This month in Smithsonian magazine Jeff MacGregor wrote a piece entitled "History, with Fries, with the sub-title "75 years of life in the fast-food lane." In the article he documented the efforts of two brothers, Mac & Dick McDonald. Back in 1940 they opened a drive-in restaurant in San Bernadino, California. With the success of their fledgling operation two years later they took a very big risk. They got rid of carhops, table service and silverware and cut the menu to the items folks ordered most: burgers, shakes, a slice of pie. And with that fast food came into being. A meal that you could get in under a minute and eat one-handed while your drove. It was a natural extension of other new innovations like suburbs and automatic transmissions.
MacGregor writes that what came next was the genius and limitless ambition of multimixer salesman Ray Kroc. In 1954 he got the rights to franchise McDonald's from coast to coast. He also oversaw the creation of Hamburger University where standardization was taught, the perfection of repetition, speedy systems management. Every cheeseburger would be exactly the same from Bangor to La Jolla.
Who doesn't know the acclaimed best commercial jingle of the 20th Century? You deserve a break today! or the now famous Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun. By the late 1990's McDonald's claimed to be opening a new store somewhere on the planet every 3 hours: a ski-thru window in Sweden or turquoise arches in Sedona. Today nearly 2 million McDonald's are in operation in 119 countries.
And now 75 years later the fries are still unrivaled, the service mostly efficient and mostly polite. The cheeseburger is still the centerpiece of a global empire. But for me, it's still about the fries...even though they aren't cooked in luscious animal fat.
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