Word: kroc
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JACQUES PEPIN has more than enough credentials to assess the role of Ray Kroc and McDonald's. But he turned out to be a better choice than we initially thought. Not only is Pepin a great chef, food writer and TV host on PBS (Jacques Pepin's Kitchen: Cooking with Claudine), but early in his career he learned about American cuisine by working for Howard Johnson's, thus becoming a veteran of the fast-food wars...
...standardized designs, mass-marketed through new forms of mass media and spewed forth in cookie-cutter form from big factories and studios. This included not only consumer goods like Ford's cars, but everything from William Levitt's suburban homes to David Sarnoff's nationally broadcast shows to Ray Kroc's Big Macs. Mass production made all sorts of stuff, from toothpaste to TVs, more affordable, but it also led to a certain conformity. And because of economies of scale, it had a centralizing effect: power shifted from local craftsmen, shopkeepers and family-run businesses to big factories, chains...
...brothers created the first self-service drive-through, offering speedy service and low prices. As the franchise expanded, Maurice handled operations while Richard focused on marketing, designing the now ubiquitous Golden Arches and the "millions served" placards. In 1961 the brothers sold the business for $2.7 million to Ray Kroc, once their milk-shake mixer salesman...
Even as early as 1879, Heinz touted the benefits of its ready-made catsup with this ad: "For the blessed relief of mother and other women of the household." In 1953, a year before Ray Kroc raised McDonald's now ubiquitous Golden Arches, a Swanson food technician named Betty Cronin created the "TV dinner." Back then, when meal preparation took an average two hours, the frozen meal on a three-section aluminum tray was lauded for helping mothers "burdened with baby-boom offspring." Today the once labor-intensive process of preparing a meal has been shrink-wrapped to a tidy...
...Okies on the road in the Dust Bowl), and some are epic (the jeep in the war). The symbiotic ecology of car and economy, which continues to this day, gave rise to the motel (the first chain, Holiday Inn, started in 1952) and to the Golden Arches (Ray Kroc bought the fledgling roadside food chain of the McDonald brothers in 1961). Las Vegas grew out of traffic, with Californians driving in on Highway 91 at the rate of 20,000 a weekend (they're still coming...