Made In America (64 page)

By 1954, when Kroc came along, the McDonald brothers were already legendary, at least in the trade.
American Restaurant
magazine had done a cover story on them in 1952,
and they were constantly being visited by people who wanted to see how they generated so much turnover from so little space. With sales of over $350,000 a year (all of it going through one busy cash register) and profits above $100,000, McDonald’s was one of the most successful restaurants in America. In his autobiography, Kroc makes it sound as if the McDonald brothers had never thought of franchising until he came along. In fact, by the time he visited them they had a dozen franchised operations going.

Almost everything later associated with the McDonald’s chain was invented or perfected by the brothers, from the method of making French fries to the practice of trumpeting the number of hamburgers sold. As early as 1950, they had a sign outside announcing ‘Over 1 Million Sold’. They even came up with the design of a sloping roof, red and white tiled walls and integral golden arches – not for the San Bernardino outlet but for their first franchise operation, which opened in Phoenix in 1952, two years before Kroc came along.

The McDonalds were, in short, the true heroes of the fast-food revolution, and by any measure they were remarkable men. They had moved to California from New Hampshire (or possibly Vermont; sources conflict) during the depression years, and opened their first drive-in restaurant in 1937 near Pasadena. It didn’t sell hamburgers. Then in 1940 they opened a new establishment at Fourteenth and E Streets, at the end of Route 66, in San Bernardino in a snug octagonal structure. It was a conventional hamburger stand, and it did reasonably well.

In 1948, however, the brothers were seized with a strange vision. They closed the business for three months, fired the twenty carhops, got rid of all the china and silverware, and reopened with a new, entirely novel idea: that the customer would have to come to a window to collect the food rather than have it brought to the car. They cut the menu to just seven items – hamburgers, cheeseburgers, pie, crisps, coffee,
milk and pop. Customers no longer specified what they wanted on their hamburgers but received them with ketchup, mustard, onions and pickle. The hamburgers were made smaller – just ten to a pound – but the price was halved to fifteen cents each.

The change was a flop. Business fell by 80 per cent. The teenagers on whom they had relied went elsewhere. Gradually, however, a new type of clientele developed, the family, particularly after they added French fries and milk shakes to the menu, and even more particularly when customers realized that the food was great and that you could feed a whole family for a few dollars. Before long McDonald’s had almost more business than it could handle.

As volume grew, the brothers constantly refined the process to make the production of food more streamlined and efficient. With a local machine-shop owner named Ed Toman they invented almost everything connected with the production of fast food, from dispensers that pump out a precise dollop of ketchup or mustard to the Lazy Susans on which twenty-four hamburger buns can be speedily dressed. They introduced the idea of specialization – one person who did nothing but cook hamburgers, another who made shakes, another to dress the buns, and so on – and developed the now universal practice of having the food prepared and waiting so that customers could place an order and immediately collect it.

The parallels between the McDonald brothers and Wright brothers are striking. Like the Wrights, the McDonald brothers never married and lived together in the same house. Like the Wrights, they had no special interest in wealth and fame. (The McDonalds’ one indulgence was to buy a pair of new Cadillacs every year on the day that the new models came out.) Both sets of brothers were single-mindedly devoted to achieving perfection in their chosen sphere, and both sets created something from which others would derive
greater credit and fame. The McDonald brothers had just one distinction that set them apart from the Wrights. They dreaded flying, which presented a problem in keeping tabs on their expanding empire. So when Ray Kroc came along and offered to form a partnership in which he would look after the franchising side of the operation, they jumped at his offer.

Kroc was, it must be said, a consummate seller of franchises. By 1961, the year he bought the brothers out for $2.7 million, there were two hundred McDonald’s restaurants, and the company was on its way to becoming a national institution. Kroc achieved this success in large part by making sure that the formula of the original San Bernardino McDonald’s was followed everywhere with the most exacting fidelity. His obsession with detail became legendary. He dictated that McDonald’s burgers must be exactly 3.875 inches across, weigh 1.6 ounces and contain precisely 19 per cent fat. Big Mac buns should have an average of 178 sesame seeds. He even specified, after much experimentation, how much wax should be on the wax paper that separated one hamburger patty from another.

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’.
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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’.
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They were largely self-contained communities, and often the sites of noxious enterprises that were ill suited to the confined spaces of cities.

Of necessity, most people in colonial America lived densely packed together in cities – in 1715 Boston’s 15,000 inhabitants shared just 700 acres of land – and went almost everywhere on foot. Walking was such an unquestioned feature of everyday life that until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the term
pedestrian,
there was no special word to describe someone on foot. (Interestingly,
pedestrian
in the sense of dull or unimaginative is significantly older, having been coined in 1716.)

Not until the development of the steam passenger ferry in the 1830s did the possibility of retiring at night to a home in a separate (if invariably close by) community begin to take root. The passenger ferry transformed a few places like Tarrytown, Stony Point, and Brooklyn, New York, but the expense, limited carrying capacity and slow speed of ferries kept their overall effect slight. The history of suburban living in America really begins with the railways. Starting with Naperville, Illinois, in 1857, railway suburbs began to pop up everywhere. Orange and Secaucus, New Jersey, Oak Park, Lake Forest and Evanston, Illinois, Scarsdale, New York, Darien and Fairfield, Connecticut – these and hundreds of other communities were either created or wholly transformed by the railways. Even California, a state not normally associated with railways, spawned a number of such communities, notably San Rafael and Pomona.
¹⁰
As railway
suburbs grew, two new words entered the language,
commute
and
commuter,
both Americanisms and both first recorded in 1865.
¹¹

The growing popularity of the railway suburbs inspired an entirely new type of community: the model suburb. As the name suggests, model suburbs were purpose-built communities, primarily for the well-to-do. Where railway suburbs had grown willy-nilly, often absorbing existing communities, the model suburbs were built from scratch, and offered not just handsome residential streets, but everything else their well-heeled citizens could require: parks, schools, shopping districts and eventually country clubs. (The Country Club, built in the Boston suburb of Brookline in 1867, appears to have provided both the name and the model for this most suburban of social centres.) Among the more venerable of model suburbs are Beverly Hills, California, Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Forest Hills, New York.

The development of the streetcar in the closing years of the nineteenth century provided a new boost and a measure of democratization to suburban living with the rise of streetcar suburbs, which pushed cities further into the countryside and offered the prospect of fresh air, space and escape from the urban hurly-burly for millions of office and factory workers and their families.

Even taken together all these early types of suburbs never added up to more than a peripheral feature of American life. Two factors conspired in the 1940s to make the suburbanization of the country complete. The first was the need for cheap, instant housing immediately after the war. The second was the rise of the automobile in the early 1950s.

In 1945 America needed, more or less immediately, five million additional houses as war-deferred marriages were consummated and millions of young couples settled down to start a family. The simplest and cheapest solution was for a developer to buy up a tract of countryside within commuting
distance of a city and fill it with hundreds – sometimes thousands – of often identical starter homes. The master of the art was Abraham Levitt, who began scattering the eastern states with his Levittowns in 1947. By making every home identical and employing assembly-line construction techniques, Levitt could offer houses at remarkably low cost. At a time when the average house cost $10,000, Levitt homes sold for just $7,900, or $65 a month, with no down payment,
and
they came equipped with major appliances.

Soon housing developments were going up along the edges of every city. By 1950, one-quarter of Americans lived in suburbs. Ten years later the proportion had risen to one-third. Today over half of Americans live in suburbs – more than in cities, farms and rural communities combined.

As people flocked to the suburbs, jobs followed. Between 1960 and 1990, five of every six jobs created in America’s thirty-five biggest metropolitan areas were in the suburbs. Instead of pouring into the cities by day to work, millions of Americans hardly went into the cities at all. In the thirty years from 1960, the number of people who commuted across county lines – in effect, lived in one suburb and worked in another – tripled to over 2.7 million.
¹²
The suburbs had taken over.

As early as 1955, the phenomenon was noticed by the writer A.C. Spectorsky, who coined the term exurbia for this new kind of community that was emotionally and economically independent from the metropolis that had spawned it, but it was not until 1991, when a
Washington Post
reporter named Joel Garreau wrote a book called
Edge City,
that this vast transition in living patterns gained widespread notice.

To qualify as an edge city by Garreau’s definition, a community must have 5 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of shopping, and more people working there than living there. America now has more than 200 edge
cities. Los Angeles and New York have about two dozen each. Almost all have been created since 1960, and almost always they are soulless, impersonal places, unfocused collections of shopping malls and office complexes that are ruthlessly unsympathetic to non-motorists. Many have no pavements or pedestrian crossings, and only rarely do they offer any but the most skeletal public transport links to the nearby metropolis, effectively denying job opportunities to many of those left behind in the declining inner cities. About one-third of all Americans now live in edge cities, and up to two-thirds of Americans work in them.
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They are substantial places, and yet most people outside their immediate areas have never heard of them. How many Americans, I wonder, could go to a map and point to even the general location of Walnut Creek, Rancho Cucamonga, Glendale, Westport Plaza, Mesquite or Plano? Anonymous or not, they are the wave of the future. In 1993, nineteen of the twenty-five fastest-growing communities in the United States were edge cities.