Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World by Eric Schlosser Read Free Book Online Page B

to ask Kroc as many as thirty-six predetermined questions about various subjects; old videos of Kroc supply the answers.The exhibit wasn’t working properly the day of my visit. Ray wouldn’t take my questions, and so I just listened to him repeating the same speeches.
    The Disneyesque tone of the museum reflects, among other things, many of the similarities between the McDonald’s Corporation and the Walt Disney Company. It also reflects the similar paths of the two men who founded these corporate giants. Ray Kroc and Walt Disney were both from Illinois; they were born a year apart, Disney in 1901, Kroc in 1902; they knew each other as young men, serving together in the same World War I ambulance corps; and they both fled the Midwest and settled in southern California, where they played central roles in the creation of new American industries. The film critic Richard Schickel has described Disney’s powerful inner need “to order, control, and keep clean any environment he inhabited.” The same could easily be said about Ray Kroc, whose obsession with cleanliness and control became one of the hallmarks of his restaurant chain. Kroc cleaned the holes in his mop wringer with a toothbrush.
    Kroc and Disney both dropped out of high school and later added the trappings of formal education to their companies. The training school for Disney’s theme-park employees was named Disneyland University. More importantly, the two men shared the same vision of America, the same optimistic faith in technology, the same conservative political views. They were charismatic figures who provided an overall corporate vision and grasped the public mood, relying on others to handle the creative and financial details. Walt Disney neither wrote, nor drew the animated classics that bore his name. Ray Kroc’s attempts to add new dishes to McDonald’s menu — such as Kolacky, a Bohemian pastry, and the Hulaburger, a sandwich featuring grilled pineapple and cheese — were unsuccessful. Both men, however, knew how to find and motivate the right talent. While Disney was much more famous and achieved success sooner, Kroc may have been more influential. His company inspired more imitators, wielded more power over the American economy — and spawned a mascot even more famous than Mickey Mouse.
    Despite all their success as businessmen and entrepreneurs, as cultural figures and advocates for a particular brand of Americanism, perhaps the most significant achievement of these two men lay elsewhere. Walt Disney and Ray Kroc were masterful salesmen. They perfected the art of selling things to children. And their success led many others to aim marketing efforts at kids, turning America’s youngestconsumers into a demographic group that is now avidly studied, analyzed, and targeted by the world’s largest corporations.

walt and ray
     
    RAY KROC TOOK THE McDonald brothers’ Speedee Service System and spread it nationwide, creating a fast food empire. Although he founded a company that came to symbolize corporate America, Kroc was never a buttoned-down corporate type. He was a former jazz musician who’d played at speakeasies — and at a bordello, on at least one occasion — during Prohibition. He was a charming, funny, and indefatigable traveling salesman who endured many years of disappointment, a Willy Loman who finally managed to hit it big in his early sixties. Kroc grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from Chicago. His father worked for Western Union. As a high school freshman, Ray Kroc discovered the joys of selling while employed at his uncle’s soda fountain. “That was where I learned you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm,” Kroc recalled in his autobiography,
Grinding It Out
, “and sell them a sundae when what they’d come for was a cup of coffee.”
    Over the years, Kroc sold coffee beans, sheet music, paper cups, Florida real estate, powdered instant beverages called “Malt-a-Plenty” and “Shake-a-Plenty,”