Word: kroc
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...will now be ruined without it. But would any sane businessman have purchased either of the two expansion franchises last year for $10 million each if they were certain financial losers? A baseball team can be used as a tax shelter for rich men like McDonald's owner Ray Kroc or Seagram's magnate Charles Bronfman, but shrewd businessmen do not generally invest in predictably unprofitable enterprises...
Fanciers of McDonald's hamburgers, who are used to giving their orders to teenagers, must have been puzzled by the bald heads and bulky bodies behind the Golden Arches last Friday. No wonder. At a store in San Diego, Founder Ray Kroc, 74, handed over French fries to waiting customers; in Baltimore, McDonald's president, Edward Schmitt, 51, picked up a spatula to flip burgers. It was "store day" at McDonald's, and from Portland to Pensacola, executives left their offices to don paper hats and hustle behind the counter...
...things really began to boom Kroc found he needed more than inventiveness, or even his "special sauce" to run the operation. He therefore established Hamburger Central, the wall-less office near Chicago where Kroc and his burger consultants could set the party line for franchisers. In the center of one floor, a cone-shaped think tank, containing a circular water bed and a device which projects the user's alpha waves onto a screen, facilitates important decisions. (Employees may meet together within the womb-like room, unless they are of different sexes). Hamburger Central directives are communicated to the "professors...
...ruling class. Once they make it on to the ship of state or of class, they try their hardest to pull in the gangplank to success along with them. As McDonald's reached Fortune 500 status in the late 60's, it turned its back on its entrepreneurial origins. Kroc had touted the franchising scheme, for instance, as a kind of popularization of big business, an opportunity to return to the era of Mom and Pop restaurants in spite of an increasingly concentrated economy. But as Kroc's company grew, it began to tread mercilessly on the franchisers...
...brass, with the blemishes retouched. The authors dug way back into hamburger history, and came up with a lot of dirt that the company hides behind the spotless view presented to the public--such as the $200,000 contribution to the 1972 Nixon campaign that left Ray Kroc's ketchup stained hands just a few weeks before the Price Commission cancelled its price rollback on the Quarter Pounder. The author's style is marred only by a few racially offensive comments, apparently made for sensational effect, such as the suggestion that the black ghetto population if denied local ownership...