McDonald's. What is BIGMAK silent about? John F. Love

Thanks
This is not a corporate book, nor is it a story that companies write to celebrate significant events. I am a freelance journalist and McDonald's has not controlled or edited my work. However, without her cooperation, I would never have been able to unlock the secrets of America's most famous and least understood company.
Few companies told so much about themselves to a stranger. This is especially surprising in the case of McDonald's, a company traditionally one of the strongest guardians of its secrets in America. And yet, when it came to this book, not a single question was left unanswered and not a single source was left unavailable. In total, I interviewed more than three hundred people who worked in the company and outside it. The book took four and a half years to write, but this close-up view of McDonald's was only possible because the company itself wanted this thorough research. For that, I have to thank McDonald's oldest chairman, Fred Turner.

I am also grateful to the many people who agreed to be interviewed and share their experiences. "McDonald's systems" - as the executive management of the corporation, as well as franchisees and suppliers - all this is too broad and diverse a topic that cannot be covered by limiting interviews with only top executives. Therefore, in my book you will find many personal stories of many people closely associated with the McDonald's Systems. They share with us their point of view on this system.

Given that the topic requires the most detailed consideration, I would not have been able to cope with such a project without the help of many people from outside the McDonald's company, which was especially important to me. I have greatly benefited from the research of Ken Props, the 83-year-old licensing director. Ken is a real McDonald's walking encyclopedia, and I'm lucky that he revealed so much to me in his weekly messages with important historical data. My special thanks go to Helen Farrell and Gloria Nelson, who collected and verified hundreds of facts, making my book complete and up-to-date. Listening to a lot of people would be a much more difficult task if not for the help of Mern Bremmer and Ian Woody, who identified location of sources, helped arrange interviews, and opened doors that would otherwise have been closed to me. Finally, I am indebted to Chuck Rabner of McDonald's, who coordinated the search for historical photographs.

This final version of the McDonald's story was most favorably influenced by Ann Poe, who read the original manuscript and suggested revisions. Ann's enthusiasm for the McDonald's story stimulated my critical faculties, which are so important when a manuscript is in rough draft and the author is exhausted. She helped me understand how much better the book would read if the draft manuscript was put in order. However, I took Ann's advice because I saw how interested she was in the quality of the book.

But my biggest support came from my wife, Joanne, whom I told almost five years ago that the project would only take a year. In the next five years, I worked on two jobs at once, and Joanne raised our children with so little help from me. She supported me whenever I completely went into the project - and when I was disappointed in it. More importantly, she pushed me to do what every journalist should do and what he does with great reluctance - to complete a long story.
John Love, November 1986

Foreword Unknown McDonald's
Just behind Fred Turner's former office on the eighth floor of McDonald's headquarters, in the McDonald's Plaza building in Chicago's western suburb of Oak Brook, Illinois, there is a small circular conference room called the Operations Room. center." The company's senior management meetings were held there, and the name, while pretentious, captures with remarkable accuracy the company's seriousness about the hamburger game.

There is nothing pretentious in this room. Like everything else at McDonald's, the operations center is strictly functional and even egalitarian. Its main detail is a large round table at which corporate managers sit face to face, as equals, and freely discuss strategies. There is no mahogany furniture, no high leather chairs, no expensive wood paneling. The room is devoid of trappings that could indicate it belongs to an organization with annual worldwide sales of more than 24 billion dollars.

Even the phone here is the most common - one of those numbers where they constantly get by mistake. In such cases, Turner interrupts the meeting, picks up the phone and answers: “Hello, this is McDonald’s.” The caller is puzzled, and Turner clarifies, "No, you're at McDonald's." The caller still doesn't understand, and Turner insistently explains, "We're the ones with the hamburgers."

Forget about the fact that the caller unwittingly landed on the chairman of the world's greatest catering company. The real challenge is how to explain to him what McDonald's is. This system spends over $1 billion a year promoting the world's most advertised brand. Her publicist, a clown named Ronald, is as familiar to American boys as Santa Claus. The company has more retail outlets than any other US merchant. Is it worth the trouble explaining that McDonald's is "the ones with hamburgers"?

The caller can be forgiven, In the "operational center" such calls were heard before. Much more important is the fact that usually few people associate a McDonald's hamburger with a huge corporation. McDonald's is probably the world's most famous retail brand today, but the organization behind it is one of America's least understood corporations. Her marketing image is the talk of the town. But the corporate reality remains unknown.

And there are serious reasons for this. One of them is the reflection of the company's activities in the press. Today, McDonald's is America's fourth-largest retailer, and the press is mostly enamored with the company's glossy looks. When McDonald's opened its 8,000th restaurant in 1984 and cooked up its 50 millionth hamburger, it was hot news. But the strategies that McDonald's uses to dominate the US $200 billion food service industry have never attracted as much attention.

The "fourth power" is hardly to blame for such limited coverage. McDonald's has had a hand in promoting the sunniest aspects of its business. From the beginning, the corporation encouraged messages that focused on the volume of hamburger sales. The McDonald brothers started doing this back in 1950, lighting up the facade of their building in neon. drive-in'a in California with the words "More than a million sold." Since then, McDonald's has churned out countless numbers showing how many times a path of sold hamburgers could be laid between the Earth and the Moon, and how many times a Mississippi bed could be filled with sold ketchup.

In a time when McDonald's didn't promote these statistics, it represented itself through romantic, if superficial, stories about its prominent and legendary founder, Ray Kroc. Therefore, the history of McDonald's became the history of its founder. Kroc personified the success of the company so well that it began to lack its own identity. In fact, McDonald's seems to prefer corporate anonymity. For all the care it takes to promote the marketing image, McDonald's falls silent when it comes to the inside work. Its executive leadership eschews industry trade shows and industry associations. And all these years, McDonald's corporate management avoided giving interviews to the business press.

There is another reason why the inner life of McDonald's remains a mystery. The point is that the outside of this network has become such a familiar feature of the American way of life that the organization behind it is taken for granted. Last year, as many as 96% of American consumers ate at least once at a McDonald's restaurant. Slightly more than half of America's population lives within a three-minute drive of the nearest McDonald's. In a typical television market, this brand is represented by thirty TV and radio advertisements daily. The existence of the McDonald's retail network is so familiar that the existence of the corporation and its power are not noticed. In America, a McDonald's retail outlet is the closest.

It is such an integral part of American culture that the competitive and economic importance of more than 14,000 McDonald's restaurants around the world can hardly be interpreted. Everyone knows that McDonald's Corporation is great, but few know how significant its impact on American business is. A casual observer from the inscription under the golden arcs of the logo learns that McDonald's has made 100 billion hamburgers. But in the restaurant industry, which consists of nearly 200,000 companies, hardly many people assume that McDonald's has 14% of all restaurant visits in the United States - that is, one in every six - and receives 6.6% of every dollar that Americans spend on eating out. How many people know that the company controls 18.8% of the $72 billion U.S. food market, more than the three food service chains combined, which are the next three behind McDonald's? And how many suspect that McDonald's sells 34% of all hamburgers sold by commercial restaurants and 26% of french fries? These numbers stunned even George Rice, whose research group GDR/Crest Enterprises collects market share data. Here is what Rice himself says: “Our first reaction to such numbers was:“ This cannot be.

Controlling such a huge market share allows McDonald's to exert such an influence on the US food industry that even the industry itself is not fully aware of its power. With its astonishing sales of hamburgers, McDonald's has become the nation's largest beef buyer. The chain produces so many french fries that it buys up 5%