History



Drive-thru menu

The first McDonald's restaurant was founded in 1940 by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald in San Bernardino, California. The McDonald's restaurant gained fame after 1948, when the brothers implemented their innovative "Speedee Service System", an assembly-line hamburger construction and self-serve operation.

In 1954, entrepreneur and milkshake-mixer salesman Ray Kroc became interested in the McDonald's restaurant when he learned of its extraordinary capacity. Upon seeing the restaurant in operation, he approached the McDonald brothers with a proposition to open new McDonald's restaurants, with himself as the first franchisee. Kroc worked hard to sell McDonald's. He even attempted to prevail on his wartime acquaintance with Walt Disney, in the failed hope of opening a McDonald's at the soon-to-be-opened Disneyland. Eventually he opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois. It was an immediate success.

Kroc's new company was originally named "McDonald's Systems Inc.", and was founded March 2, 1955. In 1960, the company was renamed "McDonald's Corporation".

One of Kroc's marketing insights was his decision to market McDonald's hamburgers to families, and particularly to children. In the early 1960s, a Washington, DC McDonald's franchisee named Oscar Goldstein sponsored a children's show called Bozo's Circus, starring a clown played by Willard Scott. When the show was cancelled, Goldstein hired Scott as McDonald's new mascot, "Ronald McDonald". The character was eventually spread to the rest of the country via an advertising campaign, although it was decided that Scott was too plump for the role. An entire cast of McDonaldland characters was developed.

Under Kroc's agreement with the McDonald brothers, he was responsible for the entire expansion process, while the brothers retained control of the production process and a share of the profits. By 1961, Kroc was frustrated with the arrangement. After some negotiation, the comfortably wealthy McDonald's brothers agreed to sell Kroc the business rights to their operation for $2.7 million, which was borrowed from a number of investors (including Princeton University). The agreement allowed the brothers to keep their original restaurant—renamed "The Big M"—which remained open until Kroc drove it out of business by opening a McDonald's just one block north. Had the brothers maintained their original agreement, which granted them 0.5% of the chain's annual revenues, they would have been collecting nearly $180 million per year today. [1]

Since that time, McDonald's has opened restaurants in countries throughout the world. On January 31, 1990 the first McDonald's Restaurant opened in Moscow, Russia. In contrast to the stereotype of McDonalds in the United States in which McDonalds is seen as the purveyor of cheap, inferior, and unhealthy food, in some parts of the world such as Russia and China, McDonald's food is seen as a status symbol and the restaurants are admired for their atmosphere and cleanliness.

The price of the Big Mac hamburger sold by McDonald's has been used by The Economist as an informal measure of purchasing power parity between two currencies, called "Big Mac Index."

The standardization of McDonalds has been emblematic of globalization. Tom Friedman proposed a McDonald's rule which was that no countries with McDonald's would go to war with each other. This "rule" was broken by the American bombing of Serbia.