A hundred billion hamburgers

Once upon a time, a businessman named Ray Kroc discovered a restaurant owned by two brothers. The restaurant served just four things: hamburgers, French fries, milk shakes and coca cola. But it was clean and inexpensive, and the service was quick. Mr Kroc liked it so much that he paid the brothers so that he could use their idea and their name: McDonald’s.

Beef, big business and fast service were the ingredients when Mr Kroc opened his first McDonald’s in 1955. Four years later there were 100 of them. Kroc knew Americans liked success. So he put signs saying how many millions of McDonald’s hamburgers people had bought. In just four years, the number was one hundred million. Now, there are more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants from Dallas to Paris and from Moscow to Beijing.

Anyone who wants to open a McDonald’s must first work in one for a week. Then they do a nine-month training programme in the restaurants and at ‘McDonald’s University’ in Chicago. There they learn the McDonald’s philosophy: quality control, service and cheap prices. McDonald’s has strict rules: Hamburgers must be served before they are ten minutes old, and French fries, seven.

McDonald’s has never stopped looking for new methods to attract customers, from drive-in windows to birthday parties. Chicken, fish, salad and, in some place, pizza are now on the menu. Their international popularity shows they have found the recipe for success.

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