Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

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Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc is an autobiography of the business legend who brought McDonald’s from a restaurant in California to a global powerhouse. Mr. Kroc is a complicated figure, like most extremely successful people, but you can’t take his achievements away from him.

I must admit that I haven’t stepped into a McDonald’s in decades. Somewhere around the 2000’s they must have added something to the Big Mac which causes my stomach to… let’s just say “rebel”. I did see the movie based on the book, The Founder, and when this book came up on my recommendations algorithm after reading The Burger King, I jumped on it.

Grinding show more It Out, a memoir by Ray Kroc follows his career from being a salesman of paper cups, to milkshake makers where his fortune was changed. He kept hearing about the “McDonald brothers” in California who ordered eight five spindles shaker machines. Mr. Kroc was intrigued by what kind of business they were running that needed to make 40 milkshakes at once, he decided to go check it out, introduced himself to the McDonald brothers and the rest is history.

Of course, the book is from Mr. Kroc’s point of view, but he did help the MacDonald brothers’ interest in franchising and help them expand it to sizes they couldn’t even imagine. While the McDonald brothers founded the company, Ray Kroc founded the company that developed McDonald’s empire all over the world.

I enjoyed this book very much, not from the franchising or business perspective as much as the way Mr. Kroc managed and led the company to have consistent standards he called “OSCV which stands for Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value. He led franchise owners into a structure which forced them to learn (via Hamburger University – another innovation) the standards of service and quality, allowing them to operate as independent businesspeople.

Ray Kroc called himself “The Founder” because he considered what he built to be separate from “just” a restaurant serving a limited menu of burgers, fries, soft drinks, and milkshakes. Personally, I agree and looking at the success of McDonald’s I think that there’s plenty of credit to go around.

To this day I remember, that while traveling in Brazil, I met a fellow backpacker who only ate at McDonald’s because he knew exactly what he was getting and wanted to avoid a stomach bug. show less

A quick fascinating book about Ray Kroc, the man you made McDonalds.
Sadly it was written in 1977 with and afterward of 1984, so it is a little dated. It is however a great look into what drove ever aspect of the McDonald's experience.

As soon as I was done with this book, I watched The Founder on Netflix and drove through McDonalds.

Anderson, Robert (Author); McDonalds (Subject)