Word: kroc
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Cleanliness is also a personal fetish of Kroc's that has become an awe-inspiring legend throughout the chain. Last month, on one of his incessant inspection tours around the empire, he walked into a McDonald's in Canada -and exploded like a raw potato in hot grease. "There was gum on the cement patio, cigarette butts between the wheel stops for the cars," he says. "There was rust on the wrought-iron railing, and the redwood fence needed to be restained. I went in there and said to the manager: 'You get somebody to mop this...
...Hamburger Degree. Such visits from Kroc are only one of the trials that a McDonald's licensee must endure. His courses at Hamburger U.. though short, are no snap; they cover everything from how to scrape a grill to how to post a double-entry ledger. "This is a hard-working place," says "Dean" Donald Breitkrentz, 36, a onetime candymaker. "Some of these people put in 14 hours a day. They get up at 6:30 in the morning to study...
Before receiving his Hamburgerology degree, the licensee must lay out an average of $150,000, at least half of it in cash. For that, he gets to lead a life regimented by Ray Kroc and subordinates. To begin with, the licensee has little choice of where he will operate. Headquarters executives pick out all the sites, buy (or sometimes lease) the land, arrange for construction of the store, and rent it with equipment to the licensee for 8.5% of gross, plus a 3% annual franchise fee. "We're just like the Mafia; we skim it right...
...licensee gets some latitude in selecting which local promotions and public service projects to bankroll, but no choice whatever as to whether to be a do-gooder or not. Community service is a Ray Kroc obsession, and every McDonald's licensee is expected to spend a generous portion of profits on it. Headquarters gives each licensee a thick book of suggested promotions and constantly prods him to come up with new ones on his own. In New York's Harlem, Lee Dunham, one of McDonald's 60 black licensees, serves free hamburgers to unwed mothers every Saturday...
...license applications a year and accepts only about 10% of them. The company gives preference to existing licensees, but values business or professional experience of any kind. Every year large numbers of executives, doctors and lawyers abandon their careers to take up the spatula. (They pretty much have to; Kroc demands that anyone putting up more than half the price of a McDonald's license work full time under the arches...