Apparently their founder was rather anal about hygiene.
His name was Raymond Kroc, and he was a genuine visionary. Amazingly enough, the whole thing did actually start out with two brothers: Maurice and Richard McDonald.
As a milk-shake machine salesman, Raymond Kroc routinely paid visits to clients. But when the fifty-two-year-old salesman traveled from his home near Chicago to southern California to meet two of his biggest clients, the result was anything but routine.
Maurice and Richard McDonald had left New Hampshire in 1930, seeking to make their fortune in Hollywood. Unable to strike it big in Tinseltown, the brothers wound up as proprietors of a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, a dusty outpost fifty-five miles east of Los Angeles.
While most restaurants bought one or two Prince Castle Multimixers, which could mix five shakes at once, the McDonalds had purchased eight. And Kroc was curious to see what kind of operation needed the capacity to churn forty milk shakes at one time. So he trekked to San Bernardino, and what he saw there changed his life. Kroc stood in the shadows of the stand's two radiant golden arches, which lit up the sky at dusk, and saw lines of people snaking outside the octagonal restaurant. Through the building's all-glass walls, he watched the male crew, clad in white paper hats and white uniforms, hustle about the squeaky-clean restaurant, dishing out burgers, fries and shakes to the working-class families that drove up. "Something was definitely happening here, I told myself," Kroc later wrote in his autobiography, Grinding It Out. "This had to be the most amazing merchandising operation I'd ever seen."
Unlike so many food-service operations Kroc had come across, this joint hummed like a finely tuned engine. As Forbes put it: "In short, the brothers brought efficiency to a slap-dash business." They offered a nine-item menu -- burgers, french fries, shakes, and pies -- eliminated seating, and used paper and plastic utensils instead of glass and china. They had also devised the rudiments of a hamburger assembly line so they could deliver orders in less than sixty seconds. And the prices were remarkably low: fifteen-cent burgers and ten-cent fries. Kroc instantly knew he had seen the future. "When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who'd just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull," Kroc said. "That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I'd seen during the day. Visions of McDonald's restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain."
Hygiene was indeed one of his obsessions. And following the brothers (and flying in the face of all previous practice, which followed the precept 'what the eye doesn't see') he made a point of having no barrier between the food buying area and the food preparation area. Rather than prevent the customer seeing the dodgy stuff that was going on back there, Kroc made sure that everyone could see that there
was no dodgy stuff going on - and that 'back there' and out here were effectively one indivisible space.
Waste was another. I remember reading about how he transformed the transport of liquids in the American (and, ultimately, global) food industry, with the introduction of straight-edged containers. McDonalds used to get its milk and other liquids in barrels, plastic versions of the barrels that had transported liquids since liquids had been transported. As one of his early colleagues put it: "Anyone else would look at a pallet of milk and see a load of barrels of milk. Ray would look at it and see the gaps in between the barrels. It used to drive him nuts."
It's all in a genuinely fascinating book called
Behind the Arches. Required reading, I'd suggest, for simple-minded glibsters who have any interest in learning stuff rather than sneering their way through life. (And I speak as one who believes the fast food industry to be among the greatest threats we face, and regards sugar, fat and salt as the horsemen of our ongoing apocalypse.)
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