jan 1, 1954 - Ray Kroc buys first Mccy D's franchies (yay french frieessss)

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lets go mc donaldssssss



Americans did not simply fill their new suburban homes with the latest appliances and gadgets; they also pioneered entirely new forms of consumption. Through World War II, downtowns remained the commercial heart of America — boasting grand department stores and five-and-dime drug stores, elegant eateries and cheap diners. But as suburbanites abandoned big-city centers in the 1950s, ambitious entrepreneurs invented two new commercial forms that would dominate the rest of the century and reconfigure American commerce: the shopping mall and the fast-food restaurant.

As Americans flocked to the suburbs, so did retailers. The first suburban shopping centers appeared outside Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle in 1949 and 1950 and set the standard for thousands to come: an enclosed, indoor promenade featuring many small specialty shops and two or three large clothing or variety stores, all surrounded by acres of parking lots. A major developer of shopping malls in the Northeast called them “today’s village green,” and observed that “the fountain in the mall has replaced the downtown department clock as the gathering place for young and old alike” — centralizing otherwise dispersed lives. Malls brought “the market to the people instead of people to the market,” commented the New York Times. In 1939, the suburban share of total metropolitan retail trade in the United States was a paltry 4 percent. By 1961, it was an astonishing 60 percent in the nation’s ten largest metropolitan regions.

No one was more influential in shaping suburban consumption patterns than Ray Kroc, the Chicago-born son of Czech immigrants. A former jazz musician and traveling salesman, Kroc found his calling in 1954 when he acquired a single franchise of McDonald’s Restaurant, a little-known hamburger chain in San Bernardino, California. In 1956, Kroc invested in twelve more franchises. By 1958 he owned seventy-nine. Three years later, Kroc bought the company from the McDonald brothers and proceeded to turn it into the largest chain of restaurants in the world. McDonald’s served burgers the same way Levitt built houses: quick and affordable. Kroc’s vision transformed the way Americans consumed food — whether they ate in the restaurant, at home, or even in the car. “Drive-in” or “fast” food became a staple of the American diet in the subsequent decades. By the year 2000, fast food was a $100 billion industry, and Ronald McDonald, the clown in McDonald’s television commercials, was as recognizable to children as Santa Claus.


The sign atop this suburban Los Angeles restaurant says it all. Suburbanization laid the foundation for a unique postwar phenomenon that would forever change American life: the rise of fast food. Cheap, convenient, and “fast,” the food served in the new restaurants, modeled after the industry’s pioneer, McDonald’s, was not necessarily nutritious, but its chief advantage was portability.

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