February 13, 2017
“Though the business history of McDonald’s is fascinating in and of itself, it is only one facet of Grinding It Out. 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?”
February 13, 2017
“I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems. It is a simple philosophy. I think it must have been passed along to me in the peasant bones of my Bohemian ancestors. But I like it because it works, and I find that it functions as well for me now that I am a multimillionaire as it did when I was selling paper cups ”
February 13, 2017
“ 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.”
February 13, 2017
“One day it would be a restaurant owner in Portland, Oregon; the next day a soda fountain operator in Yuma, Arizona; the following week, a dairy-bar manager in Washington, D.C. 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? ”
February 13, 2017
“I flew out to Los Angeles one day and made some routine calls with my representative there. Then, bright and early the next morning, I drove the sixty miles east to San Bernardino. I cruised past the McDonald’s location about 10 A.M., and I was not terrifically impressed. There was a smallish octagonal building, a very humble sort of structure situated on a corner lot about 200 feet square. It was a typical, ordinary-looking drive-in.”
February 13, 2017
“Say, what’s the attraction here?” I asked a swarthy man in a seersucker suit who was just in front of me.
“Never eaten here before?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Well, you’ll see,” he promised. “You’ll get the best hamburger you ever ate for fifteen cents. And you don’t have to wait and mess around tipping waitresses.”
I left the line and walked around behind the building, where several men were hunkered down in the shade baseball-catcher style, resting their backs against the wall and gnawing away on hamburgers. ”
February 13, 2017
“It was a hot day, but I noticed that there were no flies swarming around the place. The men in the white suits were keeping everything neat and clean as they worked. That impressed the hell out of me, because I’ve always been impatient with poor housekeeping, especially in restaurants. I observed that even the parking lot was being kept free of litter.”
February 13, 2017
“I don’t remember whether I ate a hamburger for lunch that day or not. I went back to my car and waited around until about 2:30 in the afternoon, when the crowd dwindled down to just an occasional customer. 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.”
February 13, 2017
“After dinner, the brothers took me over to visit their architect, who was just completing work on the design of a new drive-in building for them. It was neat. ”
February 13, 2017
“What made the new building unique was a set of arches that went right through the roof. There was a tall sign out front with arches that had neon tubes lighting the underside. I could see plenty of problems there. The arches of the sign looked like they would topple over in a strong wind, and those neon lights would need constant attention to keep them from fading out and looking tacky. But I liked the basic idea of the arches and most of the other features of the design, too.”
February 26, 2017
“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. But I had to see for myself how it worked. There had to be a secret something to make french fries that good.”
February 26, 2017
“After the lunch-hour rush had abated, I got together with Mac and Dick McDonald again. My enthusiasm for their operation was genuine, and I hoped it would be infectious and rally them in favor of the plan I had mapped out in my mind.
“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?”
February 26, 2017
“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.”
February 26, 2017
“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?”
February 26, 2017
“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.”
February 26, 2017
“I was born in Oak Park, just west of Chicago’s city limits, in 1902. My father, Louis Kroc, was a Western Union man. He had gone to work for the company when he was twelve years old and slowly but steadily worked his way up. He had left school in the eighth grade, and he was determined that I would finish high school. I was the wrong kid for that. My brother, Bob, who was born five years after me, and my sister, Lorraine, who came along three years after him, were much more inclined to studies. In fact, Bob became a professor, a medical researcher, and we had almost nothing in common, he and I. For many years we found it difficult even to talk to each other.”
February 26, 2017
“I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. 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.”
March 2, 2017
“ 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”
March 2, 2017
“began to feel about school the way I had felt earlier about the Boy Scouts. It was simply too slow for me. I’d been eager to become a Boy Scout, and I enjoyed it for a while. They made me the bugler. But a bugle is a very limited instrument, and I found myself doing the same things over and over in meetings. It was small potatoes. I wasn’t progressing, so I said to hell with it. School was the same—full of aggravations and little progress.”
March 5, 2017
“As school ended that spring, the United States entered World War I. I took a job selling coffee beans and novelties door-to-door. I was confident I could make my way in the world and saw no reason to return to school. Besides, the war effort was more important. Everyone was singing “Over There.” And that’s where I wanted to be. My parents objected strenuously, but I finally talked them into letting me join up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. I had to lie about my age, of course, but even my grandmother could accept that. In my company, which assembled in Connecticut for training, was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in. He was regarded as a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures. His name was Walt Disney.”
March 5, 2017
“I said, Raymond, that it is not possible for you to get married. You must first have a steady job. And I don’t mean working as an errand boy or a bellhop in a hotel. I mean something substantial.”
A few days later I went to work selling Lily brand paper cups. I don’t know what appealed to me so much about paper cups. Perhaps it was mostly because they were so innovative and upbeat. But I sensed from the outset that paper cups were part of the way America was headed. I guess my father must have agreed. At least he raised no further objections, and Ethel and I were married.”
March 6, 2017
“My daughter, Marilyn, was born in October 1924, and having this additional responsibility made me work even harder. 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.”
March 6, 2017
“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. I collected my salary of thirty-five dollars a week just the same”
March 6, 2017
“In the spring of 1925 I began to hit my stride as a salesman. There was a German restaurant called Walter Powers on the south side of Chicago. The manager was a Prussian martinet named Bittner. He always listened politely to my sales pitch, but he always, just as politely, said “Nein, danke,” and dismissed me. One day when I called on the place I saw a gleaming Marmon automobile parked at the rear entrance. I was looking it over admiringly when a man came out of the restaurant and approached me.
“Do you like that car?” he asked.
“Yes sir!” I replied. “Say, you’re Mr. Powers, aren’t you?”
He said he was and I told him, “Mr. Powers, if I could aspire to own a car like this, you could have the Rock Island and heaven, too.”
We chatted for some time about automobiles. I told him that I had ridden in the rumble seat on the outside of a Stutz Bearcat, and he agreed that had to be one of life’s finer experiences. After thirty minutes or so of shooting the breeze, he asked me who I represented and I told him.
“Are we giving you any business[…]”
March 6, 2017
“Ethel and I stored our furniture, cranked up the Model T, and headed south on the old Dixie Highway. It was a memorable trip. I had five new tires when we left Chicago. When we arrived in Miami, not one of those originals was left on the car.”
March 6, 2017
“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.”
March 6, 2017
“My father was one of the large losers in the economic collapse. After he had given up his position in New York in 1923 and returned to Chicago, taking a demotion to please my mother, he began working out his frustrations by speculating in real estate. That was probably the fastest-building bubble in the whole inflation-bloated country. Newspapers and magazines in the late twenties were full of advertisements for correspondence courses that were guaranteed to help you get rich quick in real estate. My father didn’t need to take any of those courses. He owned property scattered all over northeastern Illinois. I remember that he bought a corner lot on Madison Street in Oak Park one month and sold it to an automobile dealership the following month at a handsome profit. The real astonisher, however, was a lot he bought in Berwyn for $6,000 and sold a short time later for $18,000!”
March 6, 2017
“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. The Walgreen headquarters was at Forty-third Street and Bowen Avenue at that time, and there was a company drugstore just down the street. I presented my pitch to the food service man, a chap named McNamarra. He shook his head and threw up his hands at my suggestion.
“You’re crazy, or else you think I am,” he protested. “I get the same fifteen cents for a malted if it’s drunk at the counter, so why the hell should I pay a cent and a half for your cup and[…]”
March 6, 2017
“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.”
March 6, 2017
“One day an order was sent down from Lily Tulip’s headquarters in New York that because of the depression everyone was obliged to take a ten percent pay cut. In addition, because prices had dropped on gas, oil, and tires, all car allowances would be cut from fifty dollars a month to thirty dollars.
I was then sales manager and John Clark called me into his office to give me the news.
“Close the door, Ray, I want to talk privately with you,” he said. Then he told me how much he appreciated my hard work, how well the company thought of my production, but I would have to take a salary and expense cut. It applied to everyone, across the board.
This was a real blow. It wasn’t the reduction in salary that bothered me, but the affront to my ego. How could they treat the best salesman they had in this arbitrary fashion? I knew how much money I was making for them, depression or not, and I felt cold fury rising in me.”
March 6, 2017
“I felt trapped. I hated being put on the defensive. I walked away, but she kept after me like the determined Scot she was, telling me to answer her. So I whirled around and let her have it.
“I can’t take those cheapskates down there any more,” I blurted. “I’m quittin’!”
Zingo! Her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. Then she really lit into me. I was betraying her and our daughter. My pride was jeopardizing our existence. She stormed on about my foolishness, how desperate times were, how difficult it was for anyone to find a job (I knew that!). But I had taken my stand. I wasn’t going to back down, regardless. I couldn’t. Everything in me resisted it.
“Ethel, honey,” I said soothingly, “don’t worry. I’ll find something. We’ll get by. I’ll go back to playing the piano if I have to.”
March 6, 2017
“It got to the point in the office that I was generating too much business, too much paperwork, to be handled by the clerical pool, so Mr. Clark told me I should hire a secretary.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But I want a male secretary.”
“You what?”
“I want a man. He might cost a little more at first, but if he’s any good at all, I’ll have him doing a lot of sales work in addition to administrative things. I have nothing against having a pretty girl around, but the job I have in mind would be much better handled by a man.”
March 6, 2017
“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.” I also counseled them on handling money, encouraging them to spend wisely and save some for a rainy day.”
Notes From: Ray Kroc with Robert Anderson. “Grinding It Out.” iBooks.
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