Made In America - Bill Bryson [217]
Such obsessiveness made McDonald’s a success, but it also led to the creation of a culture that was dazzlingly unsympathetic to innovation. As he recounted in his autobiography, when a team of his most trusted executives suggested the idea of miniature outlets called MiniMacs, Kroc was ‘so damned mad I was ready to turn my office into a batting cage and let those three guys have it with my cane’.6 Their failing, he explained, was to think small. One could be excused for concluding that their failure was to think at all.
As an empire builder Kroc had no peer, but as a dietary innovator his gifts were modest. As one of his biographers has noted: ‘Every food product he thought of introducing – and the list is long – bombed in the marketplace.’7 In consequence McDonald’s menu is essentially a continuing testament to the catering skills of the founding brothers. The relatively few foods that have been added to the menu since 1954 have usually been invented by franchisees, not by headquarters staff, and have often drawn liberal inspiration from the creations of competing chains. The Big Mac, introduced nationwide in 1968, was invented and named by a franchisee in Pittsburgh named Jim Delligatti, though it was certainly similar to, if not actually modelled on, a two-patty, tripledeck sandwich created by the Big Boy chain in California fourteen years earlier. The Filet-O-Fish was thought up by a franchisee in a Catholic section of Cincinnati who wanted something to offer his customers on Fridays, but essentially it is just a large fishfinger in a bun. The Egg McMuffin, originally called the Fast Break Breakfast, came when a franchisee in Santa Barbara developed the prototype, but again it echoed a rival’s product, an eggs Benedict breakfast roll from the Jack-in-the-Box chain.
None the less, the McDonald’s formula has clearly worked. In an average year, all but 4 per cent of American consumers will visit a McDonald’s at least once. Thirty-two per cent of all hamburgers, 26 per cent of all French fries, 5 per cent of all Coca-Cola, and nearly a fifth of all meals taken in a public place are eaten at a McDonald’s. McDonald’s buys more beef and potatoes and trains more people than any other organization, the US Army included. It is the world’s largest owner of real estate. In 1994 it had 13,000 restaurants in 68 countries serving 25 million customers daily.8 So international a commodity has the Big Mac become that since 1986 The Economist magazine has used the cost of a Big Mac in various world cities as a more or less serious basis for an index comparing the relative value of their currencies.
McDonald’s, like so much else of modern American life, from the supermarket to the shopping mall, was a creature of the two great phenomena of the post-war years: the car and the suburbs. Together they transformed the way Americans live.
Suburbs were hardly new in the 1950s. The word dates from as far back as 1325, and both suburbia and suburbanite have been current since the 1890s. Before the American Revolution most cities had their suburbs – places like Harlem, New York, and Medford, Massachusetts – but they weren’t dormitory communities in the modern sense. Until about 1850, a suburb was defined as ‘an undifferentiated zone outside the city limits’.9 They were largely self-contained communities, and often the