These general characteristics represent very broad features which are to a greater or lesser extent reflected across Westernised societies. It comes as no surprise that perhaps they are most evident in the United States, the powerhouse of multinational corporate thinking. George Ritzer (1993), an American social scientist, has also further identified tendencies in what he calls the “McDonaldisation of society” in the United States – the manner in which the logic, priorities and modes of organisation of the world’s biggest hamburger chain are gradually colonising other areas of social life. Specifically, Ritzer suggests a number of aspects which define McDonald’s approach to business and human interaction. McDonald’s, he argues, is characterised by a very high degree of control – he speaks of a “caged society” where efficiency and total predictability are key, such that a McDonald’s is a McDonald’s wherever you are in the world. To this end, every action in McDonald’s is routinised and scripted. Service assistants, for example, are only permitted to use specific formulaic utterances in their dealings with customers. In consequence, all interactions are standardised and dehumanised. The product, also, is fully standardised and controlled, with very little room for human “error” in producing a non-standard, non-McDonald’s conforming hamburger. And since hamburgers themselves are largely unremarkable products, it is not the hamburger that is sold but a packaged experience, an experience of fun and entertainment in going into a branch of Mcdonald’s.