ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates that working the grill at McDonald's has also been automated in some restaurants. The distinction, according to social researchers who have examined fast food labor, is spatial and it divides the front and the back of the restaurant. The automation of preparing food redefines what cooks do and shifts on-site managers' emphasis from the back of the restaurant to the front. The computerized register, increasingly found in fast food restaurants, is one of the most important technological developments in the fast food restaurant since its widespread use in the early 1990s. The nontechnical social skills required for customer-service jobs are subsequently devalued because: of their low wages and because women disproportionately occupy them. Technology plays a role in reinforcing the gender division of labor, which is based on gender and job standards, within the restaurant organization.
