EE1 about American food culture

Yuan Zhou

WRIT-1133

Dr. Eric Leake

April 26th, 2012

Research on how convenience affect Americans. 

In this essay, I am going to incorporate and expand upon my short essay 2 and short essay 3. In my short essay 2, according to my research of coffee advertisement, I found that the American culture is about convenient. Based on different classes, there are different kinds of advertisement. I used two different brands of coffee, Nestle Instant coffee and Blue Mountain coffee, to do my research. In this research, Nestle Instant coffee is not an expensive coffee and can afford by working class people. Blue Mountain coffee is aristocrat of coffee and expensive, which means the Blue Mountain is offered for the minority. 

Because of lacking time to brew coffee, the working class people would prefer to buy instant coffee instead of buying coffee beans brewing by themselves, which would take lots of time. Time is the thing they very needed. In order to earn more money, they have to spent more time on their work but when they spent more time on their work, they have to be awake. Fortunately, the instant coffee solve this problem for them. Therefore, the advertisement of Nestle Instant coffee is very concise, and powerful. 

Why the advertisement of Nestle Instant coffee is very simple?

In the article, “Authenticity in American, Class Distinctions in Potato Chip Advertising”, Freedman and Jurafsky argues that the education is strongly associated with differences social class. As them said, “In addition to having fewer and shorter words, the inexpensive chips use more common words. Using a standard measure of word commonality based on how frequently the words occur in standard reference texts, we assigned each word on all the packages a frequency score.” (48) Because the Nestle Instant coffee is primarily face to working class people, its advertisement would be short and easy to be remember. 

The advertisement of Nestle Instant coffee shows that Americans are pay attention to convenience. For example, there are two slogans, “On the Go” and “Push and Open”, which are very concise and powerful in the advertisement of Nestle Instant coffee. These slogan would give people the first impression that the coffee is very convenient to drink during the busy day, which are also reflect the “fast and convenient” idea of the working class people. This kind of coffee has 7 packets in one package. It is save time for the working class people, because people can buy one package and have it for a week long. Every time they want to have some coffee, they just need to open the packet, put the instant coffee into hot water, and wait for a while. Moreover, people can take the coffee wherever they want, such as office and home. By contrast, if the working class people buy coffee beans to brew coffee, they would not have enough time, which is very important to them. People just need to put the instant coffee in water and wait for a while, then people would have a cup of coffee. Although this kind of coffee does not have the original taste and the smell of coffee, the instant coffee still have caffeine which can keep people awake. Because usually working class people have busy schedule and have stressful work, the instant coffee is very suitable for them. It is reflect the American culture, convenient and productive. 

In my short essay 3, according to my observation of customers behavior in Subway. I mentioned that convenience becomes the primary concern of Americans, because most of the customers are white-collar and blue-collar people, which means they are busy and on the go. Therefore, they prefer to go to Subway rather than other non fast food restaurant, because they can just wait for a minute and then take the food out of the Subway. Comparing with the food need long time to cook, the sandwich in Subway is very suitable for the working class people, because they are lacking time to wait for the food, which need long time to cook. In order to serve quickly, Subway had already cooked the food--- the meat ball, the beef and the chicken, and save them in a iron container heating them. 

Moreover, I observed that most costumer of Subway are likely to order a foot-long sandwich and then take out. I am very surprising at Americans can have a foot-long sandwich, because I and my friends usually only eat a 6-inch-long sandwich and would be full. Thus I asked 5 customers who order a foot-long sandwich and take the sandwich out of Subway. All of them said that they usually eat 6-inch-long sandwich, and the other 6-inch-long sandwich would be saved until next meal so that they can save time to work. They thought that when they got out of the office to buy food, they were wasting time. At this point, we can see Americans are weigh the convenience a lot, and they are hard-working people too. 

In addition, the costumers who prefer to take the sandwich out of Subway usually order the Lay’s potato chips, which are already be packaged. By contrast, the costumers who would like to stay in Subway did not like to order the Lay’s potato chips, maybe because the Lay’s potato chips are not fresh fried and are having higher price than other stores have. In other non fast food restaurants, such as Claim Jumper and Cheesecake Factory, the chips in there is fresh fried instead of already packaged. Because almost the customers in Subway were likely to take the food out of the restaurant, Subway offered the packaged chips instead of fresh fried chips, which would take a long time to make. In order to make customers feel convenient, Subway had a special way to attract customers. In Subway, when you order a sandwich, you should order the food from left to right, because the staff of Subway would make the sandwich while the customers are ordering the food. This kind of method cut down the prepare time of making sandwich. Most the customers like this method, because they can spent less time on food.