McDONALD'S

McDONALD'S, the world's leading fast food restaurant chain. In 1948, the brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald converted their San Bernardino, California, drive-in to a take-out restaurant serving mainly inexpensive hamburgers and French fries prepared assembly-line style. Ray A. Kroc (1902–1984) became the brothers' franchising agent in 1954, and expanded the company nationwide, opening his first McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois, the next year. Using business-format franchising, Kroc maintained strict corporate-level control of the McDonald's concept, service, and products. Kroc's chief financial officer, Harry Sonneborn, created a system of carefully choosing sites for new stores, then leasing them to franchisees, making rents an important source of corporate revenue and the company the world's largest owner of commercial real estate.

McDonald's mass-marketing strategy emphasized family-oriented and "all-American" themes, "quality, service, cleanliness, and value," and continual innovations, such as the Big Mac in 1968, a line of breakfast foods in the mid-1970s, child-oriented Happy Meals in 1979, and Chicken McNuggets in 1982. In 2001, McDonald's, with 30,000 stores and 395,000 employees serving 46 million people each day in 121 countries, achieved sales of $14.9 billion—over 60 percent of that outside the United States—earning $1.6 billion in net income. The international expansion of McDonald's has made its logo, the golden arches, a leading symbol of globalization and American culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kroc, Ray, with Robert Anderson. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's. Chicago: Regnery, 1977.

Love, John F. McDonald's: Behind the Arches. Rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1995.

Mariani, John. America Eats Out: An Illustrated History of Restaurants, Taverns, Coffee Shops, Speakeasies, and Other Establishments That Have Fed Us for 350 Years. New York: Morrow, 1991.

Jeffrey T. Coster

See also Food, Fast .