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256 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
“People have marveled at the fact that I didn’t start McDonald’s until I was fifty-two years old, and then I became a success overnight. But I was just like a lot of show business personalities who work away quietly at their craft for years, and then, suddenly, they get the right break and make it big. I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.”
“Consider, for example, the hamburger bun. It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun. Yet, is it any more unusual to find grace in the texture and softly curved silhouette of a bun than to reflect lovingly on the hackles of a favorite fishing fly? Or the arrangement of textures and colors in a butterfly’s wing? Not if you are a McDonald’s man. Not if you view the bun as an essential material in the art of serving a great many meals fast. Then this plump yeasty mass becomes an object worthy of sober study” (Kroc, 167-168)In conclusion, when the dust settled in Kroc’s golden-arched McEmpire, he has accomplished something few other humans in history ever have: a celebrated empire—even today, despite it not being fashionable to admit, McDonalds is still roaringly popular: it brought in a total revenue of $21 Billion in 2019—which still entices and (in a kind of slice-of-life sort of way) even enchants its customers—which could very well persist for the next century. This makes Kroc, no matter what may think of him, more than just a man who sold franchises and ‘ground out’ a living, but the progenitor of something now embedded in the firmament of quintessential American culture, and perhaps one of the pinnacle symbols of Americana. That makes him an undeniably successful and worthwhile person of study, despite his undeniable flaws.