Ray Kroc Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Luck is the dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.

The quality of an individual is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.

The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.

As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot.

There's almost nothing you can't accomplish if you set your mind to it.

I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night. I

Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small. Getting

You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.

None of us is as good as all of us

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, who’d once said, “When you see your competitor drowning, grab a fire hose and put it in his mouth.

Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting? This quote from McDonald's founder Ray Kroc neatly sums up our need to continuously innovate and create in our lives.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

A little bit of luck helps, yes, but the key element, which too many in our affluent society have forgotten, is still hard work—grinding it out. Ray

if you believe in something, you've got to be in it to the ends of your toes. Taking reasonable risks in part of the challenge. It;s the fun.

You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well. We demonstrated this emphasis on details, and saw it pay off, in our approach to hamburger patties.

I refused to worry about more than one thing at a time, and I would not let useless fretting about a problem, no matter how important, keep me from sleeping. This is easier said than done.

Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct of achievement. Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer. We must take the risks involved in our free enterprise system. This is the only way in the world to economic freedom. There is no other way.

I’ve always dealt fairly in business, even when I believed someone was trying to take advantage of me. That’s one reason I have had to grind away incessantly to achieve success. In some ways I guess I’m naive. I always take a man at his word unless he’s given me a reason not to, and I’ve worked out many a satisfactory deal on the strength of a handshake. On the other hand, I’ve been taken to the cleaners often enough to make me a certified cynic.

When I was terminated in 1992, I had no money, no savings, and no idea what I wanted to do for a living. But I had studied too many people who went from poverty to millionaire and billionaire, including Oprah, Sylvester Stallone, JC Penney, Colonel (Harland) Sanders, Henry Ford, and Ray Kroc, the man who transformed McDonald’s into an international household word. Now that I had an exciting goal to become a marketing consultant for people, I knew that my success depended less on what resources I had than how resourceful I could be.

Now, from the outside in, I can understand why you might be critical of McDonald’s. You might say that people shouldn’t eat meat. You might say that the hamburgers could be fatter, or less fatty, or this or that. But what you couldn’t say—what you could never say—is that McDonald’s doesn’t keep its promise. Because it does. Better than just about any business in the world, McDonald’s, the love of Ray Kroc’s life, still keeps its promise, long after Ray Kroc has gone. It delivers exactly what we have come to expect of it every single time.

One night the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. My parents would disown me if they found out I had been put in jail with a bunch of common violators of the prohibition law. We were only there three hours, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life. That

When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.

I had left Florida in the nick of time, it turned out. The business decline that began when the real estate boom collapsed caught up with the nightclubs soon after I left. The Silent Night closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped into the news once in a while as time went by. Al Capone built a home there. Then Lou Walters, father of TV’s Barbara Walters, opened the Latin Quarter. But it was to be a long time before I saw Florida again.

In essence, the message was always the same, “I want one of those mixers of yours like the McDonald brothers have in San Bernardino, California.” I got curiouser and curiouser. Who were these McDonald brothers, and why were customers picking up on the Multimixer from them when I had similar machines in lots of places? (The machine, by this time had five spindles instead of six.) So I did some checking and was astonished to learn that the McDonalds had not one Multimixer, not two or three, but eight! The mental picture of eight Multimixers churning out forty shakes at one time was just too much to be believed. These mixers sold at $150 apiece, mind you, and that was back in 1954.

Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, said, “There are three keys to success: 1. Being at the right place at the right time. 2. Knowing you are there. 3. Taking action.

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.” —Ray Kroc, Founder, McDonald’s Corporation

Opportunity, Buffett knew, is where you find it. If you don’t try something, you can’t succeed. Energy and initiative count as much as talent and luck. Winners win because they work hard and hold onto their money.

Whenever he makes a mistake, he is the first to admit it and claim the blame. After one underperforming year, he told stockholders that they would have been better off if he had stayed at home all year instead of going to the office.

Never lose your curiosity, and never stop learning. You can never know too much.

Great leaders are not infallible. What makes them great is their willingness to accept and rebound from failure. They see it as just part of the process that eventually leads to success.

Remember, self-promotion isn’t a sin. Sometimes it’s even necessary to get an idea accepted by a fearful or incredulous public. Great leaders don’t hesitate to call attention to their creations.

In his investing, he has said he is governed by three easy rules: One, never lose money; two, never forget rule number one; and three, never go into debt.

Too many salesmen, I found, would make a good presentation and convince the client, but they couldn’t recognize that critical moment when they should have stopped talking. If

I keep a number of experimental menu additions in the works all the time.

No one of us is more important than the rest of us

I couldn’t tell, and I cared not at all. It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement

I’d have a store with a row of vending machines in it. You’d push some buttons and out would come your Big Mac, shake, and fries, all prepared automatically. We could do that; I’m sure Jim Schindler could work it out. But we never will. McDonald’s is a people business, and the smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.

If you work just for money, you'll never make it, but if you love what you're doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.

One thing I flatly refuse to give money to is the support of any college. I’ve been wooed by some of the finest universities in the land, but I tell them they will not get a cent from me unless they put in a trade school. Our colleges are crowded with young people who are learning a lot about liberal arts and little about earning a living. There are too many baccalaureates and too few butchers.

Wealth, like happiness,is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing useful service. Ray Kroc

I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems.

I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the system they described that night. Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort.

But I paid particular attention to the french-fry operation. The brothers had indicated this was one of the key elements in their sales success, and they’d described the process.

He fielded all questions that students put to him, exhibiting in his lectures and discussions the qualities which have made him a present-day commercial legend: his tough-minded business philosophy; his virtually compulsive adherence to the fundamental operating strategies designed to attract the family market; his emphasis on such basic qualities as courtesy, cleanliness, and service; and his abiding loyalty to his associates, particularly to those who have served McDonald’s since its fledgling years.

The fact that she had no bookkeeping experience bothered me not at all. I knew she would master the technical routines quickly. So I told her I couldn’t pay much, but if she was willing to work hard anyhow, I could promise her a bright future. We talked the same language. She did work hard—unbelievably hard—and in less than twenty years she was one of the top women executives in the country, secretary and treasurer of McDonald’s Corporation. June

One day June took some papers down to the army personnel office that was processing Louis’s classification. When she left, he had been exempted from the service, but she had been sworn in! She was very patriotic and just got carried away. As a WAC she studied electronics at Northwestern University and learned trigonometry and calculus and God knows what else. She had to do it by intensive tutoring, because she had no special aptitude for higher mathematics. But that’s the sort of person she was; no challenge was too big for her. If she didn’t know something, she’d burrow into library books and find out. June

After we got McDonald’s going and built a larger staff, they all called her “Mother Martino.” She kept track of everyone’s family fortunes, whose wife was having a baby, who was having marital difficulties, or whose birthday it was. She helped make the office a happy place. It

A good executive does not like mistakes. He will allow his subordinates an honest mistake once in a while, but he will never condone or forgive dishonesty. It

It was not long after the “Fold-a-Nook” fiasco that I became intrigued by the stories of the McDonald brothers and their operation that kept eight Multimixers whirring up a bucket brigade of milk shakes out there in sunny San Bernardino.

I took care not to be ostentatious (I detest snobs), but my style kind of dazzled my staff at the office. They were eager to follow my examples. I stressed the importance of making a good appearance, wearing a nicely pressed suit, well-polished shoes, hair combed, and nails cleaned. “Look sharp and act sharp,” I told them. “The first thing you have to sell is yourself. When you do that, it will be easy to sell paper cups.

Children were to be seen but not heard in adult company in those days, but I never felt left out. For example, my father belonged to a singing group that often met in our house. My brother and I had to stay upstairs and amuse ourselves while my mother played the piano and the men sang. As soon as the music stopped below, Bob and I would drop whatever game we were playing and rush back to the sewing room, which was right above the kitchen. I would pull the warm-air grate out of the floor (that was before we had central heating, and floor registers were used to let heated air rise to the upper rooms). My mother would put a dish of whatever refreshments she was serving on a tray that my father had affixed to an old broom handle, then she would hoist it up to us. It was a delightful feeling of adventure, because my mother pretended to be sneaking the food away without letting the other adults know. I

Besides, the brothers did have some equipment that couldn’t be readily copied. They had a specially fabricated aluminum griddle for one thing, and the set-up of all the rest of the equipment was in a very precise, step-saving pattern. Then there was the name. I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald’s was exactly right.

Ethel was incensed by the whole thing. We had no obligations that would be jeopardized by it; our daughter, Marilyn, was married and no longer dependent on us. But that didn’t matter to Ethel; she just didn’t want to hear about the McDonalds or my plans.

She dutifully attended McDonald’s gatherings in later years, and she was liked by operators’ wives and by women on the staff, but there was nothing more between us. Our thirty-five years of holy matrimony endured another five in unholy acrimony. I

Opportunity is dead in the United States!” “The tax structure has destroyed all incentive!” How often we have heard such laments during the past thirty years, when in fact greater fortunes have been made and higher living standards achieved than ever before on earth! Those

This historic year of 1976 will see McDonald’s Corporation surpass one billion dollars in total revenue for the first time. Casual students of business history may not realize the significance of the fact that this milestone will be reached during the twenty-second year of the company’s history.

There was a lot of nervous tension at that time on all levels of society over the alarming developments in Europe and Asia. Magazines speculated grimly on whether war with Japan was inevitable. Then our attention was diverted from Japanese aggression in China to the Nazi conquests in Europe. On December 7, 1941, we were thrown into war by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and I was thrown out of the Multimixer business. Supplies of copper, used in winding the motors for Multimixer, were restricted by the war effort. A

I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them. “What are you doing Raymond?” my mother would ask. “Nothing. Just thinking.” “Daydreaming you mean,” she’d say. “Danny Dreamer is at it again.” They called me Danny Dreamer a lot, even later when I was in high school and would come home all excited about some scheme I’d thought up. I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action.

Another aspect of the agreement was that I was to charge a franchise fee of $950 for each license. This was to cover my expenses in finding a suitable location and a landlord who would be willing to build to our specifications. Each license was to run for twenty years. My contract with the McDonalds was only for ten years. That was later amended to ninety-nine years. I

I’ve been in the kitchens of a lot of restaurants and drive-ins selling Multimixers around the country,” I told them, “and I have never seen anything to equal the potential of this place of yours. Why don’t you open a series of units like this? It would be a gold mine for you and for me, too, because every one would boost my Multimixer sales. What d’you say?” Silence.

America had become an ice cream society in the last years of the twenties, thanks in large part to Prohibition. Bars and fine lounges in hotels sold ice cream, because they could no longer sell liquor, and dairy bars began to crop up all over the country. It was an incredible era. The straitlaced Cal Coolidge, who assured the nation that his fiscal probity had brought prosperity here to stay, moved the White House to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the summer and celebrated the Fourth of July by parading around in a cowboy costume. Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for the stupefying figure of $70,000 a year. Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris. Al Jolson sang in the first talking pictures. And—wonder of wonders—in 1929 the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant! Big

So I attacked their excesses by telling very simply the story of my great-grandfather and his beloved pipe. Grandpa Phossie, we called him, which means Grandpa Beard. I told of the hardships he’d undergone in Bohemia and how he had made his way to the United States. I related in pithy detail how he had built a home for his family with the sweat of his brow. Now he had little time left in life and few pleasures beyond throwing a stick for his little dog to fetch and looking into the swirls of smoke from his ancient pipe to recall scenes from happier days. “Who among you,” I asked, “would deprive that whitebearded old man of one of his last comforts on earth, his beloved pipe?” I was delighted to note that there were tears in the eyes of some of the girls in the auditorium as I finished. I wished my father could have heard that applause. It might have made up for some of his disappointment in my lack of scholastic interest. As

Cooking with gas was a popular expression at the time, but it was an in-joke with us. When somebody was cooking with gas around our place it meant that he was really doing everything right. This stemmed from our experience in patterning our stores on the plans provided by the McDonald brothers. Jim Schindler insisted on using gas units for making french fries instead of the electric friers the McDonald boys were using. Gas proved to be more efficient for this purpose. It was cheaper, and we got a better product. So we tried to “cook with gas” in all our operations at McDonald’s. The

Instead, they were obtuse, they were utterly indifferent to the fact that I was putting every cent I had and all I could borrow into this project. When we sat down with our lawyers in attendance, the brothers acknowledged the problems but refused to write a single letter that would permit me to make changes. “We have told you by telephone that you may go ahead and alter the plans as we discussed,” said their attorney, Frank Cotter. “But the contract calls for a registered letter. If Mr. Kroc does not have that, he is put in jeopardy,” said my counsel. “That’s your problem.” It was almost as though they were hoping I would fail. This was a peculiar attitude for them to take because the more successful the franchising, the more money they would make. My attorney gave up on the situation.

He had a son-in-law named Ed MacLuckie who was looking for a job and who had expressed a liking for the food service business. Ed was working a wholesale hardware territory over in Michigan at the time and it was not going well. So I talked to him. He was one of these whip-lean, nervous types who are often very fussy and fastidious and have great endurance. Just the kind of qualifications I was looking for, so I hired him as a manager of my first store. Art Bender, the McDonald brothers’ manager, came to Des Plaines and helped Ed and me open that store on April 15, 1955.

I had memorized the procedure when I watched the McDonald’s operation in San Bernardino, and I had done it exactly the same way. I went through the whole thing once more. The result was the same—bland, mushy french fries. They were as good, actually, as the french fries you could buy at other places. But that was not what I wanted.

If anyone stood to gain by our success and suffer if we failed, it was our suppliers. They knew McDonald’s restaurants possessed the potential of becoming super customers, and they knew we played straight.

After seventeen years of selling paper cups for Lily Tulip Cup Company and climbing to the top of the organization’s sales ladder, I saw opportunity appear in the form of an ugly, six-spindled milk shake machine called a Multimixer, and I grabbed it. It wasn’t easy to give up security and a well-paying job to strike out on my own. My wife was shocked and incredulous. But my success soon calmed her fears, and I plunged gleefully into my campaign to sell a Multimixer to every drug store soda fountain and dairy bar in the nation.

Then I went over to the building and introduced myself to Mac and Dick McDonald. They were delighted to see me (“Mr. Multimixer” they called me), and I warmed up to them immediately. We made a date to get together for dinner that evening so they could tell me all about their operation. I

Her apprehensions about my becoming Mr. Multimixer had been laid to rest at this point, and I don’t think she ever got over the shock of discovering that we were nearly $100,000 in debt. She couldn’t seem to handle it. For me, this was the first phase of grinding it out—building my personal monument to capitalism. I paid tribute, in the feudal sense, for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald’s on the foundation I had laid.

I sold a Multimixer to a guy named Willard Marriott, who had just opened a drive-in called A & W Root Beer. His method of operation fascinated me. I considered myself a connoisseur of kitchens; after all, selling Multimixers took me into thousands of them. I prided myself on being able to tell which operations would appeal to the public and which would fail. Willard Marriott looked like a winner to me from the start. I had no more idea than he did back then, though, of what a giant his Marriott Corporation would become in hotels and restaurants.

Another piece of paper discovered among my father’s effects was a yellowed document dated 1906. It was a phrenologist’s report of a reading he had done on the bumps of the head of Raymond A. Kroc, aged four. He had predicted that I would become a chef or work in some branch of food service. I was amazed at the prognostication; after all I was in a food service–related business and felt a real affinity for kitchens. Little did I know how much more accurate that old boy’s prophesy would eventually prove to be. In

I worked at something whenever possible. Work is the meat in the hamburger of life. There is an old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I never believed it because, for me, work was play. I got as much pleasure out of it as I did from playing baseball. Baseball

One of the reasons his subordinated lease idea worked so well was that in the late fifties we didn’t have the proliferation of franchise operations and the fierce competition for commercial fringe property that developed in the course of the next twenty years.

We started Franchise Realty Corporation with $1,000 paid-in capital, and Harry parlayed that cash investment into something like $170 million worth of real estate. His idea, simply put, was that we would induce a property owner to lease us his land on a subordinated basis. That is, he would take back a second mortgage so that we could go to a lending institution (in the early days it was a bank) and arrange a first mortgage on the building; the landlord would subordinate his land to the building. I must admit that I was a bit skeptical:

This was the beginning of real income for McDonald’s. Harry devised a formula for the monthly payments being made by our operators that paid our own mortgage and other expenses plus a profit.

That winter was a particularly tough one for the paper cup business. Everything slowed down except for the hospital and medical clinic sales, and I didn’t have any of those places for customers. I didn’t do very well, because I thought of the customer first. I didn’t try to force an order on a soda fountain operator when I could see that his business had fallen off because of cold weather and he didn’t need the damn cups. My philosophy was one of helping my customer, and if I couldn’t sell him by helping him improve his own sales, I felt I wasn’t doing my job.

A subject of much greater concern to me, however, was the great french-fry flop. I had explained to Ed MacLuckie with great pride the McDonald’s secret for making french fries. I showed him how to peel the potatoes, leaving just a bit of the skin to add flavor.

But there was one other agreement they hadn’t told me about, and that was for Cook County, Illinois, where I had my home, my office, and my first model store. The brothers had sold Cook County to the Frejlack Ice Cream Company interest for $5,000! It cost me $25,000 to buy that area from the Frejlacks, and it was blood money. I could not afford it. I was already in debt for all I was worth. I couldn’t blame the Frejlacks, of course, they were completely aboveboard and fair. But I could never forgive the McDonalds. Unwittingly or not, they had made an ass of me—in the Biblical sense. I’d been blindfolded by their assurances and led to grind like blind Samson in the prison house. My

I was about to lose one of my biggest accounts, Walgreens, the people I had created a tremendous amount of business for and to whom I was selling five million cups a year. Fred Stoll told me in strictest confidence that a former Walgreen executive who had a lot of pull in the top offices of the company had gone into the paper cup business with a competitor of mine, and he was going to be given all of the Walgreen trade. The rationale would be that this competitor was selling for five percent under my price. I explained this to John Clark and tried to get him to go along with offering Walgreens a price break—after all, they paid their bills on time and there was promotion value in having a big company like that use your product. But all I got was a tongue lashing.

For the practices pioneered or perfected by McDonald’s under Ray Kroc’s leadership have revolutionized an entire food service industry, changed eating habits throughout the world, and raised customer expectations. Who among us is not now less tolerant of slow service, overpriced meals, soggy french fries, or a lack of cleanliness in eating places? Mr.

In 1930 I made a sale that not only gave Lily Tulip Cup Company a big boost in volume but also gave me an insight into a new direction for paper cup distribution. I was selling our little pleated “souffle” cups to the Walgreen Drug Company, a Chicago firm that was just starting a period of tremendous expansion. They used these cups for serving sauces at their soda fountains. Observing the traffic at these soda fountains at noon, I perceived what I considered to be a golden opportunity. If they had our new Lily Tulip cups, they could sell malts and soft drinks “to go” to the overflow crowds.

One day I said, “Mac, the only way in this world that you can increase your soda fountain volume is to sell to people who don’t take up a stool. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I will give you 200 or 300 containers with covers, however many you need to try this for a month in your store down the street. Now most of your takeout customers will be Walgreen employees from headquarters here, and you can conduct your own marketing survey on them and see how they like it. You get the cups free, so it’s not going to cost you anything to try it.” Finally he agreed. I brought him the cups, and we set the thing up at one end of the soda fountain. It was a big success from the first day. It wasn’t long before McNamarra was more excited about the idea of takeouts than I was.

The best part of it for me personally was that every time I saw a new Walgreen’s store going up it meant new business. This sort of multiplication was clearly the way to go. I spent less and less time chasing pushcart vendors around the West Side and more time cultivating large accounts where big turnover would automatically winch in sales in the thousands and hundreds of thousands.

I had spent the previous summer and lunch hours during the school year working in my uncle Earl Edmund Sweet’s drugstore soda fountain in Oak Park. That was where I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what they’d come for was a cup of coffee.

It seemed like we averaged a blowout every fifteen or twenty miles. I’d jack up the car and pull off the wheel to patch the traitorous inner tube, and sometimes while I was applying the glue or manning the air pump, another tire would go bang! and expire. The roads were pretty primitive, of course, especially those red clay tracks through Georgia.

One of the things I did differently was to make my milkshakes with a soft product drawn from a tank, instead of hand-dipping ice cream. This changed the layout and gave us more space. One major problem in adapting the California-style building to the Midwestern climate was ventilation. I brought in architectual consultants one after the other in an attempt to solve the problem of exhausting the stale air and replacing it with fresh cool or heated air.

Another judgment I made early in the game and enforced through the years was that there would be no pay telephones, no jukeboxes, no vending machines of any kind in McDonald’s restaurants. Many times operators have been tempted by the side income some of these machines offer, and they have questioned my decision. But I’ve stood firm. All of those things create unproductive traffic in a store and encourage loitering that can disrupt your customers. This would downgrade the family image we wanted to create for McDonald’s. Furthermore, in some areas the vending machines were controlled by the crime syndicate, and I wanted no part of that. Our

the basics have to be stressed over and over. If I had a brick for every time I’ve repeated the phrase QSC and V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value), I think I’d probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them. And the operators need the stress on fundamentals as much as their managers and crews. This is especially true of a new location. So

Sometimes Ed MacLuckie would have forgotten to turn the sign on when dusk began to fall, and that made me furious. Or maybe the lot would have some litter on it that Ed said he hadn’t had time to pick up. Those little things didn’t seem to bother some people, but they were gross affronts to me. I’d get screaming mad and really let Ed have it. He took it in good part. I know he was as concerned about these details as I was, because he proved it in his own stores in later years. But perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald’s. Everything else was secondary for me.

Không ai trong chúng ta có thể giỏi bằng tất cả chúng ta gộp lại

The McDonald brothers kept their potatoes—top quality Idaho spuds, about eight ounces apiece—piled in bins in their back warehouse building. Since rats and mice and other varmints like to eat potatoes, the walls of the bins were of two layers of small-mesh chicken wire. This kept the critters out and allowed fresh air to circulate among the potatoes. I watched the spuds being bagged up and followed their trip by four-wheeled cart to the octagonal drive-in building. There they were carefully peeled, leaving a tiny proportion of skin on, and then they were cut into long sections and dumped into large sinks of cold water. The french-fry man, with his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, would plunge his arms into the floating schools of potatoes and gently stir them. I could see the water turning white with starch. This was drained off and the residual starch was rinsed from the glistening morsels with a flexible spray hose. Then the potatoes went into wire baskets, stacked in production-line fashion next to the deep-fry vats.

See that big white house with the wide front porch?” he asked. “That’s our home and we love it. We sit out on the porch in the evenings and watch the sunset and look down on our place here. It’s peaceful. We don’t need any more problems. We are in a position to enjoy life now, and that’s just what we intend to do.” His

It’ll be a lot of trouble,” Dick McDonald objected. “Who could we get to open them for us?” I sat there feeling a sense of certitude begin to envelope me. Then I leaned forward and said, “Well, what about me?

One of my incidental tasks at the radio station was to hire talent to build up the programs. One evening a couple of fellows who called themselves Sam and Henry came in to audition. They gave me their routine, a few songs and vaudevillian patter. Their singing was lousy but the jokes weren’t too bad, so I hired them for five dollars apiece. They kept working on their characters and developed a Southern Negro dialogue that was a huge success. That team went on to make show business history, later changing the name of their act to Amos and Andy.

Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d’ bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale. The