Ray Kroc: biography, family and children, education, success story

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Ray Kroc hardly ever imagined that he would become the founder of the largest fast food chain in the world. Kroc was included in the list of 100 most influential people of the century according to Times magazine and accumulated a fortune that allowed him to live comfortably until the end of his life. He owned the San Diego Padres baseball team from 1974 until his death in 1984.

Early years

Ray Kroc's biography began on October 5, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, near Chicago. His parents were from the environment of Czech migrants. His mother's name was Rose Mary (née Grach), and his father's name was Alois Louis Kroc. His father was from the village of Brzhasy near Pilsen, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). Kroc's father made a fortune speculating in land during the 1920s and then lost it after the stock market crash of 1929.

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's, grew up and spent most of his life in Oak Park. DuringDuring World War I, he lied about his age and became a Red Cross ambulance driver at the age of 15. By the way, much later, in the company Kroc's Red Cross, founded in Connecticut to train volunteers, there was another boy who added years to himself to get into it - his name was W alt Disney.

The war, however, ended shortly after Ray Kroc enlisted in the army. During the Great Depression, he worked various jobs, working as a paper cup salesman, as a real estate agent in Florida, and occasionally playing piano in bands.

Fateful meeting

After World War II, Kroc found work as a salesman for milkshake mixers for the Prince Castle catering chain. When sales of the Prince Multi Mixer fell due to competition from cheaper Hamilton Beach products, Kroc was impressed by Richard and Maurice McDonald, who bought eight of his multi mixers for their San Bernardino, California store and visited them in 1954. Ray Kroc made sure that the concept and design of this small chain of stores and fast food outlets could expand across the country.

Ray Kroc: how an empire was built

Having visited about a thousand kitchens, Kroc believed that the McDonald brothers had the best company he had ever seen. The restaurant was clean, modern, mechanized and the staff professional and well maintained. Roadside burgers often didn't meet the needs of the area's frequent bikers and local rebellious teenagers, and inMcDonald's Ray Kroc saw the perfect realization of the concept of a fast food restaurant.

Kroc opened the first McDonald's with the McDonald brothers in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Effective manager

Since then, the story of Ray Kroc and McDonald's has rushed forward like a freight train. After entering into a partnership agreement with the Macdonald brothers, Kroc sent a letter to W alt Disney. They met as ambulance trainees in Sound Beach, Connecticut during World War I. Kroc wrote: “I recently took over McDonald's fast food chain. I would like to know if it is possible to include it in your Disney Development concern. According to one version, Disney agreed, on the condition that he raise the price of French fries from ten to fifteen cents, which would allow him to make a profit. Kroc refused to neglect the interests of his regular customers and decided to do without the help of Disney and his studio.

Journalist Eric Schlosser wrote in his book "Fast Food" that this is a preemptive renegotiation by some McDonald's marketing executives. Most likely, Kroc's proposal simply remained unanswered.

Kroc is credited with a number of innovative changes to the food franchising model. Chief among these was the sale of single store franchises instead of the larger territorial franchises that were common in the industry at the time. Kroc acknowledged that selling exclusive licenses to large markets is the fastest way tofor the franchisor to make money, but he also saw in practice the loss of the franchisor's ability to control the course and direction of the network. Above all, in accordance with contractual obligations with the McDonald brothers, Kroc wanted uniformity in service and quality across all McDonald's locations. Kroc knew that it would be difficult to achieve this goal without influencing all the establishments belonging to the chain (franchise).

Ray Kroc's McDonald's policy was to create places only in suburban areas, not in the city center, as ordinary citizens could eat there after regular business hours ended. Restaurants, according to Krok, had to comply with all possible sanitary and hygienic standards, and the staff had to be clean, well-groomed and polite with children. Food should be strictly fixed, standardized products. Restaurants were not allowed to deviate in any way from specific menus and signature recipes. Kroc insisted that every condiment container must be kept perfectly clean. Smoking and paintball at McDonald's have also always been banned.

Krok himself at first had difficulty adhering to his strict rules. In addition, several California-based restaurants began offering dishes that should not have been on the menu, changing prices, recipes, or making various other deviations from the firm's overall strategy. For a while, the ambitious manager continued to license McDonald's in California, preferring to focus on the Midwest, where he believed peoplemore conservative and less likely to challenge authority.

Kroc had a disdainful opinion of MBAs and people who attended business schools or graduated in management, believing they lacked competitiveness or market savvy. For a while, McDonald's had a policy of not hiring people with an MBA. He also forbade McDonald's executives from having secretaries and required them to answer phone calls on their own. They were supposed to follow a certain dress code, which included, among other things, a ban on beards. The company encouraged employees with special certificates and praises given out for honest observance of the franchise rules.

Great ambitions

During the 1960s, so many new fast food chains entered the market that copied the McDonald's model, including Burger King, Burger Chef, Arbys, KFC and Hardee's. Ray Kroc spoke of competitors with undisguised contempt, saying that they could not offer the quality of food, service, affordable prices and sanitation that McDonald's had. He resisted joining any trade organization or concern for fear of accidentally revealing his trade secrets.

Krok was embarrassed by the desire of the McDonald brothers to maintain only a small number of restaurants. The brothers also consistently impressed on Kroc that he had no right to make changes to such things as the original plan (for example, to introduceIllinois has stricter rules than California), but despite Kroc's pleas, the brothers never sent any formal letters that legally allowed changes to the restaurant chain's rules. In 1961, he bought the company for $2.7 million, calculated to provide each brother with $1 million after taxes. Obtaining funds for the buyout was difficult due to existing debt that had accumulated following the company's dramatic and rapid expansion. However, Harry Sonneborn, whom Kroc called his "financial wizard", was able to raise the necessary funds.

Krok was very angry that the brothers did not give him some real estate and the rights to the very first restaurant in San Bernardino. In a fit of rage, Kroc later opened a new McDonald's restaurant near the McDonald brothers' original restaurant, which was later renamed The Big M because the brothers had neglected to retain rights to the name. Big M closed six years later, unable to compete with the first brainchild of the MacDonald brothers. As part of the ransom, Kroc is alleged to have promised, based on the handshake agreement, to continue paying an annual fee of 0.5% of the original agreement, but there is no evidence of this other than the claim of the McDonald brothers' nephew. Neither brother publicly expressed disappointment with the deal. Speaking to someone about the ransom, Richard McDonald reportedly said he had no regrets. Since then, the company has been called Ray Kroc's McDonald's.

Croc supported the Speedee Service pipelineSystem for making hamburgers, which was introduced by the McDonald brothers in 1948. He standardized all food preparation operations, ensuring that every hamburger was the same in every restaurant. He set strict rules for the entire franchise in everything related to food preparation, portion sizes, cooking times and methods, package size and design. Kroc also canceled cost-cutting measures such as using soy in hamburger meats. These strict rules applied to customer service standards as well. For example, the money should be refunded to customers whose orders were incorrect, or customers who had to wait more than five minutes.

By the time of Kroc's death, the network had 7,500 outlets in the US and 31 in other countries around the world. The combined sales of all the restaurants totaled over $8 billion in 1983, and his personal fortune was about $600 million.

Passion for baseball

In 1974, Kroc retired from the company. He decided to return to baseball, his favorite sport, when he learned that the San Diego Padres were for sale. She was conditionally sold to Joseph Danzansky, a Washington grocery store owner who planned to relocate the team to Washington. However, the sale was tied to a lawsuit, with Kroc purchasing the team for $12 million, keeping it in San Diego. In Kroc's first year in charge, in 1974, the Padres lost 102 games but attracted over one million attention, a record.box office success in the major leagues of the time. Their previous highest attendance was 644, 772 in 1972. Their captain said that Kroc was first and foremost a big fan of the team.

On April 9, 1974, as the Padres were on the verge of losing the season opener in San Diego, Kroc took the microphone and gave a speech to 39,083 fans: "I've never seen a more stupid games than this one. The crowd greeted his speech with great approval and applause. But in the end, disillusioned with the team, he handed over management to her son-in-law, Ballard Smith. "Hamburgers make more sense than baseball," Kroc said at the time.

After his death, since 1984, the Padres began to wear special armbands with Kroc's initials - R. A. K. That same year, they won the NL pennant and played in the 1984 World Tournament. In 1999, Kroc was inducted posthumously into the first class of the San Diego Padres Hall of Fame as team owner.

Socio-political position

The Kroc Foundation supported research, treatment and education in various areas of medicine such as alcoholism, diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Ray's non-profit Ronald McDonald House, which provides free housing for parents close to the medical facilities where their children receive treatment, is a prime example of this community stance.

Lifelong Republican Kroc believed strongly in self-sufficiency and campaigned stronglyagainst the expansion of the powers of the government and the New Deal. He received mixed reactions from the public when his $255,000 donation to Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign became public. The entrepreneur was accused by some politicians - in particular, Senator Harrison Williams - that he wants to influence Nixon, so that the latter, if he wins, vetoes the minimum wage bill.

Private life

Relations with the first wives of Ray Kroc - Ethel Fleming (1922-1961) and Jane Dobbins Green (1963-1968) - ended in divorce. His third wife, Joan Kroc, was a philanthropist and greatly increased her charitable contributions after her husband's death. She made donations to a range of issues that interested her. For example, to promote peace and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. After her death in 2003, her remaining $2.7 billion estate was distributed to a number of non-profit organizations. That amount included a $1.5 billion donation to the Salvation Army to build 26 Krok Centers-community centers serving hungry areas across the country. Ray Kroc's children received almost nothing from the inheritance.

Death

In 1980, after a stroke, Kroc was sent to a rehabilitation center for treatment for alcoholism. He died of heart failure four years later in a hospital in San Diego, California at the age of 81 and was buried in El Camino Memorial Park.in the Sorrento Valley in San Diego.

In popular culture

Kroc's acquisition of the McDonald's franchise and his "Kroc-style business tactics" are the subject of Mark Knopfler's 2004 song Boom, Like That.

Krok is portrayed by Michael Keaton in the 2016 film The Founder. The film shows how Ray Kroc's empire, McDonald's, was created. At the same time, it criticizes the unethical attitude of the entrepreneur towards the McDonald brothers.