Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,19
content to stay on their well-oiled colony in San Berdoo, pulling down $100,000 a year in profits off fifteen-cent burgers and buying a new-model Cadillac each year. The relentless Kroc, however, saw an empire of replicas. “When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I’d seen during the day. Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain.”
Kroc cajoled the brothers into letting him lead their franchising efforts, and one year later he opened his first McDonald’s outpost in Des Plaines, Illinois, near the other end of Mother Road 66, not far from his childhood home. Eventually, as the parties’ feuds over control grew more intense, Kroc asked the McDonald brothers, who had no true sense of what the company would become, to name their price; Kroc bought them out by for a cool—perhaps immoral—million dollars each after taxes. Then, Kroc went out with franchise agreements and pursued scrapping entrepreneurs he could enlist to follow the exacting system with beagle-like devotion. In short time, dozens and then hundreds more locations would open their doors.
The company became an unprecedented national success story. Kroc had turned a roadside sapling into a national staple. McDonald’s now feeds more people daily in America than the entire population of Australia. Today, there are more than thirty-six thousand McDonald’s stores in the world in well over a hundred countries from Argentina to Azerbaijan and in thousands of cities from Chicago, Caracas, Casablanca, and Chișinău to Carmiel, Chengdu, and Canberra. There’s a flying-saucer-shaped McDonald’s in the deserts of Roswell, New Mexico, and an outpost with a ski-thru window atop a mountain in Lindvallen, Sweden. You can find McDonald’s sacred fries in the holy cities of Varanasi, Jerusalem, Vatican City, Mecca, and Medina (Saudi Arabia and Ohio).
Even as the company flourished beyond any possible comprehension, Kroc’s manic focus never abated. This is part of why his name still rings out as a titanic paragon of American industry. As he grew in power, Kroc labored to keep a grip on the big plans, while still fussing over the small irritants, an autocrat somewhere on a scale between tin-pot and Pol Pot. After selling Kroc their namesake business in 1961, the McDonald’s brothers refused (legally) to hand over the property that held their original McDonald’s stand in San Bernardino. In a trademark maneuver, Kroc simply opened a McDonald’s across the street and put their stand out of business.
Despite the richness of Harland Sanders’s origin story and self-legendizing or Billy Ingram’s brilliance as the marketer who delivered White Castle and the hamburger to the American mainstream, it was Ray Kroc who seized the mantle of fast-food messiah and, for a long while, national hero. This had as much to do with his biography and his fanatical, inborn drive for success as his militant business philosophies. Long before Kroc forged the empire that currently employs more people than the entire US armed services, he lied about his age and enlisted to serve as an ambulance driver during World War I. Kroc was fifteen. One of his Red Cross comrades was a fellow perfectionist, high school dropout, and Chicago native named Walt Disney, who had also fibbed about his age and who also went on to establish his own expansive California-born kingdom.* The war ended before Kroc could be dispatched to Europe. Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of high school again, enabling him to spend nearly the rest of his life pursuing the two professional callings that suited his restless disposition: piano playing and selling.
Ray Kroc—whose father had “worried himself to death” over real estate losses in the Great Depression—sported oversize rings, despised unions and MBAs, and admired Barry Goldwater, Boss Daley, and American determinism. The son of an immigrant villager from Bohemia, Kroc had no taste or patience for the bohemian spirit. “We have found out,” he wrote, in a 1958 warning to the McDonald brothers about franchisees who deviated from the operational script, “that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry.… You cannot give them an inch. The organization cannot trust the individual.” Despite this 1950s-style posturing, Kroc was shrewd enough to capitalize on his franchisees’ creativity, which yielded some of the company’s most successful inventions, from