270 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
always lose customers quickly. What is new about call centers—and fast
food chains, supermarkets, and home and garden centers, just to name
a few—is the ever-present demand for “friendliness on schedule,” the
need to control emotions in keeping with tightly scheduled and timed
workfl ows, brief breaks, and standardized performance checks.
Yet the digital revolution is only one of the many factors that have been
changing the world of work in the service sector at a fundamental level.
For example, digitalization was accompanied by long-term sociopolitical
trends, such as increases in vacation time, alongside rising income levels.
These, in turn, have led to rapid growth in the signifi cance of the “tourist
industry.”^71 In the land of the “world travel champions,” the number of
travel agencies jumped from 3,120 in 1970 to 9,500 in 1980, climbing up
to 13,200 in 1990. This fi gure hit a peak in Germany in 1994 with 17,500
travel agencies, not including side businesses.^72 The fact that these num-
bers fell just as quickly from 14,235 in 2002 to 9,729 in 2013, however,
has much more to do with an Internet trend:^73 travel agents are becoming
redundant because it has become much easier for consumers to system-
atically search and book the best value for their money using “data high-
ways” that provide direct access to the deals off ered by “providers” (i.e.,
package tour companies, airlines, hotels, etc.).
Globalization also stirred up a number of areas within the tertiary
sector, forcing German companies to make changes in order to keep up
with the multinational corporations dominating the market. One example
of this is the industrialization of the restaurant business thanks to fast-
food chains, and McDonald’s in particular, since 1971. McDonald’s-style
gastronomy relies on modern technology: large-size and easy-to-use
freezers, refrigerators, and cooking equipment, plus the corresponding
logistics, manufacturing, transport, storage, and preparation systems. Yet
one of the defi ning characteristics of these self-service restaurants is, as
Stephan Voswinkel puts it, the “modifi ed adaptation of the Fordist model
of production to the particular demands of interactive service.”^74
The McDonald’s-style model of production rested on four pillars, or
“MACs” (the ironic abbreviation for “minimal and calculable”). As the
fi rst Big MAC, “McSkill” represents the separation between the planning
and instruction side of work and the actual execution of tasks in a classic
Taylorist manner. It also covers the external preparation of foods outside
of the actual restaurants. Cooking equipment dominates the production
workfl ows in McDonald’s restaurants, and the individual steps required
to use this equipment and prepare food have been simplifi ed so that un-
skilled workers are capable of using it all. As a result, McDonald’s does
not need to employ trained cooks. Furthermore, audio and visual signals
make it easy for employees to follow the diff erent warming and grill-