The hamburger, he liked to say, could be assembled on his terms, but people were determined to have hot dogs their own way. That demanded a condiment station, which the McDonald brothers had eliminated—rightly, in his view—as the messiest place in the whole restaurant. Above all, he wanted consistency so that a hamburger in California would be an advertisement for one in Chicago or New York. If the McDonald brothers had built the perfect hamburger stand, Ray Kroc envisioned the perfect nationwide chain. The trick was to impose his will upon independent owners, which took an odd combination of
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