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By Root 1318 0

McDonalds fired all their carhops in 1948, closed their restaurant, installed larger grills, and reopened three months later with a radically new method of preparing food. It was designed to increase the speed, lower prices, and raise the volume of sales. The brothers eliminated almost two-thirds of the items on their old menu. They got rid of everything that had to be eaten with a knife, spoon, or fork. The only sandwiches now sold were hamburgers or cheeseburgers. The brothers got rid of their dishes and glassware, replacing them with paper cups, paper bags, and paper plates. They divided the food preparation into separate tasks performed by different workers. To fill a typical order, one person grilled the hamburger; another “dressed” and wrapped it; another prepared the milk shake; another made the fries; and another worked the counter. For the first time, the guiding principles of a factory assembly line were applied to a commercial kitchen. The new division of labor meant that a worker only had to be taught how to perform one task. Skilled and expensive short-order cooks were no longer necessary. All of the burgers were sold with the same condiments: ketchup, onions, mustard, and two pickles. No substitutions were allowed. The McDonald brothers’ Speedee Service System revolutionized the restaurant business. An ad of theirs seeking franchisees later spelled out the benefits of the system: “Imagine — No Carhops — No Waitresses — No Dishwashers — No Bus Boys — The McDonald’s System is Self-Service!”

Richard McDonald designed a new building for the restaurant, hoping to make it easy to spot from the road. Though untrained as an architect, he came up with a design that was simple, memorable, and archetypal. On two sides of the roof he put golden arches, lit by neon at night, that from a distance formed the letter M. The building effortlessly fused advertising with architecture and spawned one of the most famous corporate logos in the world.

The Speedee Service System, however, got off to a rocky start. Customers pulled up to the restaurant and honked their horns, wondering what had happened to the carhops, still expecting to be served. People were not yet accustomed to waiting in line and getting their own food. Within a few weeks, however, the new system gained acceptance, as word spread about the low prices and good hamburgers. The McDonald brothers now aimed for a much broader clientele. They employed only young men, convinced that female workers would attract teenage boys to the restaurant and drive away other customers. Families soon lined up to eat at McDonald’s. Company historian John F. Love explained the lasting significance of McDonald’s new self-service system: “Working-class families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food.”

San Bernardino at the time was an ideal setting for all sorts of cultural experimentation. The town was an odd melting-pot of agriculture and industry located on the periphery of the southern California boom, a place that felt out on the edge. Nicknamed “San Berdoo,” it was full of citrus groves, but sat next door to the smokestacks and steel mills of Fontana. San Bernardino had just sixty thousand inhabitants, but millions of people passed through there every year. It was the last stop on Route 66, end of the line for truckers, tourists, and migrants from the East. Its main street was jammed with drive-ins and cheap motels. The same year the McDonald brothers opened their new self-service restaurant, a group of World War II veterans in San Berdoo, alienated by the dullness of civilian life, formed a local motorcycle club, borrowing the nickname of the U.S. Army’s Eleventh Airborne Division: “Hell’s Angels.” The same town that gave the world the golden arches also gave it a biker gang that stood for a totally antithetical set of values. The Hell’s Angels flaunted their dirtiness, celebrated disorder, terrified families and small children instead of trying to sell them burgers, took drugs, sold drugs, and injected into American pop culture an anger and a darkness and a