments, DeVoe has concluded that fast food helps us save time, but even just thinking about fast food restaurants make us live with more speed and less patience. DeVoe said, "Fast food culture … doesn't just change the way we eat but it can also fundamentally alter the way we experience our time."
DeVoe claims that the impatience promoted by our fast-food culture and mindset "stops us from smelling the roses."

Frank Partnoy, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (Public Affairs, 2012), pp. 55-58;

Science Daily, "Exposure to Fast Food Can Make Us Impatient," (26 March 2010)