Fifties (27 page)

One of Kroc’s early jobs was as a paper-cup salesman, and he understood not only his own product but what part paper—quick consumption, carry-out food possibilities, and labor-cost savings, through the elimination of dish washing—was beginning to play in American life. He was
always
looking for the idea or invention that would make his fortune. On his route he made the acquaintanceship of a man named Earl Prince, an engineer who also ran a chain of dairy parlors. In the late thirties, Prince, in no small part pushed by Kroc, developed a machine that used a single motor to drive five separate spindles, thus greatly accelerating the milkshake-making process. He called it the Multimixer, and it was a powerful machine, or, as Ray Kroc liked to boast, “You could mix concrete with the damn thing.” When Kroc’s employer, the Lily-Tulip paper-cup company, turned down the idea of selling it across the country, Kroc decided to handle it himself. In 1939 he started his own business, Malt-A-Mixer.

Kroc set out to sell the entire country these amazing machines, and to make sure he covered all his bases, he even sent out a newsletter to bars extolling the virtues of the sexy new mixed drinks they could make (with a Multimixer), including the Delicado (“After Dinner You’ll Love Delacado. Brandy or Your Favorite Liqueur Multimixed With Ice Cream”). The war put his dream on hold because the materials for the Multimixer were no longer available, but when it was over, his business exploded. He and two associates sold 9,000 Multimixers a year, and Kroc was making $25,000 a year. It was not the big strike he had hoped for, but by the standards of the time, he was wealthy. But by the early fifties, the tide was running out on Multimixers: Sales were dramatically down, and there was competition from a rival company. Kroc had the foresight to realize that it was not so much the product that was the problem as its prize customer—the neighborhood drugstore. The great move to the suburbs was the death knell for that small-town institution.

By 1954 Kroc was looking for an alternative source of income,
so he and a friend invented something called a Fold-A-Nook, two benches and a small table that folded down from the wall and thereby made a small kitchen seem roomier. He exhibited it at a trade show in Los Angeles and sold not a single one. He was still selling Multimixers at the time and the one thing that puzzled him was the success of a small hamburger spot in San Bernardino, which seemed to buck the national trend: The rest of the nation wanted fewer Multimixers; this place called McDonald’s needed ever more; most drugstores needed, at best, two Multimixers, but in early 1954, the McDonald brothers ordered their ninth and tenth machines—that meant they were making something on the order of fifty milkshakes at a time. In addition, Kroc was getting calls from other fast-food operators, who told him they wanted the same kind of mixers the McDonalds were using.

In early 1954, Kroc went to San Bernardino to take a look. He was stunned. He arrived an hour before lunch, but there were already long lines. He immediately liked what he saw: attendants in spiffy white shirts and trousers and white paper hats, and no flies clustered around the back of the place. Kroc got in line and began to talk with the customers. He innocently pointed out that he had never waited on line for a hamburger before. The regulars, as he had hoped, gave him unsolicited testimonials: The place was clean, it was fast, it was cheap, and the hamburgers were good. Besides, they said, you did not have to tip. That alone struck home with him. Orders, he was amazed to discover, were being filled in about fifteen seconds apiece. The hamburgers cost 15 cents each, a slice of cheese cost 4 cents more, a shake was 20 cents, and a coffee was a nickel. One out of three customers wanted a shake, and even here the McDonalds had improved upon Kroc’s beloved Multimixer. Ed Toman, their personal inventor, had taken Ray Kroc’s machine and cut four inches off the spindles. That meant that the shakes could be made right in the twelve-inch paper cups—there was no need to transfer from the mixer to the cup. Kroc sat all afternoon and watched. The McDonalds were glad to see him—he was, after all, something of a celebrity in the business. Mr. Multimixer, they called him. They assured him that this was a typical day. Kroc asked the McDonalds when the rush stopped. “Sometime late tonight when we close,” Dick McDonald said. At first, Ray Kroc began to think how good it would be to expand McDonald’s because of what it could mean to his troubled Multimixer business. And the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he had seen the future and it was hamburgers.

At the moment Ray Kroc entered their world, the McDonald brothers had issued all of nine franchises and were looking for a new manager to handle franchising. Soon after his visit, Kroc called Dick McDonald. “Have you found a franchising agent yet?” he asked. “No, Ray, not yet,” McDonald answered. “Well then, what about me?” Kroc said.

He took over the franchise end at the age of fifty-two, a diabetic who had already lost his gallbladder. Starting out all over in a new field when most men were starting to think about retirement, he was unbelievably hardworking and ambitious, and his ability to outwork everyone in his office was soon a legend. He made $12,000 at the start, half of what he had made as a Multimixer man. But he was sure this was the big break he had always been looking for. “It was,” he once said, “practically life or death for me.”

Years later, he was asked why he went with the McDonald brothers when he could so easily have stolen their system. Part of it was the name itself: McDonald’s simply sounded right to him. He did not think that a chain named Kroc’s would have the same appeal. In addition, he had been in and out of a thousand kitchens in his years as a paper-cup and mixer salesman, and this was by far the best operation he’d ever seen. He knew that the McDonalds had learned to do things right only after making many mistakes and it was well worth whatever it cost him to avoid repeating those mistakes.

He saw immediately that the prime customers were
families,
young couples, a little unsure of themselves, often with children in tow. They were comfortable at McDonald’s as they might not have been at a more traditional restaurant; they came, ordered, and ate in the car, and if their children were misbehaving, it wouldn’t annoy the other clients. 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. At first, the various franchises did their best business on Saturday night, and next best on Friday night—the customers obviously regarded it as a treat. Then they began to do well on Sunday afternoon, and then, at last, on the weeknights. Soon there were advertising slogans reflecting the thrust of the business: “Give Mom a Night Out,” and then “Give Mom a Night Off.” These were, as Fred Turner, Kroc’s heir to the company later noted, the forerunner of the famous McDonald’s slogan “You Deserve a Break Today.”

Kroc understood that the McDonalds were taking advantage of a phenomenon—the instant suburbs, where millions of Americans were now living. He liked to boast that when he looked for a new site,
he did not so much measure traffic along the highway as determine the size and stability of a community by counting the church steeples and the number of schools. He had no use for downtown areas: He vowed often that there would never be a McDonald’s in Chicago’s Loop, ostensibly the perfect place for a fast-food emporium. In his view, the commuters would desert during peak dinner hours, and he was not enthusiastic about the remaining clientele: They were not, most assuredly, family people, and he saw McDonald’s as predominantly a family restaurant. The people who would eat at a downtown McDonald’s might well be bums or, worse, and they might damage the image of his restaurant. He wanted no women working at the stands, because he thought they were there to flirt rather than work—and that would conflict with the image of a family restaurant. Women in short skirts behind the counter would attract young men in black leather jackets—as in the carhop days of old—and he wanted no part of that. “I’ve made up my mind that all hamburger joints had jukeboxes, telephones, and cigarette machines and that your wife and my wife wouldn’t go to a place with leather-jacketed guys and smoke-filled rooms,” he once said.

At the center of all of the hoopla was a very small piece of meat, soon to be standardized in the McDonald’s handbook at 1.6 ounces. It was made of “commercial-grade” ground chuck and formed into a patty 3
⁵
⁄
₈
inches in diameter. The fat content was between 17 and 20 percent. It was served with a quarter-ounce of onion, a teaspoon of mustard, a tablespoon of ketchup, and a pickle one inch in diameter. There was, in Kroc’s mind, something beautiful about a hamburger as opposed to, say, hot dogs. He wanted no part of hot dogs, whose popularity he felt was regional; confined to such places as New York and Philadelphia. In addition, he perceived them as a snack instead of a full meal. As he found beauty in the hamburger, he thought hot dogs unattractive—both aesthetically and commercially. The hamburger, he liked to say, could be assembled on his terms, but people were determined to have hot dogs their own way. That demanded a condiment station, which the McDonald brothers had eliminated—rightly, in his view—as the messiest place in the whole restaurant.

Above all, he wanted consistency so that a hamburger in California would be an advertisement for one in Chicago or New York. If the McDonald brothers had built the perfect hamburger stand, Ray Kroc envisioned the perfect nationwide chain. The trick was to impose his will upon independent owners, which took an odd combination of pure democratic instinct and totalitarian will. Kroc
brooked little in the way of dissent, and he expected everyone to work as hard as he did.

At first, Kroc granted most of his licenses in California, which, because of the dominance of the auto there and the exceptional year-round climate, qualified as the birthplace of the fast-food franchise. But Kroc, who lived in suburban Chicago, soon found that it was hard to impose rules on California operators from such a distance. In fact, they sometimes seemed to be in a virtual conspiracy to break his beloved rules of standardization, serving foods that were not supposed to be on the menu, posting higher prices than those agreed on, and committing other equally egregious sins. These were not evil men and women, though sometimes they might have seemed so to him. Rather, they did not hate dirt as much as he, or they were, on occasion, willing to put the price of the hamburger above the price he had specified. There was a certain contradiction here: Kroc wanted highly individual small-time owners to risk all their savings in classic American entrepreneurial style, but he wanted those same people to obey all the rules emanating from Chicago headquarters. Clearly, the latter came to be the most important qualification. His philosophy had an almost Orwellian quality to it. In 1958 he told the McDonald brothers: “We have found out, as you have, that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry. Even personal friends who we know have the best of intentions may not conform. They have a difference of opinion as to various processing and certain qualities of product.... You cannot give them an inch. The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization [or] he shouldn’t go into this kind of business.” Fearing for his control, Kroc even stopped giving out California franchises for a time, awarding them instead to apparently more conformist Midwesterners.

He opened his own first hamburger stand in Des Plaines, suburban Chicago, in April 1955; at the time he was so desperately short of cash that he had to borrow the money necessary to put up his showplace McDonald’s. He even offered the banks half the stock in his company for a mere $25,000. Fortunately for his own financial future, and probably also for the future of McDonald’s, he found no takers.

He was a hands-on owner, the first person there every morning, setting up, checking things out, then going into downtown Chicago, working all day at his headquarters, trying to expand the network, and then stopping back at night to close and clean up. “Every night
you’d see him coming down the street, walking close to the gutter, picking up every McDonald’s wrapper and cup along the way,” said Fred Turner, who started as one of Kroc’s first grill men and later became chairman of the company. “He’d come into the store with both hands full of cups and wrappers. He was the store’s outside pickup man.” Actually, cleanliness and order were fetishes with him. If he went into a colleague’s office and there was a picture slightly out of kilter on the wall, he straightened it; if there was a loose thread on the couch, he would pick it up and throw it away. He gave his top people little packets with nail files, combs, and brushes, and for one executive, whose nose hair he judged as too long, he included a tiny pair of scissors. He demanded that all his employees be clean, down to their fingernails, and sometimes he even asked them to brush their teeth more carefully. He wanted no beards or mustaches, no wrinkled clothes, and no gum chewing. Years later an advertising man named Barry Klein came by the headquarters to work out some proposals. Klein, in the style of his profession and the times, wore his hair long. Everyone waited for Kroc to explode, but he merely swallowed his anger and muttered to a colleague, “That SOB better be good.” Executives in the main office were to leave their desks clean at the end of the day. Every day, the windows at all McDonald’s had to be cleaned, the parking lot had to be hosed down, and the garbage cans scrubbed. Mopping of the floors inside was a continuous process.

He knew he was going to be a great success at McDonald’s even before the Des Plaines store opened. He called a man named Waddy Pratt, the regional dealer for Coke, and said, “My name’s Ray Kroc and I’m opening a restaurant and I want to sell Coke because it’s the best goddamn product there is.” Pratt trekked out to the Des Plaines store, and the two of them stood in the parking lot, like two figures from a Sinclair Lewis novel. Kroc repeated: “I believe in Coke. So I’m going to buy it.” Then he added: “And orange soda and root beer, too.” “I’m sorry, we’re not in the rainbow flavors,” Pratt said, using the industry’s term for the other sodas. “Well, you better get into them because I plan to have a thousand of these stores pretty soon,” Kroc said. Pratt looked around him and thought, We are standing over a hole in the ground that this man says will be a restaurant and in addition he is telling me he’s going to own 999 more just like it. This man is not playing with a full deck. (Years after, Kroc would remind Pratt of that day: “I guess you wish you’d gotten in on orange soda and root beer right then and there, right, Waddy, you’d have made millions more.”) Kroc even knew exactly
how he wanted the soda delivered: in tin containers instead of the usual gallon glass jugs. Pratt told him Coke didn’t handle it in tin. “Don’t lie to me,” Kroc said, and with that Pratt realized that he had heard somewhere about military shipments overseas of Coke in tin. “It’s not available in retail in America in tin,” he said. Kroc was getting edgier, but Pratt came up with a compromise: If Kroc’s people would clean out the jugs, Pratt would have them picked up and sold to another merchant in town, and the five-cent-a-jug price would be turned over to Kroc. Kroc loved that idea: “You mean I get to cut my costs five cents a jug?” he asked incredulously.