Word: brooks
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...chain is going on to new triumphs: adding an average of one new outlet every day to its 2,500 in the U.S., and hanging on every one a sign reading OVER 12 BILLION SOLD to commemorate an event that occurred during August. Executives at world headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., a Chicago suburb, have not bothered to investigate who ate the 12 billionth hamburger, when or in which restaurant, because they know that its consumption constituted only an ephemeral milestone. In four months or less, given the current intensity of the nation's hamburger hunger, those signs will...
...make sure that the restaurant floor is mopped at proper intervals and the parking lot tidied up hourly. If a manager tries to sell his customers hamburgers that have been off the grill more than ten minutes or coffee more than 30 minutes old, Big Brother in Oak Brook will find out. Headquarters executives calculate exactly how much food each restaurant can be expected to throw away each day, and are ready to chastise a chronically deviant manager who has no good explanation...
Careers Abandoned. Oddly, in a chain with McDonald's passion for standardization, licensees get neither food nor supplies from Oak Brook. Restaurants buy their own, mostly through regional cooperatives, though naturally the purchases must meet rigid headquarters specifications. The basic hamburger patty must be a machine-cut, 1.6-oz. chunk of "pure" beef - that is, no lungs, hearts, cereal, soybeans or other filler - with no more than 19% fat content, v. 30% for some competing ham burgers. The 3½-in.-wide bun must have a higher-than-normal sugar content for faster browning...
McDonald's outlets have enough massed buying power - they purchase 1% of all the beef wholesaled in the nation - to line up steady supplies at stable prices in all normal times, and Oak Brook will help out in a pinch. Headquarters executives are currently buying up live steers with "contributions" levied on licensees, who get the meat back in the form of patties. McDonald's chiefs figure that they have corralled enough steers to get the company through the current beef shortage and avoid a price boost when the ceiling comes off retail beef prices this week...
...chairman intends to stick around to oversee that growth too. His undiminished vigor is evident to anyone visiting Oak Brook headquarters where the offices are open cubicles and Kroc's shouting rings through them all (executives who need some peace and quiet retire to an elaborate "think tank" equipped with a 700-gal. waterbed...