Fast Food Nation Ch 2

The fast food industry focused its advertising on children for several reasons, including the fact that children are extremely impressionable, a child can become a lifelong customer, and children bring in their family, which also creates profits for the companies. Kids are extremely impressionable, so it would be much easier to make a child believe that the food these companies are selling healthy food, rather than an adult; but more importantly, the kids believe that McDonalds or Burger King are fun places to go. Perhaps the most powerful and most important reasons why fast food corporations target advertising on children is the fact that by doing so, they can create life long customers (and then these life-long customers will bring their kids in, and so on and so forth). Another very important aspect of this child advertising is that it brings in the parents, who have the money, and who will also probably buy something. It may not be morally right to focus advertising on children, but that is not the basis of the capitalistic economy we live in, especially not the basis of the fast food economy. It would be great if the biggest complaint that the consumer would have on the fast food industry was the fact that it advertised directly to children, but in caparison to the health problems that fast food consumption creates, advertising targeted at children does not seem as concerning.