McDonald’s Company History

According to “McDonalds Corporation”, McDonald’s is the world’s leading fast food service organization. They generate more than $40 billion in system wide sales. Over 30,000 restaurants are operated in more than 100 countries on six continents. Some very key important dates that “McDonald’s Corporation” includes on their webpage is the first McDonald’s opening which was opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1948 in San Bernardino, California. In 1954, Ray Croc gains the rights to set up a McDonald’s restaurant in most of the country. The year of 1965 is the year that McDonald’s goes public. In 1960, the slogan “Look for the Golden Arches” is used for advertising this restaurant. 1983 is when Chicken McNuggets are introduced. Some early history of McDonald’s is the way the first menu was organized and what was sold, it goes as follows. The menu was quite simple which consisted of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, french fries, shakes, soft drinks, and apple pie. In early McDonald’s restaurants, there were no tables to be able to sit at, no jukeboxes, or even a telephone. This company attracted mainly family instead of teenagers and the most impressive aspect this company had was that of how the McDonald’s workers did their jobs. Each worker's steps had been carefully choreographed, like an assembly line, to ensure maximum efficiency. The savings in preparation time, and the resulting increase in volume, allowed the McDonalds to lower the price of a hamburger from 30 cents to 15 cents. Ray Kroc, a seller of Multimixer milkshake machines suggested that McDonald’s was a ticket to success and that they franchise McDonald’s throughout the country. When the brothers hesitated of this opportunity, Kroc offered to do it for them and he immediately returned to his home outside of Chicago with rights to set up McDonald's restaurants throughout the country, except in a handful of territories in the states of California and Arizona which were already licensed by the McDonald brothers. Kroc's first McDonald's restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, near Chicago, on April 15, 1955. As any business undergoes the same situation, obstacles and problems arose for Kroc when starting up the business. Some of the problems were first the adaptation of the McDonald's building design to a northern climate. A basement had to be installed to house a furnace, and adequate ventilation was difficult, as exhaust fans sucked out warm air in the winter and cool air in the summer. The most interesting problem in my opinion would be that of which Kroc had a hard time reproducing McDonald’s rich and tasty French fries. The way they did their French fries was as follows. Kroc and his crew members tried duplicating the brothers' method by leaving just a little peel for flavor, cutting the potatoes into shoestrings, and rinsing the strips in cold water, as a result the fries turned into mush. After many hours on the phone with the McDonald brothers, Kroc found the solution to his French fries problems. The McDonald brothers stored their potatoes outside in wire bins, and the warm California breeze dried them out and cured them, slowly turning the sugars into starch. His fries in his opinion were better tasting then the McDonald’s original recipe. The growth of McDonald’s grew very slowly for the first three years of its existence but by the year 1958, 34 restaurants were now in place. The year of 1959 is when fate starting getting on the side of Kroc. He managed to open 67 restaurants which brought the total to more than 100 restaurants in production. In 1960 the McDonald's advertising campaign "Look for the Golden Arches" gave sales a big boost. To Kroc’s belief, he believed that advertising was an investment that would in the end come back many times over, which advertising has always played a key role in the development of the McDonald's Corporation. In 1962 McDonald's replaced its "Speedee" the hamburger