Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,18

at speakeasies during Prohibition, and selling kitchen and restaurant supplies. “The mental picture of eight Multimixers churning out forty shakes at one time was just too much to be believed,” Kroc wrote in Grinding It Out, his mind-blowing autobiography and a seminal monograph about twentieth-century capitalism. Kroc arrived at the McDonald’s desert mirage at the western end of Route 66, saw the crowds amassed, heard that Multimixer octet playing its scherzo, and was duly delivered.

Kroc quickly understood that the platoon of shake machines was just one part of a total efficiency equation. Dick and Mac McDonald, the sons of a shoe-factory foreman, had struck out for California from New Hampshire to try to make it in the entertainment business and ended up producing a food-service revolution instead. In 1940, the two opened a barbecue drive-in that, like many others of the time, featured a full staff with carhops and an outdoor counter and served about two dozen items, including pulled pork and hamburgers. McDonald’s Barbeque did well, yet it caused endless headaches. The carhops made the stand an attractive hangout for teenage boys, who idled endlessly, scared off families, and tended to disappear with the cups and plates and utensils. In 1948, in an audacious turn, the two brothers shut down their profitable shop for three months, meticulously reschemed the basics of their operations by diagramming them on a tennis court, and reopened as a highly efficient enterprise the likes of which the food industry had never before seen. Gone were the conventions of the standard drive-ins of the era with their young carhops in short skirts and majorette boots delivering trays of food to curbs. Instead, their stand had a no-frills, Levittown-inspired assembly-line operation to befit the “age of jet propulsion,” as one brother put it, where just nine items were made quickly and well. The Speedee Service System featured two custom-built six-foot-long stainless steel grills, each twice as long as anything available on the market. The Multimixers came with modified paddles that allowed milkshakes to be whipped directly in their paper cups, and a house-commissioned steel lazy Susan facilitated the whirlwind dressing of twenty-four burger buns with condiments. More impressive yet, Dick McDonald had gone undercover as a fake reporter to visit candy companies on a mission to track down a machine that could dispense perfect-sized patties (beef instead of peppermint paste) with the easy pull of a lever.

The burger stand that Kroc ogled in 1954 had dusted the efficient, mechanized Fordism of industrial Midwestern factories with a little Hollywood magic. The food, prepared in a glass-encased visible kitchen that transfixed young onlookers, was kept warm with infrared lights, which worked better than heat lamps. Meals were served in disposable packaging through a window; there were no utensils, no dirty dishes, no malingerers, no delays. In addition to rapid-fire service, McDonald’s offered a much more digestible price for a new customer base: members of the burgeoning middle class and their burgeoning families.

“The kids loved coming to the counter,” recalled Art Bender, who worked the original McDonald’s counter and later became a franchisee. “They would come with two bits in their fists and order a hamburger and a Coke. They could still see Mama in the car, but they also could feel independent. Pretty soon, it sinks in that this is great for the business, this is important.” It was also important that a fifteen-cent McDonald’s burger cost about half of what an average diner burger did, and as Kroc witnessed firsthand, the stand attracted bigger and more diverse crowds, who lined up, got their orders quickly, and went on their way. (In an echo of White Castle, the first McDonald’s neon marquee even bore the motto BUY ’M BY THE BAG.)

National dining habits were among the many norms to be altered by the thundering US economy and car culture. In 1958, just as the new highways were rolling out, the service industry overtook manufacturing as the country’s largest economic sector. Dining out, once the exclusive habit of the rich, slowly democratized. “Kroc saw immediately that the prime customers were families, young couples, a little unsure of themselves, often with children in tow,” David Halberstam noted in his book The Fifties. “They were comfortable at McDonald’s as they might not have been at a more traditional restaurant.… It was an inexpensive, easy night out for the family. In the early days a family of four could eat at McDonald’s for about $2.50.”

Dick and Mac McDonald were more or less