Too Impatient to Smell the Roses: Exposure to Fast Food Brands Impedes Happiness

Innovative products and services offering convenience, speed, and temporal efficiency have brought remarkable changes to the use of time in our society. While we used to wait for weeks or months for letters to arrive, simultaneous global communication between individuals and groups for negligible cost is now only a few key strokes away. The processing of information is on a similar asymptotic trajectory approaching instantaneity: Sifting through piles of papers and books in libraries has largely been replaced by online search engines that deliver almost instant hits. This societal shift towards the instantaneous and the acceleration of activities with the explicit intention of saving time is infused into our very sustenance. Frozen prepared meals save us from having to spend time preparing food and the microwave saves us from having to wait for an oven to cook it. Better yet, fast food restaurants offer hot meals that can be picked up at drive-thru windows and are ready to be consumed on the go. We tested whether exposure to the ultimate symbols of an impatience culture—fast-food brands—undermined people’s ability to experience happiness from pleasurable visual and auditory stimuli. The essence of fast food is not what you eat (e.g., tacos, fried chicken, burgers, or pizza), but how you eat it. This is meaningfully conveyed by the manner in which fast food is served. Fast-food packaging facilitates temporal efficiency because there are no dishes to wash, no waiter to wait for, and portable containers make meals easier to eat while multitasking (i.e. in the car or at your desk). To demonstrate that the implicit effects of fast food occurs independent of the type of food, we examined whether the same food served in different packaging would interfere with people’s enjoyment of pleasant stimuli. Participants in the fast-food condition viewed pictures of food in ready-to-go branded packaging; whereas, participants in the control condition view the same food displayed on ceramic tableware).