History of McDonald's

In the late forties, Dick and Mac McDonald were looking for ways to improve their small drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. Instead of trying to simply change their business a little, which was already allowing them to earn a decent amount of $200,000 a year, they invented an entirely new concept based on fast service, low prices and high volume.

They switched to self-service at the counter, abandoning the 25-item barbecue menu in favor of a limited menu of just nine items: hamburger, cheeseburger, three types of soft drinks, milk, coffee, potato chips and pies, which were added shortly after the restaurant reopened French fries and milkshakes. They remodeled the kitchen, where all the equipment was made of stainless steel and designed for mass production and assembly line speed. They also dramatically reduced the already competitive price of hamburgers from 30 cents to 15 cents.

When the new McDonald Brothers restaurant reopened in December 1948, it took some time to get the business going. But it soon became obvious that they had captured the spirit of post-war America. By the mid-fifties, their small hamburger factory was generating $350,000 in annual revenue. Sales have nearly doubled from their previous restaurant. During peak hours, it was common to see a crowd of 150 customers around the tiny hamburger stand.

Word of their success quickly spread, and after an article about their restaurant was published in American Restaurant Magazine in 1952, they began receiving 300 inquiries a month from all over the country. Their first licensee was Neil Fox, and the brothers decided that his drive-in restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, would be a prototype for the chain they wanted to create. The building, clad in red and white tiles, with a sloped roof and golden arches on the sides, became the model for the first wave of McDonald's restaurants to appear in the country, and a permanent symbol of the industry.

Crawling around their tennis court, the McDonald brothers chalked out an assembly line-style kitchen design that was twice the size of their first restaurant's kitchen. By studying the movement of workers during the cooking process, they were able to arrange equipment most efficiently. The rain washed away the chalk, and the brothers had to redo everything again, improving the design. They could not have dreamed of such success for their business in San Bernardino, but the potential of the franchising concept, of which they were pioneers, was far from being fully exploited.

For just one thousand dollars, licensees received the name "McDonald's", a fundamental description of the high-speed service system, and could, within one to two weeks, use the services of Art Bender, the brothers' first employee at the counter at the new restaurant, who helped the licensees get started. But in 1954, a traveling salesman selling milkshake machines, Ray Kroc, saw with his own eyes the McDonald brothers restaurant. The quick service restaurant industry was ready to take off.

Ray Kroc was 52 years old. At this age, many people are thinking about retirement. And Kroc founded the company that became the McDonald's we know today. Kroc, who dropped out of school at age 15 to work as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I, was a dreamer...a traveling salesman who was constantly looking for a final product to sell. He started out selling paper cups to street vendors in Chicago, dabbled in real estate in Florida, and finally built a nice business as the exclusive distributor of Multimixers. It was the Multimixers that first brought him to the McDonald Brothers hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California. After all, if he could discover the secret of how they were able to sell 20,000 cocktails a month, how many more cars could he sell them? But when Kroc showed up at the brothers' restaurant one morning in 1954 and saw a fast-moving line of customers buying whole bags of burgers and fries, he had one single thought: “This system will work everywhere. Everywhere!"

The McDonald brothers did not want to personally oversee the expansion of their concept throughout the country, so Ray Kroc became their exclusive franchising agent. The great traveling salesman had found his final product. On March 2, 1955, Kroc founded a new franchise company called McDonald's System, Inc. On April 15, 1955, his McDonald's restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, with the help of Art Bender, who provided diners with the first McDonald Brothers hamburger and now Ray Kroc's first McDonald's hamburger. Bender then opened Kroc's first licensed McDonald's restaurant in Fresno, California, and retired as the owner of seven restaurants.

Kroc retained the McDonald brothers' principles of a limited menu, quality food, an assembly-line production system, and fast, friendly service, while adding its own high standards of cleanliness. Quality, service culture, cleanliness and accessibility - KCH and D - remain the main principles of McDonald's to this day. But it was in the field of franchising that Kroc applied his knowledge as a traveling salesman and created a successfully operating system. This was largely dictated by necessity.

Kroc's agreement with the McDonald brothers limited royalties to $950 per restaurant and service fees of just 1.9% of the restaurant's turnover, of which 0.5% went to the McDonald brothers. In addition, even earlier, Kroc decided that the McDonald's system would not sell equipment to license holders or provide them with supplies and products. However, the company bought or leased most of the real estate where the restaurants were located. And this program soon provided a great advantage over its competitors.

It was in Kroc's interests to do everything possible to ensure that license holders increased turnover. If they failed, he would fail with them, and vice versa. Kroc used his persuasive powers as a salesman, persuading early licensees to sign contracts... identifying promising suppliers... inspiring the first management team... and convincing lenders to finance his fledgling company. Kroc believed in his dream so much that until 1961 he did not take a dollar of salary from the company. The formula worked.

At the end of 1956, the 14 McDonald's restaurants had sales of $1.2 million and sold about 50 million hamburgers. In just 4 years there were already 228 restaurants with a turnover of 37.6 million dollars. By mid-1960, the company had sold 400 million hamburgers.

But Kroc knew that to continue to grow, he needed to buy the business from the McDonald brothers to remove the contractual restrictions under which he operated. Despite the successful operation of the restaurants, Kroc's company's net profit in 1960 was only $77,000, and its long-term debts were $5.7 million. The brothers asked for $2.7 million in cash, with $700,000 going to taxes, leaving them with $1 million each. A reasonable price for the time, the brothers thought, for inventing the fast food industry. In 1961, Kroc managed to obtain a loan against the company's real estate. Although it ultimately cost him $14 million to pay off the loan, he bought control over his growing system.

That same year, in the basement of a restaurant in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, he opened Hamburger University, a training class for new licensees and restaurant managers, which grew into an international training center for senior management using advanced training methods.

Milestones of our growth in the United States included: turnover, number of restaurants, number of hamburgers sold, and establishing standards of quality, service culture, cleanliness and availability (CCA) never before seen in the quick service industry. By 1963 we were selling one million hamburgers a day, Ray Kroc sold the billionth hamburger to Art Linkletter during a television show.

The first national meeting of restaurant licensees was held in Hollywood, Florida in 1965 to commemorate the chain's tenth anniversary. And in the same year, McDonald's became a joint stock company, putting its shares on public sale at a price of $22.5. Within weeks, stock prices soared to $49 per share.

For Ray Kroc, years without a paycheck paid off. The first shares he sold were worth $3 million, and the remaining shares he held were worth $32 million. Even June Martino, Kroc's longtime partner and secretary at Multimixer, shared in his success, selling $300,000 worth of stock and keeping an additional $5 million in stock. A year later, on July 5, 1966, McDonald's was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a major achievement for the hamburger chain. In 1967, the price of a hamburger at McDonald's increased from 15 to 18 cents, the first increase since the McDonald brothers set the price at 15 cents two decades ago. And the next year, the thousandth restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, not far from Kroc's first restaurant.

By 1970, nearly 16,000 McDonald's restaurants in all 50 states and four countries outside the United States had sales of $587 million. That same year, a restaurant in Bloomington, Minnesota became the first to achieve $1 million in annual sales, and a restaurant in Waikiki, Hawaii, became the first to serve breakfast. The following year, the first McTown opened in Chula Vista, California. McDonald's crossed the billion-dollar sales mark in 1972 and split its shares for the fifth time, bringing the original 1965 stock of 100 shares to 1,836 shares.

In 1975, the first McAuto restaurant opened in Sierra Vista, Arizona. This new service system now accounts for almost half of the turnover of all McDonald's restaurants in the United States. That same year, the company's 3,076 restaurants operating in 20 countries generated $2.5 billion in sales. The following year, the 20 billionth hamburger was sold.

In 1977, Ray Kroc was named senior chairman of McDonald's, and Fred Turner, a grill man at Kroc's first restaurant, was named chairman of the board. That same year, more than 1,000 restaurants had sales exceeding $1 million, and 11 restaurants exceeded the $2 million mark. By the time of the Silver Anniversary in 1980, 6,263 restaurants in 27 countries were generating sales of $6.2 billion and more than 35 billion hamburgers had been sold. On January 14, 1984, Ray Kroc died, fulfilling his McDonald's dreams. That same year, his company's sales exceeded $10 billion, 50 billion hamburgers were sold, and there were 8,300 restaurants in 36 countries. A McDonald's restaurant opened every 17 hours worldwide, and the average restaurant generated annual sales of $1,264,000. By 1990, trade turnover had increased to $18.7 billion, and the number of hamburgers sold exceeded 80 billion. 11,800 McDonald's restaurants operated in 54 countries.

And in 1990, the company's leadership changed for only the third time in our history: Fred Turner became Senior Chairman, passing the baton to Mike Quinlan, named chairman and senior executive, who began working at McDonald's part-time in 1963 as a sales clerk. mail sorting.

As a testament to our systematic and consistent efforts over the years, McDonald's has been the only company in the Standard & Poor 500 to report 100 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth in revenue, earnings and earnings per share since 1965. . It's no surprise that Better Investing Magazine named McDonald's the most popular company and its common stock the most widely held... And Life magazine named Ray Kroc one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century.

Ray Kroc's dreams of growing the company in the United States were fully realized, but the story was just beginning. McDonald's is taking over the world. While experts were surprised at the rapid development of the hamburger chain in the United States, our company was preparing another surprise for them in the form of expanding the system outside the United States.

We opened our first restaurant outside the United States on June 1, 1967, in Canada, and the race was on. Today there are over 1,000 restaurants in Canada. When McDonald's Canada introduced pizza to its menu in 1992, they overnight became the largest retail chain selling this dish.

After a few false starts in the Caribbean and the Netherlands, where we tried to adapt our menu to local tastes, we realized that what worked so well in the US could work almost anywhere. A strong local partner, well trained and fully involved in the business, traditional McDonald's menu, strict implementation of our procedures and maintaining C&D is the formula for success.

One of the most striking examples is Japan. There, Den Fujita, owner of a company importing handbags, shoes and clothing, became a joint venture partner with McDonald's in 1971. Fujita opened his first restaurant on July 20, 1971, in a tiny 500-square-foot space located in the heart of the Ginza shopping district in Tokyo. It took 39 hours to build this site, although such construction usually takes 3 months. The restaurant had $3,000 in sales on its first day, and Fujita never looked back. At the end of 1993, McDonald's became the most successful restaurant chain in Japan, with about 2,300 restaurants, the turnover of which was almost double that of its nearest competitor.

In 1971 we also opened our first restaurants in Germany and Australia. Today there are over 600 restaurants in Germany, and about 635 in Australia. In France and England, the first restaurants appeared in the early 1970s; currently there are 625 enterprises in France, and more than 700 in England.

These 6 countries - Canada, Japan, Germany, Australia, France and England - are known as McDonald's Big Six because they account for approximately 80% of the restaurant's operating revenues overseas. McDonald's restaurants opened in other countries are playing an increasingly important role in our company's operations. For example, in 1997, the turnover of 10,752 restaurants in 108 countries was 16.5 billion.

Some restaurant openings abroad have been so significant that they have made headlines around the world. For example, on the cold morning of January 31, 1990, more than 30,000 people lined up at the first 23,680-square-foot McDonald's restaurant in Moscow. Before this, no restaurant had served so many customers in one day.

The restaurant's opening was the culmination of years of negotiations that began during the 1976 Montreal Olympics and culminated in the largest joint venture agreement between the Soviet Union and a catering company.

Soon Russian workers were serving 40,000 to 50,000 visitors a day. In its first full year of operation, the restaurant served 15 million people. To meet ever-increasing demand, we built a $45 million food processing plant in the suburbs of Moscow - one of the most modern food processing plants in Europe.

The McDonald's restaurant in Beijing, which opened on April 23, 1992, broke the first day of operation record set in Moscow. 40,000 visitors were served here. A five-year joint venture between McDonald's and the General Corporation of Beijing Agriculture, Industry and Commerce has created a network of local farmers, manufacturers and other suppliers to supply the restaurant with everything it needs. New records: two restaurants opened in Poland in 1992, and each surpassed Moscow and Beijing in the number of orders on the opening day. The restaurant in Warsaw, which opened in June, had 13,304 orders, but this record was broken in Katowice 6 months later. McDonald's also proved extremely popular in other countries that were formerly behind the Iron Curtain: the Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary and Slovenia.

We began to open restaurants in other previously undeveloped regions of the world. In the Middle East, the first restaurant opened in Tel Aviv in October 1993. Restaurants have since been added to Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, reflecting our long-term growth plans in the region.

Respecting local customs, McDonald's restaurants in Arab countries serve food in accordance with Islamic cooking laws, especially beef. In addition, there are no figures or posters depicting Ronald McDonald in restaurants in Saudi Arabia, because... Islamic faith prohibits the depiction of idols. The first kosher McDonald's opened in early 1995 in a suburb of Jerusalem. It does not offer dairy products and is closed on Saturdays. In India, Big Mac is made from lamb and the sandwich is called Maharaja Mac.

The growth of McDonald's domestically and internationally proved Ray Kroc right when he first started McDonald's and thought, "This will work everywhere."

Let's look at the very first establishment under this sign in the world.

The very first establishment of the brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened in 1940 in the Californian town of San Bernardino. It was an ordinary cafe for motorists. It brought them about $200,000 a year, but Richard and Maurice were constantly looking for ways to improve it. The very first restaurant was called “McDonald’s Famous Barbeque” and offered its visitors about forty types of fried meat.

In the photo above you can see exactly the original restaurant in its original form.

When in 1948 the brothers realized that their main income came from selling hamburgers, a brilliant idea came to their minds. It was a risky step, but they decided to do it and converted the restaurant’s interior into a hamburger production line. The menu also changed, now it included several types of hamburgers, orange juice and chips, and a year later the menu was replenished with French fries and, beloved by all of America, Coca-Cola. A limited menu and fast conveyor service allowed the price of hamburgers to be reduced to 15 cents, which was much lower than what other establishments in the city offered. The sandwiches sold out with a bang!

They were the first in the world to introduce a completely new concept of fast food, based on fast service, low prices and high sales volume. They introduced self-service in the hall and remodeled the kitchen, changing equipment with the expectation of mass production and greater speed of preparation of portions. This sharply reduced the prices of hamburgers, which formed the basis of their range.

Word of their success quickly spread, and after an article about their restaurant was published in American Restaurant Magazine in 1952, they began receiving 300 inquiries a month from all over the country. Their first licensee was Neil Fox, and the brothers decided that his drive-in restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, would be a prototype for the chain they wanted to create. The building, clad in red and white tiles, with a sloped roof and golden arches on the sides, became the model for the first wave of McDonald's restaurants to appear in the country, and a permanent symbol of the industry.

Crawling around their tennis court, the McDonald brothers chalked out an assembly line-style kitchen design that was twice the size of their first restaurant's kitchen. By studying the movement of workers during the cooking process, they were able to arrange equipment most efficiently. The rain washed away the chalk, and the brothers had to redo everything again, improving the design. They could not have dreamed of such success for their business in San Bernardino, but the potential of the franchising concept, of which they were pioneers, was far from being fully exploited.

For just a thousand dollars, licensees received the name "McDonald's", a fundamental description of the high-speed service system, and could, within one to two weeks, use the services of Art Bender, the brothers' first employee at the counter at the new restaurant, who helped the licensees get started. But in 1954, a traveling salesman selling milkshake machines, Ray Kroc, saw with his own eyes the McDonald brothers restaurant. The quick service restaurant industry was ready to take off.

In 1955, the McDonald brothers submitted licenses that would allow them to open a chain of fast food restaurants in neighboring cities. The list of cities where it planned to open branches included Phoenix, Arizona and Downey. Downey is still home to one of the very first restaurants. When it came to opening a chain of restaurants across America, the brothers took on Ray Kroc, who sold machines that made milkshakes, as partners. McDonald's became a corporation in April 1955. The first restaurant, which was opened by McDonald's, was called Original McDonald's, and it was from here that the story of success and popularity of the world-famous chain began. Coca-Cola has been a partner of McDonald's, one might say, since its founding.

Exterior of the first store in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Ray Kroc was 52 years old. At this age, many people are thinking about retirement. And Kroc founded the company that became the McDonald's we know today. Kroc, who dropped out of school at age 15 to work as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I, was a dreamer...a traveling salesman who was constantly looking for a final product to sell. He started out selling paper cups to street vendors in Chicago, dabbled in real estate in Florida, and finally built a nice business as the exclusive distributor of Multimixers. It was the Multimixers that first brought him to the McDonald Brothers hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California. After all, if he could discover the secret of how they were able to sell 20,000 cocktails a month, how many more cars could he sell them? But when Kroc showed up at the brothers' restaurant one morning in 1954 and saw a fast-moving line of customers buying whole bags of burgers and fries, he had one single thought: “This system will work everywhere. Everywhere!"

The McDonald brothers did not want to personally oversee the expansion of their concept throughout the country, so Ray Kroc became their exclusive franchising agent. The great traveling salesman had found his final product. On March 2, 1955, Kroc founded a new franchise company called McDonald's System, Inc. On April 15, 1955, his McDonald's restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, with the help of Art Bender, who provided diners with the first McDonald Brothers hamburger and now Ray Kroc's first McDonald's hamburger. Bender then opened Kroc's first licensed McDonald's restaurant in Fresno, California, and retired as the owner of seven restaurants.

Photo from 1955, this is Ray Kroc's first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Soon after their new restaurant opened, it became obvious that they had hit the nail on the head and that it was exactly what the Americans wanted. The restaurant's name quickly spread among drivers, and its red-and-white tiled building with a sloped roof and golden arches on the sides began to attract more and more customers.

But Kroc knew that to continue to grow, he needed to buy the business from the McDonald brothers to remove the contractual restrictions under which he operated. Despite the successful operation of the restaurants, Kroc's company's net profit in 1960 was only $77,000, and its long-term debts were $5.7 million. The brothers asked for $2.7 million in cash, with $700,000 going to taxes, leaving them with $1 million each. A reasonable price for the time, the brothers thought, for inventing the fast food industry. In 1961, Kroc managed to obtain a loan against the company's real estate. Although it ultimately cost him $14 million to pay off the loan, he bought control over his growing system.

McDonald's team in Des Plaines.

That same year, in the basement of a restaurant in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, he opened Hamburger University, a training class for new licensees and restaurant managers, which grew into an international training center for senior management using advanced training methods.

Milestones of growth in the United States included turnover, number of restaurants, number of hamburgers sold, and the establishment of standards of quality, service culture, cleanliness and availability (QC&A) previously unknown in the fast food industry. By 1963 we were selling one million hamburgers a day, Ray Kroc sold the billionth hamburger to Art Linkletter during a television show.

The first national meeting of restaurant licensees was held in Hollywood, Florida in 1965 to commemorate the chain's tenth anniversary. And in the same year, McDonald's became a joint stock company, putting its shares on public sale at a price of $22.5. Within weeks, stock prices soared to $49 per share.

For Ray Kroc, years without a paycheck paid off. The first shares he sold were worth $3 million, and the remaining shares he held were worth $32 million. Even June Martino, Kroc's longtime partner and secretary at Multimixer, shared in his success, selling $300,000 worth of stock and keeping an additional $5 million in stock. A year later, on July 5, 1966, McDonald's was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a major achievement for the hamburger chain. In 1967, the price of a hamburger at McDonald's increased from 15 to 18 cents, the first increase since the McDonald brothers set the price at 15 cents two decades ago. And the next year, the thousandth restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, not far from Kroc's first restaurant.

Ray Kroc has maintained the principles laid down by the McDonald brothers: a limited but high-quality menu, an assembly-line portion system and fast and friendly service, while adding the highest standards of cleanliness. The quality of food, accessibility, service culture and cleanliness to this day remain the main principles of the McDonald's fast food restaurant chain, which have won success all over the world.

By 1970, nearly 16,000 McDonald's restaurants in all 50 states and four countries outside the United States had sales of $587 million. That same year, a restaurant in Bloomington, Minnesota became the first to achieve $1 million in annual sales, and a restaurant in Waikiki, Hawaii, became the first to serve breakfast. The following year, the first McTown opened in Chula Vista, California. McDonald's crossed the billion-dollar sales mark in 1972 and split its shares for the fifth time, bringing the original 1965 stock of 100 shares to 1,836 shares.

In 1975, the first McAuto restaurant opened in Sierra Vista, Arizona. This new service system now accounts for almost half of the turnover of all McDonald's restaurants in the United States. That same year, the company's 3,076 restaurants operating in 20 countries generated $2.5 billion in sales. The following year, the 20 billionth hamburger was sold.

Exterior of the first fast food restaurant with its neon arches, 1955

In 1977, Ray Kroc was named senior chairman of McDonald's, and Fred Turner, a grill man at Kroc's first restaurant, was named chairman of the board. That same year, more than 1,000 restaurants had sales exceeding $1 million, and 11 restaurants exceeded the $2 million mark. By the time of the Silver Anniversary in 1980, 6,263 restaurants in 27 countries were generating sales of $6.2 billion and more than 35 billion hamburgers had been sold. On January 14, 1984, Ray Kroc died, fulfilling his McDonald's dreams. That same year, his company's sales exceeded $10 billion, 50 billion hamburgers were sold, and there were 8,300 restaurants in 36 countries. A McDonald's restaurant opened every 17 hours worldwide, and the average restaurant generated annual sales of $1,264,000. By 1990, trade turnover had increased to $18.7 billion, and the number of hamburgers sold exceeded 80 billion. 11,800 McDonald's restaurants operated in 54 countries.

And in 1990, the company's leadership changed for only the third time in its history: Fred Turner became Senior Chairman, passing the baton to Mike Quinlan, named chairman and senior executive, who began working at McDonald's part-time in 1963 as a sorting clerk. mail.

Fred Turner and Ray Kroc review the project of the future restaurant

As a testament to its systematic and consistent performance over many years, McDonald's has been the only company in the Standard & Poor 500 to report 100 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth in revenue, earnings, and earnings per share since 1965. It's no surprise that Better Investing Magazine named McDonald's the most popular company and its common stock the most widely held... And Life magazine named Ray Kroc one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century.

Grounds of the first McDonald's restaurant, San Bernardino, California

Ray Kroc's dreams of growing the company in the United States were fully realized, but the story was just beginning. McDonald's is taking over the world. While experts were surprised at the rapid development of the hamburger chain in the United States, our company was preparing another surprise for them in the form of expanding the system outside the United States.

The first restaurant outside the United States was in Canada on June 1, 1967, and the race was on. Today there are over 1,000 restaurants in Canada. When McDonald's Canada introduced pizza to its menu in 1992, they overnight became the largest retail chain selling this dish.

First ever McDrive held in Sierra Vista, Arizona

On April 29, 1988, an agreement was signed in Moscow on the creation of a joint venture between the Canadian company McDonald's Restaurants of Canada Limited and the Main Directorate of Public Catering of the Moscow City Executive Committee - Moscow-McDonald's.

The authorized capital of the future joint venture was 14.952 million rubles.

It was planned that the total number of McDonald's catering establishments in Moscow would be increased to 20.

In 1988, Moscow newspapers reported that the first Moscow McDonald's would hire students and schoolchildren, most of them on a part-time basis. “Given the intensive work, the pay will be high - two to two and a half rubles per hour,” newspapers of those years wrote.

On May 3, 1989, construction began on the first McDonald's restaurant on Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow, and on January 31, 1990, it opened.

At dawn on January 31, 1990, over 5 thousand people gathered in front of the restaurant, waiting for the opening. On the first day of operation, the McDonald's restaurant on Pushkin Square served more than 30 thousand visitors, setting a world record for the first working day in the history of McDonald's. Previously, the world record belonged to a Budapest restaurant - 9 thousand 100 visitors

The first fast food establishment had 700-900 seats inside the building and another 200 in the summer outdoor area.

In 1990, a hamburger cost 1.5 rubles, and a Big Mac cost 3.75 rubles, with the average salary of a Soviet person being 150 rubles. For comparison: a monthly bus pass cost 3 rubles.

The second and third restaurants of the chain opened in 1993 on Old Arbat and Gorky Street (now Tverskaya Street).

The first restaurant outside the capital was opened in St. Petersburg in 1996.

Also in 1996, McDonald's launched Russia's first concept of serving visitors in cars - MakAvto, which works on the principle of several windows, which allows you to order and receive products while in your car.

In 1992, the McComplex was opened for the production of semi-finished products for a chain of restaurants, producing about 70 million kilograms of products per year.

Today there are 218 McDonald's restaurants in Russia, which serve more than 600 thousand visitors daily.

In 1971, the first restaurants were also opened in Germany and Australia. Today there are over 600 restaurants in Germany, and about 635 in Australia. In France and England, the first restaurants appeared in the early 1970s; currently there are 625 enterprises in France, and more than 700 in England.

Here is the oldest McDonald's in Downey, California. The restaurant has remained virtually unchanged since it opened in 1953

Richard McDonald opens the first McDonald's Bar-B-Que in San Bernardino at the intersection of 14th and East streets, where it is still located.

The McDonald brothers decided to renovate their cafe and change the menu, which from now on contains only nine dishes. The main dish on the menu was a 15-cent hamburger, with which, for just 5 cents, visitors could get a huge glass of orange juice.

McDonald's introduces its famous French fries, which become a bestseller.

Ray Kroc visits McDonald's and becomes partners with Richard and Maurice (also known as Dick and Mac). Soon Ray is already an official franchise agent. He introduces a milkshake to the restaurant menu.

A second McDonald's is opening in Des Plaines, Illinois, thanks in large part to Ray Kroc. On the opening day of the restaurant, its revenue was $366.12. More than 700 McDonald's will open over the next decade.

23 years after the opening of the first restaurant, the 500th McDonald's opens in Toledo, Ohio.

In 1965, McDonald became a formal corporation by publicly selling its shares at $22.50 per share. The initial sale of shares took place on the day of the 10th anniversary of the opening of the network.

1963
Ronald McDonald entered the business; the net profit of the McDonald's chain exceeded $1 million.

With the opening of the first McDonald's restaurants in Canada and Puerto Rico, McDonald's became an international chain. This process has continued continuously since then, ultimately leading to McDonald's branches being opened today in 118 different countries.

The famous Big Mac appears at McDonald's.

In addition to the lunch menu, McDonald's also offers breakfast, which includes sandwiches and an egg called McMuffin. The Egg McMuffin was invented by Herb Peterson, a McDonald's manager in Santa Barbara, California.

McDonald's is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

In an effort to please customers who care about their figure and health, fresh salads appeared on the McDonald's menu on May 15, 1987.

Opening of the first McDonald's in the USSR and Russia on Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow. At that time, it was the largest of all the restaurants in this chain, which broke the record of the McDonald's chain, serving 30 thousand visitors on the opening day.

McDonald's launches a website, McDonalds.com.

In 2005, McDonald celebrated its 50th anniversary since opening its first restaurant.

McDonald's introduced a snack (snack) to the menu, adding a sandwich to lunch.

As part of its competition with cafes and bistros, McDonald's is launching a line of lattes and cappuccinos in restaurants - McCafe, which also includes freshly squeezed fruit cocktails and Frappes.

McDonalds Museum in Des Plaines, Illinois

The museum of this king of fast food is located in San Bernardino, here you can see a mini-replica of the corporation's first restaurant with original equipment, which includes Ray Kroc cocktail machines. Very interesting exhibits are the uniforms of the employees, which were changed several times over the long years of operation of the network. And of course, there are a lot of old advertisements, photographs and a video library, from which you can trace the history of the development of the restaurant chain.

sources
http://mcdpopculture.blogspot.com
http://lifeglobe.net
http://kervansaraymarmaris.com
http://www.vmireinteresnogo.com
http://ria.ru
http://makdak2004.narod.ru/item4.html

And along the way I’ll remind you what it looks like, and also amazing The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

The world's largest fast food restaurant chain began as a small barbecue bar in 1940 in San Bernardino, California. It was founded by brothers Richard and Maurice MacDonald and since then the network has grown so much that it now serves 68 million visitors daily in 119 countries. Well, the very first restaurant was called "McDonald's Famous Barbeque" and offered its visitors about forty types of fried meat. In this article we will not only tell you about the very first restaurant, but also about the history of one of the largest and most famous in the world fast food. In the photo below you can see exactly that original restaurant in its original form.

A key turnaround for the restaurant came in 1948, after the McDonald brothers realized that most of their profits came from selling hamburgers. Then they decided to take a bold and drastic step - they completely closed the restaurant and converted the interior space into a simple conveyor system for preparing hamburgers. The simple menu included just a few types of burgers, chips and orange juice. The following year, French fries and Coca Cola were added. This simplified menu, as well as a simple assembly-line cooking system, allowed them to sell hamburgers for 15 cents, which was half the price of other restaurants in the city.

In 1953, the brothers already provided licenses to open the McDonald's chain in neighboring cities. Three more fast food restaurants were opened in Phoenix, Arizona and Downey in California. The restaurant in Downey is one of the oldest surviving restaurants today. In 1945, the brothers brought in Ray Kroc, a salesman for milkshake machines, as they opened restaurants across the country. On April 15, 1955, McDonald's became a corporation. The company calls its first restaurant Original McDonald's, since it was from here that the corporation's phenomenal success story began. We also recently wrote about the Coca-Cola Museum, McDonald's constant partner almost from the moment of its founding. The McDonald's Museum is located in San Bernardino, where You can see an exact replica of the restaurant with original equipment, including Ray Kroc's multi-milkshake machines. Also shown here are various uniforms of restaurant employees during different periods of its operation. There is also a collection of vintage advertisements, photos and videos dedicated to the history of McDonalds. Pictured below is 1950- e years Customers at a McDonald's restaurant:

Photo from 1955, this is Ray Kroc's first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois:

Exterior of the first store in Des Plaines, Illinois:

McDonald's Des Plaines team:

Exterior of the first fast food restaurant with its neon arches, 1955:

The site of the first McDonald's restaurant, San Bernardino, California:

McDonalds Museum in Des Plaines, Illinois:

The first ever McDrive, held in Sierra Vista, Arizona:

Fred Turner and Ray Kroc consider a future restaurant project:

Here is the oldest McDonald's in Downey, California. The restaurant has remained virtually unchanged since it opened in 1953:

Finally, a few photos from the McDonalds Museum:

Frederick Leo Turner (January 6, 1933 – January 7, 2013) grew up in Des Moines and Chicago and graduated from Drake University in 1954. Immediately after the army, he began his career at McDonald's - grilling meat. Thanks to his extraordinary abilities, he very quickly rose through the ranks.

Since Fred Turner became operations manager in 1958, the company has operated only 34 restaurants. By the time he retired in 2004 and throughout his career, serving as CEO in 1973 and chairman of the company in 1977, McDonald's was represented by 31,500 restaurants around the world. During all this time, the number of meat buns sold was not just in the millions, it seemed endless. The land needed to graze livestock for the company's needs was equal to the area of ​​states such as Texas or Kansas.

State of Texas, USA

This entire huge empire was run by Fred, or at least that's what he wanted to be called. He was involved not only in the creation of a unified menu, but also in the attractiveness of the restaurant buildings themselves, which at that time were entirely made of brick and with mansard roofs. It was Turner who suggested adding more seating to encourage visitors to linger, and who introduced the first Drive Thru in 1975. Visitors could receive their order in just 50 seconds without leaving their car.

Every place on the territory of the establishments had to be clean, he was obsessed with cleanliness - all glass had to be without a single spot, and garbage in the parking lot had to be immediately removed. The training films even talked about the pipes under the sink being polished to a shine, and this was not just a whim of the boss - he himself started out as an ordinary grill worker.

In Fred's universe, every hamburger had to be perfect. One pound of meat should yield 10 pieces of hamburger meat, not 9 or 11. A maximum of 24 meats could be grilled, and buns that stuck together in the toaster had to be separated, which helped shave off precious seconds in service. should be 0.28 inches (0.71 cm) thick, and the secret sauce is always the same flavor. It was all in Fred's Bible, a training manual he wrote and taught at Hamburger University, founded in 1961 at a restaurant in Elk Grove, Illinois, where managers and employees were trained for three weeks to get a franchise off the ground properly. Currently, more than 80,000 people around the world can boast of this outlandish qualification.

Quality, service and cleanliness were his motto. In addition to his motto, he had an amazing ability to see unfilled niches in the market and future trends. was introduced into the menu to please Catholics on Fridays. with a free plastic trinket was meant to attract the attention of the youngest visitors. with egg, a name coined by his wife, was a triumph on the breakfast menu, which was introduced in 1975. Just as Americans turned away from beef, fried chicken alternatives were introduced.

One day in 1979, Turner asked a chef to make pieces of chicken the size of his thumb. Four years later, a deep-fried chicken option appeared. Their success was incredible. Americans began to eat them like French fries, dipping them in sauce. And McDonald's became the second largest chicken seller in the world. For the company's needs, they began to breed a special type of chicken with large breasts.

Such a huge influence seems a little strange, since Turner, at the beginning of his career at McDonald's, was just out of Des Moines University and his best achievement was as a truck driver for a cookie company. The visionary very quickly recognized the potential of the young employee and made him his right hand. He saw in this child-faced man the son he never had. Many people joked that Fred had ketchup running through his veins instead of blood.

The company's annual revenues at the time of Turner's resignation were $19.1 billion. As the global market expands, so does public criticism: obesity, pollution, soil erosion. However, Turner can't be faulted for developing great service, popular food and beloved flavors wherever you find the golden arches.

An excerpt from a letter from Don Thompson, now the company's former CEO, on the day of Fred Turner's death on January 7, 2013:

McDonald's is incredibly fortunate that Fred Turner decided to dedicate his talent and vision to the development of the brand. And we owe a big tribute to Fred because he is the reason we provide our 69 million visitors every day with excellent quality, service and cleanliness. Fred left a huge legacy. High standards. Unbridled optimism. The mentality of the system is still strong today. He often liked to repeat: “You have made a decisive contribution.” There is no better way to describe Fred...he made enormous contributions that changed the world.

Ray Kroc knew the final destination where the company needed to develop, and Fred Turner knew how to get there. It was a great team that remained faithful to their work all their lives.

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Although Fred Turner was at the helm of McDonald's longer than Ray Kroc, he did not eclipse the company's founder. To some extent, the explanation for this should be sought in his deliberate efforts to direct all attention to Kroc. “Fred is a humble person. Also, what happened to Harry Sonneborn when he tried to sideline Ray was a good lesson for him, says McDonald's CEO David Wallerstein. “But Fred also loved and respected Ray so much that he wanted Ray to continue to be the person who personified McDonald's.” This was important because in most large companies there are almost no personalities left.”

Throughout the 1970s, it was Kroc's personality that became synonymous with McDonald's, and as thousands of new restaurants opened, Kroc played a major role in maintaining the company's image as a vibrant, community-minded organization. It was Kroc who was always the center of attention at the opening ceremonies of new enterprises. It was Kroc who in most cases gave speeches to the public and appeared in front of television cameras. Kroc was also the most important link with the company's second most important category of customers - franchisees. Every week, a dozen franchisees came to his San Diego office, where he moved from Los Angeles in 1974, for advice.

Turner was in no way trying to please Kroc, but he also didn't try to dispel the idea that the McDonald's founder continued to be the "boss" of the company. That's what Turner called Kroc. And even in seemingly insignificant matters, Turner paid special attention to ensuring that everything was done the way Kroc wanted it, if only the boss really wanted it. Although Turner ultimately had the final say in deciding the fate of multimillion-dollar projects, he insisted that Kroc be given final say in determining the salaries and incentives of the company's top executives. He knew that Kroc wanted a privilege that would allow him, for example, to reduce the salary of one manager by $1,000 and add that thousand to the salary of another manager. Sometimes, in order to fulfill Kroc's simple wishes, Turner had to show considerable ingenuity. When National Guardsmen shot and killed four Kent State University students while dispersing a peaceful demonstration in 1970, Kroc demanded that all flags on McDonald's restaurant flagpoles remain at full-staff. But a franchisee from one of the university towns approached Turner and told him in a panic that students, who made up the lion's share of his establishment's customers, were demanding that flags at all fast food establishments be flown at half-mast in memory of the dead. Turner found a way out of this sticky situation that did not require him to have an unpleasant explanation with Kroc. He advised the franchisee to back up a truck used to deliver buns to a flagpole and just accidentally knock over the flagpole.

However, the respect with which Turner treated Kroc was manifested not only in external signs of attention. Kroc was a mentor to him, and Turner visited him almost daily because he wanted to gain ideas and experience from a man whose talent in selling products and running a company he really valued very highly. Although Kroc remained on the West Coast after Turner became president, he continued to take an active part in the company's affairs. Kroc, more than anyone else, advocated for expanding the range of restaurants, believing that this would help their popularity grow. They were offered hundreds of sites for the construction of new restaurants. No one watched the sales reports of new businesses as closely as Kroc, who personally called managers to the carpet if their restaurants' performance fell below average.

Once Kroc was convinced that a particular step should be taken, he would stop at nothing to see his project through. At the end of 1969, for example, he ordered the abolition of territorial boundaries for new restaurants. Previously, one restaurant opened under a license had to be at least three miles apart from each other. Now the ban remains only on opening two enterprises in the same building. The previous size of the territory was considered an integral part of the license. But, years ahead of everyone else, Kroc saw the benefits of having McDonald's restaurants within just two or three blocks of each other. “He kept pushing and pushing the idea, and no one could understand why,” Turner says of Kroc's tenacity in advocating the innovation. “We only agreed with him because he was so persistent.”

In a word, Turner's attitude towards Kroc made it possible to revive the harmony lost in the company in the mid-60s, when McDonald's split into two camps. An important element of the new harmony was the close personal relationship between Kroc and Turner. “Ray never had a son, and Fred became one,” notes director David Wallerstein. “Fred idolized Ray, but he also knew how to deal with him. He could get what he wanted out of him by making him think that what Turner wanted from him was Kroc's own idea. He behaved with him the way a son behaves with his father.” Here's what director Allen Stults added: “Fred's attitude towards Ray was amazing in that he was not a hypocrite when he called California to get the boss's opinion, but at the same time he ran McDonald's with the same firmness , as Hari."

However, Turner remained in the shadow of Kroc, who was constantly in the public spotlight, and therefore he is practically unknown outside of McDonald's - even in business circles, where it would seem that the president of a company whose annual revenue is $11 billion is unknown. must. Perhaps Turner would have deserved such a fate if he had taken this post simply for a while in order to simply replace the founder of the company who had all the power. And although, quite possibly, someone could have formed exactly such an impression, it has absolutely nothing in common with reality.

Although Ray Kroc continued to be the object of public admiration as the chief architect of McDonald's runaway success, he quietly handed over almost all of his powers to Turner. Turner began to use these powers immediately, and the decisions he began to make were by no means decisions of the caliph for an hour. In the first five years of his presidency, from 1969 to 1973, he initiated more changes at McDonald's than in the entire previous 15 years. The company's foundation was undoubtedly laid by Kroc, but Turner changed so much that McDonald's at the end of that five-year period bore little resemblance to the company it had been at the beginning. David Wallerstein believes that "the modern McDonald's is entirely the brainchild of Fred Turner."

In 1968, when Turner became president, McDonald's reached a milestone that new companies inevitably reach after successfully completing their initial development phase. The company was trying to carry out difficult transformations that were designed to turn it into a truly large corporation. When Turner took the reins, it seemed that few people in the company wanted such changes. The fast food industry was growing at an exceptionally fast pace, and McDonald's once dominant position in the market was being seriously challenged. It became apparent that competitors were willing and able to take a leadership position in the industry.