Page 90 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

just going to let them do anything they want to as long as they
are getting money out of it. It will be survival of the fittest. And
I am just as sure as I am sure that I am dictating this sleeve that
we are going to be at the top of the list of the fittest.”
McDonald’s has always been a results-oriented company.
“We were continuously looking for a better way to do things,
and then a revised better way to do things, and then a revised,
revised better way,” Fred Turner is quoted as saying in McDon-
ald’s: Behind the Arches, written by John F. Love.
So it went without saying that company executives sought
nothing but the best. Golden Arches lore has it that Ray Kroc once
closed down an underperforming restaurant that was dirty, under-
staffed, and poorly run. That information was finally verified to
me by Tom Dentice, retired executive vice president: “Ray pulled
into the lot, and the lines were all the way out to the flagpoles.”
As the story goes, Ray jumped up on one of the outdoor tables
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and said to everyone, “I’m Ray Kroc, I own McDonald’s, and this
restaurant doesn’t meet our standards: It’s terrible and I’m embar-
rassed, so I’m closing the store.” Nobody would dispute the sen-
timent behind the tale: substandard was unacceptable, and that
has always been the case. Fred Turner remembers one store in
Florida in particular: “They were a mess. Everything was screwed
up. Ray had a fit. Kicked the metal door closed. He went out and
slammed it with his foot. He was so mad he couldn’t see straight.
Everything was wrong. He couldn’t live with it.”
One story about Ray’s legendary standards was told to me by
Ed Rensi, retired president of McDonald’s. Ed recalls touring
stores with Ray Kroc: “We go into the first store. Ray walks up
to the counter and gets a cheeseburger, a small fries, and a straw-
berry milkshake. We go sit down, and I am eating—I think I had
gotten a bag of fries. So we are eating and eating, and he says to
me, ‘Ed, I want you to go over there and take all the food in the
bin and throw it out. This food is awful.’ I said, ‘okay,’ and he