What do they call a quarter pound of cheese in Casablanca? "At the dawn of the automobile age, in this fertile agricultural land, the illusion of the dollar symbol flashed in the minds of entrepreneurs. They erected a huge imitation of a brightly colored sphere, which was pleasant and whimsical. Drivers can be seen from a distance when they bump on the highway. At these stalls, they squeezed out fresh thirst-quenching juice at a price of 50 cents a cup to wake up overheated drivers (because this was before the appearance of car air conditioning). Two brothers from Frost Manchester, New Hampshire, whose names are MacDonald, squeezed oranges is not their wish. They saw their father being kicked to the side of the road after working as a handicraft shoe factory for 42 years, saying that he was too old to use it any more. In this way, his working hours are over. The shame of his dismissal made his children feel an urgent need to control their own future to avoid this fate. 1926, the eldest brother Mike traveled westward on foot for the first time, followed by Dick, who was seven years younger than him. These are two of the first speculators who have explored this road for decades. Their hope is to become famous in the emerging film industry, or at least find wealth. By the time they are 50 years old,
Ray and Joan: The man who created McDonald's wealth and the woman who gave it all to them, ray kroc, are selling franchises all over the country. In McDonald's in the 1950s, when he walked into the dinner club in Sao Paulo, he met a beautiful young pianist whose name was.
. I bought it to pay the rent.
The two brothers worked hard to earn wages at Columbia Film Studio, and turned off the TV and work lights when the silent film changed shifts. Their salary of $25 a week is hardly enough for them to live like kings, and certainly not enough for their future.
Unable to enter more attractive behind-the-scenes industries such as production and director, Dick and Mike scrimped and saved money to participate in another less glorious industry: the film industry. 1930, they bought a theater 20 miles east of Los Angeles, located in the center of a strange growing orange zone called Glendora. News clips and dual functions turn a trip to the cinema into a whole day. In order to discourage customers from taking their own food to the movies, the brothers installed a snack bar in the hall. This seems to be a definite bet.
The 750-seat church theatre is located on the foothill avenue not far from the city hall. The two brothers recast the venue with an optimistic new name. But in those years of economic depression, the lighthouse was crumbling, and the bills of the two brothers were overdue all the year round. They even buried some money in the backyard in case the bank failed. The only person who seems to make money is the owner of a root juice soda stand named Willie. So, after seven years of operation, Dick and Mike sold the theater at 1937, and transferred the industry from the entertainment industry to the catering industry. In the next town, Monrovia, on a 10-year-old route 66, they elaborately made it.
Someone borrowed wood from an octagonal open-air food stall and reached an agreement with Sunkist. Twenty dozen oranges accounted for a quarter of autumn fruits. The name they call "airport" comes from the airport near the foot of the mountain, which boasts itself as "the friendliest airport in America". This kind of air traffic attracts all kinds of idiots. Because the sand in this field is sometimes used to make movies, there is always a chance to catch a glimpse of stars like Laurel or Hardy. Strengthened by this spectacular scene, contented day-trippers will go sideways to the airport to satisfy their basic needs, thirst and hunger with fresh orange juice drinks and hot dogs. The adventure was a great success. The two brothers introduced their parents from New Hampshire and opened two more booths.
The two brothers briefly realized their dream of a new company called Dimer, and each menu would cost 65,438+00 cents, but they rejected the idea, thinking it was too depressing. They believe that the future will attract drivers. They think that soon, the working hours will be reduced to less than four days a week, so that Americans have enough leisure time to wander in the car and stop to eat. They dismantled their stalls and ventured further eastward to the growing desert city of San Bernardino, known locally as San Bernardino, a historic trade center 60 miles from Los Angeles. Their optimism about the future encouraged them to pass the rejection from bank to bank until they finally managed to get a loan of $5,000 from a bank. To their shock, they chose the location in E Street and downtown San Bernardo. 14. Apart from dreams, the only collateral for the two brothers is their dilapidated octagonal juice stand. They spent 200 dollars to buy a porter, cut it in half and moved into a new home. This time, entrepreneurs posted their surnames on their reincarnated institutions, followed by a special menu item: "McDonald's BBQ".
Like other roadside restaurants at that time, McDonald's rotisserie provided food directly to customers' cars through a fleet of young beautiful women named carhops, so named because they often jumped on the pedals of cars and claimed to be customers. Dick and Mike were very frugal, and dressed these ladies in the uniforms of ushers recovered from the lighthouse, beautifying the dramatic prosperity of serving your window.
McDonald's survived the challenging war years, when the biological fortress and happiness were reasonably rationed. The armistice declaration opened the curtain of a cynical era, which suddenly swept through the most common aspects of life. Americans have saved their money and desire for entertainment, and now they are making up for lost time. Henry Ford's production line stopped production during the war before starting to produce cars. The prices of these cars are all ordinary consumers. Up to1950,400 million cars blocked the road. The fuel sales tax allows the construction of wide new roads, providing access to large areas of the United States and providing new opportunities for adventure. All this means expanding services: gas stations, restaurants and motels. The journey becomes as important as the destination. Eating out is not only accepted by society, but also a sign of carefree wealth. Eating meals delivered directly to the window of your beloved new car makes people feel that owning a car is allowed from time to time.
The orange orchards that used to be dense on our road are now dotted with fast food restaurants. When a pile of ground beef was considered as tasteless and suspicious Gloppe meatballs, hamburgers suddenly became a cliche. But to the consternation of this family-conscious person, the food in these stalls is not all. Driving into a minefield that has become bad behavior. Wandering teenagers are everywhere. With the help of employees, they smoked cigarettes, blew up jukeboxes and played sexual pranks in the parking lot. The employees seem to toss and turn in front of the revolving door; Employees either resign or don't put on a show, which often puts employers in trouble.
None of this will reduce sales. A steady stream of customers let 20 drivers jump around, and the parking lot has 125 car parking spaces, which is full and is the place where the younger generation goes to town. Faced with this success, in 1948, Dick and Mike made a bold, perhaps stupid decision, stepped back, reassessed, closed the door and waited for a while. Dick and Mike ask themselves how to prepare hamburgers, French fries and milkshakes as effectively as possible. They want to know, how do they streamline their business to maximize profits? How do they distinguish themselves from other drivers? How do they speed up the service? "
In the process of finding the answer, they got inspiration from Levitt, a roller coaster in the East. This enterprising family applied the logic of Ford T-assembly line to the housing construction in Long Island, new york, where a large number of houses were needed to meet the rapidly expanding suburbs. The goal of the McDonald brothers is to imitate this prefabricated thinking when preparing and serving food: "Leviton on bread."
First, the brothers analyzed their business receipts to determine the best-selling products and cut the menu from 25 to 9 most popular products instead of eating expensive labor-intensive barbecues. Dick secretly disguised himself as a freelance writer and ventured to Los Angeles to find the trade secrets of the candy industry. He found inspiration in the cone of a handmade candy machine used to make mint pies. Dick invited a friend with a mechanical mind to design an automatic condiment dispenser, which can spray ketchup or mustard accurately at the press of a button. Mechanical press for rapidly forming beef patties. In order to meet the demand for milkshakes, Dick and Mike bought eight state-of-the-art mixers, called multi-mixers, which enabled them to produce five cups of foamed drinks at a time on each machine. The surplus can be put in the refrigerator and taken away at any time. Crucially, in the new business model of the brother company, customers are not allowed to ask for replacement. The brothers said that they provided choices and accelerated the pace.
In order to carry out the next stage of renovation, they retreated to the tennis court behind their home in the dark. They planned the operation with a thick piece of red chalk and designed an assembly line for preparing and distributing food. Workers can barbecue meat (1/kloc-0.40 patties per second) and French fries (900 servings per hour) most effectively on the assembly line, and deliver the whole meal to hungry customers within 20 seconds. After they stopped, a rare desert rainstorm came and washed away the traces of their paintings. The next day, the Stokes conspired again.
This hamburger dance helped Dick and Mike solve the problem of expensive employees. Attractive drivers will soon be driven out of the picture: customers will have to get off the bus and go to the window to order food. When they are there, they can stare at the "fish tank" and marvel at their well-made and efficient kitchen. The new employees are all men, wearing neat and conservative paper hats and white uniforms to instill a clean and accurate surgical atmosphere in them. The two brothers think that female employees bring unnecessary interference.
The cost table of reincarnation surgery is. Considering the lower labor cost, the brothers can now charge a few cents less than the petition. A hamburger 15 cents, a bag of French fries 10 cents, and a milkshake with triple cream for 20 cents. Dick and Mike are counting on their reduced operating costs and large sales to make considerable profits. Someone drove into the parking lot, but no one jumped out and drove away. Others regret the old, longer menus and the inability to customize them. The two brothers began to let the employees park their cars in front of the restaurant, so the place didn't look very good. Plastic surgery is a disaster.
In the past four months, for no particular reason, a miraculous improvement has taken place. The taxi came, followed by the construction workers and the children. Soon, rows of hungry customers began to fill the counter, and the appearance of these customers attracted others. Sales are so hot that the two brothers posted a picture with a rising thermometer on the front window, which is a neat picture to show off sales. Dick said that when the number reaches 6.5438+0 million, the artist will add an explosion at the top. Profits soared to a huge profit of $654.38 million per year, which allowed them to participate in their personal car fantasies and upgrade to the latest Cadillac on the market, including three Cadillac, one of which was for Mac's wife. Dick is not married. )
Hamburg searchers seem really willing to exchange speed and price for choice. The quality of food is not the main attraction. Perhaps, the brothers' French fries are an exception, it is a model of crispness and freshness. Mike has a wizard who opens potatoes and uses chemical principles to perfect the formula through hard experiments and mistakes. The magic step is to dry tawny Idaho in desert air to break down sugar, which is a key step if it takes time. Patience is as noble as accuracy: improper blanching, or trying to speed up the process in any way, will certainly produce greasy and soft potatoes, as the petition says. This is the arena where McDonald's recasts the formula. On this stage, slowness and caution are necessary and permissible ingredients.
In addition to the long queue, the two brothers also have a sign that they have a blow. Maybe the imitator came to study the ballet performance displayed behind the shop window. When these imitators ask for details they can't see, Dick and Mike share business secrets happily. Finally, they realized that they could put a price tag on the formula and then pay more cash. 1952 A few months after their quick-frozen supplier Primex published an article praising McDonald's French fries business in American catering magazines, the brothers posted their own advertisements. They promised readers "the most important 60 seconds of their lives", and the advertising center's
It is their unique hexagonal building, which shines brightly. Their "revolutionary development of catering industry" has now been sold to all parties concerned. A cover story is exactly the same as this hype, boasting that McDonald's "sells 1 10,000 hamburgers and 160 tons of French fries every year" and discloses a huge total income of $277,000 per year. That's it. For the ambitious burger tycoon, San Bernardo became the country of Oz.
The more honest people in this group invested $950 in the initial fee for this formula, not just visiting and stealing ideas. At the top of the list is Neil Fox, an oil executive in Phoenix. His family thinks he is a madman who has devoted himself to the high-end burger industry. Dick and Mike also think Fox is crazy because they want to use their own names instead of their own. They say the word "McDonald's" has no meaning outside San Bernardino. Fox explained to his brothers that he thought their names were "Lucky".
In addition to the name, in order to make money, Fox also got an operation manual, and a staff member who was seconded for a week showed him the rope. In the process of redesigning the idea of "Driving in", he also got a hot-selling blueprint of the news building, from which he could build a specially designed red and white ceramic tile restaurant to attract attention and decorate sacred cars. Dick, who is more market-minded among young people, insists on his own point of view: he imagines a pair of parabolas hanging on the building. More and more people are opposed to the practice of setting up billboards on new roads, which forces designers to design these buildings themselves as signs. Bold, even wild designs are sweeping the road, becoming the standard sign of roadside joints and restaurants, better attracting drivers' attention and punctuation. The roof is towering, darts are flying, and the stars are shining and colorful.
A future architect hesitated, trying to persuade his brothers to give up the idea of arches; Another complaint was told what to do, and implied that the arches were too rough, and Dick must have broken them in a nightmare. Finally, in Stanley meston, the MacDonald brothers found an acplice, and meston drew a 65,438+02× 65,438+06-foot red and white tile work area, which is easy to be approached and seen by customers. According to the instructions, he installed a golden arch decorated with neon on the building, which rose like a rainbow from the side of the building, making the building look like it was about to take off. The building itself is now more like a signboard, attracting the attention of motorists.
Hundreds of inquiries poured in. Carnation, a dairy supplier, is eager to acquire McDonald's and its winning formula. In order to encourage the sale of ice cream, the top management of the company put forward the suggestion of copying McDonald's nationwide. The two brothers considered an alliance and finally refused; They are content with the status quo and don't want their business and personal life to be surrounded by a huge bureaucracy. The extra work doesn't seem to be worth the potential return. "More places, more problems," Mike sighed. "We will always be on the road, in motels, looking for places and managers." It's much easier to just sell manuals and blueprints and charge $950.
One day, a well-dressed and tough 52-year-old salesman from Chicago was looking for luck in the grotesque toilets on E Street. His name is ray kroc. Ray Joan's
The man who made a fortune in McDonald's and the woman who donated all the wealth of McDonald's by Lisa Naples were published by Penguin Publishing Group (a branch of Penguin Random House Co., Ltd.) in Darden, 20 165438,1October 5. Copyright? Lisa Naples