BHoP#347 Time to Lean, Time to Clean: The Story of Ray Kroc and the Rise of McDonald's

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Well Adam, you have you have returned from Europe and need to know how the weather was there

and how it is in the Commonwealth.

Yeah.

The weather in Harbaura was rainy and foggy and not a real place, but go ahead.

It's totally real, incredible and real and it's actually very similar here, you know.

So once again, Pennsylvania is probably one of your best facts, Emily's of Northwestern

Europe available to you in North America.

How is the weather in Arkansas?

It is in the high 70s.

We're going to hit near 80 today.

So we've got that going for us.

Looking forward to that I guess.

How's the weather in Kyoto?

It's what I really want to know.

It really matters to me.

So yeah, that's where we are expecting thunderstorms as usual.

So we'll just we'll just await that.

When do the tornadoes come?

The tornadoes will come very soon.

We're almost in the tornado season.

So I do have a tornado siren right outside the office door.

That's why we can't record certain times throughout the week due to the tornado siren

testing, which would interrupt what we're trying to do here.

It would degrade the quality.

The quality of this podcast is what up the quality, you know, as the case can be, right?

Well, if I'm doing something especially autistic, maybe the tornado siren goes off and everyone

just feels better, you know.

And speaking of quality and autism, we have a very special episode for you today, because

we're going to talk about McDonald's and talk about Ray Crock, great American.

The listeners are going to need to guess who picked this topic.

It's going to be difficult.

Right.

We're going to try to not make this a pure seed oil's episode.

That's going to be very important.

And it's not going to be totally focused on modern McDonald's and when it's become so

no.

No.

Well, we're going to ask the the folks at home to do today is to imagine a time where business

owners had hustle business owners cared about the consumer.

And they made huge profits, but also provided a quality product to the people.

That's going to be something very foreign, especially to our younger listeners out there.

Just almost unheard of.

Yeah.

And I, you know, I just want to mention before we get into a franchise that, you know, really

failed to stay centered in California, that in and out is still doing all of these things

and looks like the earliest description of the first McDonald's.

So I mean, there is still quality out there, but it's not as widely available as McDonald's

no question.

Yeah.

And they have they are moving or have moved to Tennessee.

So we'll see what happens with it out going going forward.

So.

So we're going to talk about Ray Crock, Oak Park Illinois's favorite son born in 1902,

worked various jobs, very, you know, post war and free war kind of jobs, paper cup salesman,

pianists.

Okay.

I don't.

I don't.

I mean, what's really incredible is that was a thing like that you could do.

You know, like life almost nothing about life was assured, but if you wanted to get out

there and get on the road and, you know, sleep in Howard Johnson motels for most of the year,

you could sell paper cups.

Yeah.

And Howard Johnson also had quality food in those days.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But most notably, he worked for multi-mixer milkshake machines.

And so go around selling the multi-mixers very different, you know, they could mix several

milkshakes at a time, very strong salesman believed in systemization and efficiency.

But Hamilton Beach came in provided a cheaper, cheaper milkshake machine.

So Ray Crock was in the mid 50s, having a little bit of trouble, but he's out in California

in San Bernardino area.

And he notices a small burger stand ordering multiple milkshake machines, very strange

order, very large order, why would a little burger stand be ordering this many milkshake

machines?

Enter Richard and Maurice McDonald and they had created something called the speedy service

system, which was a very efficient assembly line method for fast food production.

They did this with a very, very specific blueprint and a very limited menu burger, fries, and

shakes.

They were focused on consistency as much as they could.

They focused on low cost and very importantly for what would come to American food.

They focused on speed.

So beginning in 55, Ray Crock becomes a franchise agent for the McDonald's speedy system, essentially.

And he opens the first McDonald's franchise to East of the Mississippi into Plano, Illinois.

And so in 1961, he buys out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million in games full control

of the company.

Now, right there, that seems like a very simple business deal, but it was actually quite

a long way to get there.

Ray Crock wanted to keep all these contractual obligations, but he wanted to really change

how it was done.

He wanted to implement the system in the fullest way possible, but he also wanted to be free

to deviate from it somewhat so we could kind of break out of the McDonald's brothers mold.

What happened with restaurant franchises before Ray Crock, for the most part, was you were

assigned a territory.

So we used Kentucky Fried Chicken, for example, you could sell Kentucky Fried Chicken,

you could sell it to restaurants, the recipe, whatever, in territories, you would be the

exclusive territorial person who had this.

So so it's rather different.

So in KFC, for example, not necessarily a standardized menu, but it could be Ed and Lorraine's

diner and you offered the Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe.

The Colonel would sell you a friend of the podcast, the Colonel would sell you pressure

cookers would sell you the recipe, teach you how to do it, but it was very different

from a, this is only Kentucky Fried Chicken, standardized menus, same Kentucky Fried

Chicken, you get in Utah is the same that you get in Pennsylvania.

That just wasn't the model, but the chicken was the same.

Or you would have these franchises that again, we're going to sell you a territory.

You could be Joe's burger shack of, you know, the Pacific Northwest or whatever.

Ray is going to change that and he's going to make it into the empire that it is, which

is essentially standardization and control strict operational guidelines, emphasis on uniform

taste service and appearance nationwide.

And in the early 60s, he established Hamburg University to train franchise operators.

He established single owner franchises, which meant that you didn't get a territory.

You got single stores, or single stores of instances, single owners.

So no more large territorial franchises, which was essentially the standard at the time.

He recognized the sale of exclusive licenses.

You know, for these big territories, it's a quick way to make money, but it lost the

franchise's ability to control the product being served and the way in which it was

served.

Right.

So contractual obligations are there.

He needed the McDonald brothers out in order to be able to do this because they strictly

resisted it.

And so in 1961, he buys the company for $2.7 million.

It almost seems like the McDonald's to that number out there that didn't know if he would

actually pay it because it was an astronomical sum at the time.

Harry Sonnenborn, his financial guy, was able to get the funds.

And so he gets it.

And he begins to really fine tune exactly what McDonald's would be.

Standardizing operations and strictly controlling how the food was made from the portion sizes

to the time it takes to cook, the packaging, and he rejected cost cutting measures, which

is something very foreign to fast food today.

So being filler existed at this time, he would not use it.

He searched diligently for the perfect potato for the most consistent fry.

He would park a couple miles away from a McDonald's franchise, for example, and would pick

up the trash, McDonald's trash along the way that he found and dump it at the owner's

door.

He would go to competing burger chains and go through their trash and count up the

wrappers to try to deduce their sales versus McDonald's sales.

And really, if you didn't get your food within something like five minutes, full refund,

it was something really just that hurt him.

Even down to the mostly disposable packaging, at least the way McDonald's did, it was

pretty, pretty unique for the time.

A lot of stuff that we just take for granted, McDonald's really pioneered.

And so now you've got this juggernaut, you have this sort of brilliant model of maintaining

control.

And so you're going to be able to build a gigantic, a gigantic operation this way.

One of the other things that he did that was, that was quite brilliant was the real estate

strategy from McDonald's.

He created what was at a time called, you know, rather imaginatively, franchise realty

corporation.

It's now McDonald.

And they purchased land and at least to have the franchise eased.

So they're making money on the land that they've leased to the people who've already paid

him the franchise fee plus the profits and royalties that come from the franchise.

A pledge allegiance to the grind.

I mean, and that is the secret to McDonald's.

It is the secret to McDonald's.

Yeah.

They are a real estate company.

Yeah.

It was not simply billions and billions served.

It was billions and billions leased.

99 billion must be served.

Right.

Nobody thought of this before.

No.

No, they hadn't.

They hadn't.

And then we have to give him credit for branding and marketing.

Symbols like the golden arches, which have become, you know, as ubiquitous as an American

symbol as the Superman logo, dare I say, even as recognizable as the American flag as

far as a symbol of America, all you have to look at is the golden arches and the cold

were to kind of prove that point.

He wanted to develop things like a very family friendly image.

It wanted to be a place where people would bring their kids, which is something that McDonald's

has shot away from in recent decades and probably to their detriment.

And as we talk about this, we'll talk a little bit about the detriment of McDonald's.

McDonald's is still doing fine.

They're still making a lot of money, but at the same time, it's not the same thing, not

the same thing that it was.

Right.

So, so you got that obviously introduction of mascots like Ronald McDonald beginning in

the 60s, the whole McDonald lamb people in the 70s and the 80s.

And McDonald's is seen, although we're talking Ronald McDonald, golden arches, we're talking

classic architecture era.

It was seen as very clean, new and innovative in its time.

Yeah.

It was a novelty to go to a place like McDonald's.

I think pretty much anybody would admit that people eat out more than they ever have

before.

But if you can think all the way back to about a hundred years ago, which is the genesis

of anything that we would now recognize as fast food in the case of white castle, which

is really the first somewhat standard chain fast food restaurant, you still don't have

anything like a notion of speed.

So fast, fast is relative, but white castle in the 1920s, 30s into the 40s is still serving

you food on a real plate with real utensils that have to be washed by real dishwashers.

And the McDonald brothers, you know, the colonel, not Sanders, but Grills is accentuating

Ray Crockier.

I want to give a little bit of a little bit credit to the McDonald brothers themselves who

open up a restaurant along Route 66 in, you know, Mormon founded San Bernardino.

And they're going to serve people much faster than anyone has ever been served.

I mean, it's, it is lightning fast.

And that's why it's so popular.

So really without people being mobile, that number of people traveling along any kind of

road of any sort in those kind of numbers, you don't really incentivize this.

I don't, I'm not sure that fast food exists without automobiles.

I don't, I don't see why you need it.

Right.

And it's going to progress to another Crock innovation or popularization anyway, the

drive-through.

Yeah.

There you go.

The original restaurant is drive up, walk up, and get your food in literal minutes, unheard

of.

Right.

Prior to that, for the most part, White Castle being the notable exception, and we stand

White Castle.

It's great.

You, you grimace, but you, you don't live in crystal country.

Trust me.

If you did, you would appreciate White Castle even more.

So, you know, the, you walk up, you get your food.

Before that, you did have the, these sort of traditional drive-in where you go up and

a hop comes out of your order through a window, but it was still a relatively slow and

inconsistent process.

Yes.

That's good.

Yeah.

That's good.

That's good.

Is that drive-in comes before drive-through?

Drive-through is the.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you're sitting there.

You're parking.

Maybe they're going to hang the tray on your window.

You don't know what kind of menu you're going to get.

You certainly don't know anything about consistency.

You're going to wait who knows how long.

The McDonald's, their, brothers, they've developed a system they're ready to go.

And they really, really game this system.

And they too were very protective of the system.

That's why they were worried about any of Crocs deviations from it.

It was a final old machine, and if you start messing with that, then you really can't,

you really can't do much.

So when they had, they had actually had earlier franchises, but they were upset at the

changes in the menu, upset in things.

Then ironically upset when Ray Crock, no, I want to, I want to do all the things you did,

but better.

They're like, no, it's still a change.

We're not going to allow that.

That'll be $2.7 million if you want to do that.

And yes.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah.

And this, this was such a facet and was such a calling card that if you find the oldest

images from maybe the 1950s of the first sets of arches that were built intentionally

to be, to frame the entire restaurant, right?

This is, once they start franchising, once Crock has a hold of things, you'll notice

that on top of the sign, the arches are on the restaurant.

But on top of the sign is the first mascot who was not Ronald McDonald.

It was a character called Speedy.

Speedy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because that was, that's what they did.

That's what was notable.

Yeah.

So the idea that you can get things quickly, efficiently done exactly the right way or you

get all of your money back, that, that was new, you know, that, that people just assumed

you would just kind of sit there and things would take however long they took.

Yeah.

And they were, some might argue that we were better for that, but you've also not set

around modern Americans long enough to really know why that's not good.

It was not a little bit later, but if this is still possible and there are certainly examples

in America where that, where that, where it is possible now, but, but we got to get to

the 70s because that's where it gets really interesting.

So Crock, not inventing the fast food model, but being the Henry Ford of fast food industrializes

it and scales it nationally and globally in a way that could not have been imagined

before.

I'm sort of lauding him because I'm impressed with him.

Yeah.

And yet at the same time, this seems to be contradictory to a lot of our other episodes

where we bemoan the taking away of, you know, regional, you know, identifiers, food, local

restaurants and stuff, but he's not quite a Sam Walton where he kills the five and

die.

The McDonald's really becomes another feature.

And then for a long time, you know, for big towns, midsize towns and especially small

towns, getting a McDonald's was a big deal.

You know, you've got your first McDonald's now.

And so what do we have from him?

All the standardization drive through uniform menus, national advertising change, operational

manuals for fast food chains.

The corporate franchising model is going to be borrowed by places like Burger King, Wendy's,

Taco Bell.

And even beyond that, you cannot really find another example of food being defined in

such a significant way, post-World War II, especially in the suburbs, then McDonald's.

McDonald's changes the way America eats truly.

It expands, they're eating more cheeseburgers, they're eating fast food style cheeseburgers.

And it just, it changes the way America eats.

And then it expands as the only other thing coming out of, you know, post-war, it was

a World War II thing that was brought over and really became popular afterwards.

But that's a shelf stable product.

It's not a new edifice in your suburban neighborhood, for example, right?

And so it really changes the landscape where decades are removed from that.

So we're used to this.

The other thing McDonald's does, and we will get to the burger war, is that they become

for a long time the standard teenage job.

To this day, it's still used as the place where teenagers work.

You go into McDonald's and you will not see a teenager very often, but, or at least not

the kind that you traditionally associate with McDonald's.

But it became a perjorative, right?

Oh, you want to work at McDonald's?

But it wasn't a perjorative then.

It was right to work at McDonald's.

Some are not negligible percentage of Americans, I think, have worked at McDonald's at

one time or another.

Yeah.

Won't name his name, you know, homeless boy at 13 gets a job of McDonald's.

He's now a big wig at a certain company whose product we may or may not use to record

this podcast couldn't, couldn't have made it without Ray Crock.

So thanks for that, Ray.

My secretary worked at McDonald's in the early 80s.

It's still probably her favorite job she's ever had.

It looks back with it fondly.

Most days, mostly.

Did you work at McDonald's?

Did you work at McDonald's?

I have never had a normal kind of job.

No, there you go.

That's exactly that's going to say I thought I thought everyone on this podcast was in

need.

So, okay.

Yeah, my career, my, my, my resume is interesting.

We'll put it that way.

There are a lot of gaps in your resume.

Yeah, I can't talk about it, but, but yes, but no, I should say.

So then we get to the 70s and now you have Burger King and Wendy's who are really like,

okay, this McDonald's idea is awesome and we need to, we need to really piggyback off

of this.

So they began doing the same things that led to the great burger war of the 70s and 80s.

Corporate espionage, you can only imagine Ray Crock trying a whopper for the first time

and wondering what that, what, what's going on?

How do we compete with this quarter pounder given in the early 70s, by the way?

And of course, the Big Mac, even, even earlier.

They McDonald's and the fast food places did not toy with their recipes like they do

today where there is a, seemingly a new product you have to get all the time.

Burger King differentiated himself by having the whopper and they were flame broiled very,

very different.

Wendy's had square hamburger patties because they don't cut corners.

Ray Crock would allow new things on the menu, but no, is that true?

Is that real?

That's, that is, I think it's one of those things that might have been apocryphal at

the time, but it became true over time.

It has become true.

Okay.

Yeah.

I've heard Dave Thomas say it.

So for example, we're recording this in Lent, the filet fish is an interesting story.

I believe this filet fish might come out of Cincinnati as all semi-good things do.

I'll have to, I'll have to double check on that, but I think the origins are Cincinnati.

They, it was basically, you know, Lent and kind of things, like 62, something like that.

So early on in the history of it, Ray Crock had a competing sandwich, which was called

the Hula Burger, which is a horrible idea, sorry, Ray, which was a grilled pineapple

slice on a hamburger bun.

What could go wrong?

And Cincinnati boy is like, I got this filet fish here.

So Ray is like, all right, we'll have a competition, whichever sells the most, that one goes on

the menu and the filet fish beat it because of all the Catholics and Cincinnati.

So we thank you for that.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The deep lore that the people wanted home listening to me to all this episode.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the Big Mac was invented in Fayette County,

Pennsylvania, in Union Town.

I was waiting on it in 1967, it is, the Big Mac is Appalach's gift to the rest of the

world.

I mean, among other things.

So.

You're welcome for the many, many gifts that we've given.

No worries, guys.

Yeah.

I was didn't cut corners and who was an early KFC franchise, but that's a story for another

day.

And so Ray Crock also, I'm not need I'm percent sure he didn't invent this term, but he certainly

popularized it and was really known for it.

If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean.

So a big Ray Crock thing.

Yeah.

It's great.

Yeah.

He didn't invent the word grind set because he was too busy being on it.

Right.

So we get to the burger wars.

So predominantly plays out, you know, in differentiating their products, square burgers, the whopper, as we

said, but also in major advertising campaigns, certainly burger kings have it your way,

which was a was a dig at McDonald's because McDonald's was very standard.

They didn't want to have it your way.

You were going to have a McDonald's way.

The famous where's the beef slogan, for example, coming from out of Wendy's and they would

have aggressive comparative marketing.

Here's a flat sad McDonald's burger.

Here's a great and glorious whopper that you can get any way that you want.

The specialty burgers have already mentioned whopper big mag Dave's single.

The expansion to chicken sandwiches, breakfast items, value menus, later supersized options

and combo meals.

So you have a advertising war, a menu war, eventually a pricing war, aggressive couponing and promotional

tactics.

Remember, you still do, if you check your junk mail, you still get coupons in the mail.

A lot of this really comes out of the burger wars.

And then of course, geographic expansion, they want to dominate the suburbs, especially,

and they want to dominate urban centers, especially.

And eventually, they want to take over the world, which leads to expansion to Europe, Asia,

and Latin America.

Cambridge University has campuses on maybe four continents, maybe five, I don't know.

And that's where you go.

You want to be big time in the McDonald's franchise.

You go to Hamburg University.

I don't have that.

I don't display any of my diplomas.

If I had a Hamburg University, that would be framed.

Yes, sir.

It would be framed and hung.

With a name like mine, you should go to Hamburg University.

If indeed, that is my real name.

So, international expansion is an interesting one, because as I mentioned before, the McDonald's

artist becomes a symbol of American dominance throughout the world.

A lot of times, especially in the TikTok and Reels era, I hear people that are like,

you're going to a foreign country.

Why are you going to McDonald's?

I'm looking to McDonald's in any foreign country that has one that I've ever been in.

And I have.

And we'll continue to do so, because I want to see what they're doing.

I'm re-crocking it at the, you know, you're picking up McDonald's fresh, you're yelling

at people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And in some ways, you get something a little bit more similar to the old McDonald's, because

they will look clean things up for you.

Customer services is a lot better in a lot of cases.

Yeah.

I remember particularly, Panama's McDonald's being weird, because they're like, do you want

fries or fried chicken with that?

I thought that was odd.

And they will bust your tables, different culture, different way.

Yes.

But the Burger Wars, you know, were huge, Burger King expanded, Wendy's expanded massively,

McDonald's expanded even far beyond the McDonald's.

Just plate one and continues to win Burger King and yeah, Burger King, I had no idea when

you suggested this, that how in the tank you were for McDonald's like, well, if you had

to, like, gun to my head situation, I'm a huge Wendy's fan, you know, Dublin, Ohio.

I will, I will defend Wendy's and, and bemoan what happened to Wendy's.

And we're going to talk, because this kind of happened to all the chains, we're going

to get into that.

But they, Wendy's has gone down, in my opinion, saying that for liability purposes, never

a Burger King fan, but they've gone down.

We've seen their decline, they're announcing closure of stores, for example, yeah, right.

And most of the time, the decline is put on the fact that they deviated all of them from

what Ray Crock set down, which was consistency, speed, and quality.

Yeah.

All of them, including McDonald's, have seen, have seen a downgrade in all of those.

Yep.

It, it began, I would say in McDonald's in the 80s, when they moved away from

Tallow, which is a very hot topic right now, but the save costs, they moved to seed oils,

processed oils.

And that was probably the first chain in the armor.

We're assuming the audience knows that.

So that's why we're kind of brushing past it.

Like, yeah, McDonald's used to make their fries and beef Tallow.

And they were, they were McDonald's was famous for having very good fries.

Yeah.

And they weren't, then things changed.

And so, so the legend is kind of Hindus complained, but I think the real story is just simply

that, you know, seat oil was much, much, much cheaper than beef Tallow.

And I mean, because realistically in the 80s, how you just the Hindu market for McDonald's

in America, that they were going to make this major change.

So that's my theory.

But we've seen it, it sounds like a more plausible explanation than a guy

ranting on TikTok, who obviously hasn't slept in two days.

So yep.

Right.

It's good.

So we've all seen customer service quality, cleanliness go down, not only in fast food,

but in grocery stores, other retail stores, that's an extraordinary problem that we have

in America.

If you travel elsewhere, you actually don't see that in other, in the other countries

of, with certain developmental capacities, we'll put it that way.

Of a certain kind, do not have really this issue.

And yet, we do hear.

And it's, there are a number of factors, but one is, it is a different country from when

Ray Crock industrialized McDonald's.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't want to talk about seat oils precisely.

They're part of this.

But I would say that the average BMI of the average American and what that does to your

energy and your mood and a lot of other things, governs to some degree the, the low quality

of our social interactions.

Yeah.

Everything is sort of bid to the bottom dollar today, so you're going to get the cheapest

thing.

I mean, you take any clothing item that people want to order off Amazon, it's going to

come from China, sometimes drop shipped from China, just low quality, kind of stuff.

People, now there's, there's a small shift, generationally, probably going toward that.

But it's, it's much like the, oh, all the kids are coming in great numbers to big liturgical

churches.

It's, if you really run the numbers versus those who were like, say, not coming to church

at all, it's still not that big of a shift.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you for saying this.

I mean, I just, the honesty washes over me like an awesome wave.

So we have to have the talk, you know, yeah.

So the people who are investing in the BMI once, crime once model are more than there were

20 years ago, but not enough to overcome Timo or Wayfair or something like that.

Yeah.

And so, so what you have is corporations that have a prioritized profit.

Now Ray Crock did this to get rich and he did, but his model is not simply volume.

That was a part of his model.

We're going to sell a lot of food quickly, but especially as the burger wars flare up

and as he's expanding into territories, he understands that people are only going to

come for my cheap burgers if they're good and they're only going to come to the restaurant

if it's a quality experience.

And so we understood that service and consistency was a very important part of retaining business

so that you could maintain that volume.

Now fast food restaurants are just the default place that people go and they really don't

have to cater to the customer anymore.

And that's true at businesses across the board.

Walmart can be miserable because you're going to complain about it, but you're going

to shop there anyway.

McDonald's like every other fast food place today, take the soybean thing out of it, take

the rotating menu which causes issues out of it.

They've incentivized people to order through apps, couponing, like the customer service

at a certain point, they don't care about it because you're never going to talk to a

human.

You can order on an app, you can go in, you grab your bag, which has been sitting there

for who knows how long off of a shelf, and you take it out to your car.

And so people are really just going after what's fast.

And a few years ago, they said fast and cheap, but it's not even that cheap, relatively

speaking anymore.

So we've been set a drift and people want to say, well, that was Crocs fault, but that's

not fair to Croc.

In 1967, Croc steps down a CEO and he remains chairman of 73 and was still very much overseeing

his operation, making sure that it was what it was supposed to be.

People criticize him for a number of things like his conflict with McDonald's brothers

over the royalties or how he aggressively pushed them out.

They want to blame McDonald's for the rise of obesity or fast food linked public health

concerns or criticism over wages and working conditions because he was a big nixon fan

and did fight against a minimum wage and things like that, right?

But you can't really say that, oh, that's why McDonald's is the way it is today.

McDonald's is the way it is today.

And many of them are because of the change in the business model that's happened across

virtually all industries since about the 80s, which we really didn't see that the

dragons had until really probably the 2000s when things started getting pretty bad as

far as quality, consistency and service.

Yeah, and I do not see how that could change until and unless you have the same relatively

localized control rather than essentially shareholder control by private equity and other

investors who are going to optimize for the bottom line and not necessarily for a certain

business model centered on which makes sense in the case of a restaurant centered on customer

service.

They're just not optimizing for customer service and why would they, right?

If they can make this profits, it's one of the best examples, one of the easily observable

examples of what private equity does.

Because if you're looking at a retail store that say sells clothing, you're, you have

a pretty, depending on the store, a pretty large inventory you have to go through before

the new inventory comes in and you start seeing the changes in the product.

Yeah.

With fast food, you're talking within days, you start to see portions getting smaller,

you start to see quality going down, right?

And people can document that today.

Right.

And you see they get, they get bought out and I won't mention any specific chains, but

you'll see them, you know, that were owned by the one guy, you know, I found it the same

with shop, I was in college or whatever.

And then it gets bought out and virtually overnight, the changes become very, very noticeable.

And that's why no one goes to long john silver's anymore, nobody, long john silver's rest

in peace.

They just keep closing.

Where's the last, where's the last long john's that you've seen?

It's paired with an A and W for absolutely no reason in the world.

Yeah.

It is.

Like one day, I like to, I need to do the research on young brands and how we ended up

with pizza hut Taco Bells and Taco Bell KFC's all jam together.

What a combo.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

The long john's A and W class, like that, that's been, it's been around a while now.

Right.

It's kind of enshrined at this point.

Like, yeah.

Yeah.

It's being cringed by virtue of time.

With enough time, things quit being cringed.

Right.

We quit feeling the cringed.

We become a notch related to cring.

There you go.

Yeah.

It doesn't mean that they are not metaphysically cringed.

It just means.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so that is, you know, sort of in a nutshell, the history of McDonald's and, and what

has happened.

You know, McDonald's, I think it was a misstep when they, when they tried to be gourmet.

So they, they tried to do things like the arch Deluxe, it's going to be this big gourmet

burger.

And it comes out just flops.

And so what McDonald's learned from that was, oh, we need to do more of this stuff.

And we need to do it even harder.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

No.

And that is the opposite of the original business model, which was the McDonald brothers

figuring out that if you just make like six things, you offer six things, and they're

really great.

And you can always get them.

Yeah.

Fast.

That's the way it is.

And so here.

And so people go, well, you just can't do that today.

As an attitude, I don't like, you can't happen, can't do it in America anymore.

My brother's Chick-fil-A exists.

Chick-fil-A.

Chick-fil-A has a simple menu that is extremely fast, prizes customer service, prizes cleanliness.

It is almost universally recognized as the golden example of customer service in America.

Fast food or not?

Fast food or not?

Right.

No, that's true.

That's true.

And they honor this Sabbath day.

Have you been controversial in and out in the state of Utah?

I have not.

That's once again, why aren't the Mormons calling me to do the conference there?

I got as far as Wyoming to do the history things, but they have not here to forehand me.

Yeah.

I mean, you do that or even an Arctic freeze, which food is useful.

Arctic, yeah.

Yeah.

That's right.

If food I would not describe as like extremely notable, but customer service is incredible.

Fans of podcasts know I'm devoted to their fries sauce.

There you go.

Mormons know customer service is what we're saying.

I mean, even early KFC franchising as it's history in Utah.

I believe the first franchise is Utah.

Wow.

Yeah.

What do remind you folks out there if you're blackpilling yourself hearing the story of

this great American reminder that crock was in his 50s before this got going.

Carl Sanders is in his 60s before things really got going for him.

It's never too late.

I had never too late.

I love that.

I love that because they do not know how many trains he sat on trying to sell fuller brushes

or whatever he was selling paper costs and it just didn't work.

Yeah.

It just didn't work.

He listened to the motivational records and things back in the day, just trying to get

that edge, trying to get it.

And in those 50s, cracks the code.

Cracks the code.

It's really a beautiful story.

That's a show idea, you know, the really classic American genre of self-help and motivation,

motivational speaking.

I know many of you find it cringe and many of you also dislike personal effort in any

regard, in your in your salvation or in any other realm.

But a lot has been done by people who are sitting there listening to recordings you

can find on YouTube about how to change your sense of motivation in life.

So it might be cringe.

I've never personally been a devotee, but you do see it popping up over and over and over

again in the lives of people like Ray Croc.

Yeah.

It gave him the drive.

It gave him the drive to do what they did, you know, you get Dale Carnegie, Carnegie had

to win friends and influence people, which by the way, much like the Fleming mod novels

has been censored today.

So the folks know if you're going to go out and get the kind of standard for this, you're

going to have to find an older edition, uncensored, until you have friends or you are influencing

other people.

Don't mock Dale Carnegie.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you know, you can you can read that and he's going to open up your eyes to

a lot of things and you'll realize you don't actually ever ask people anything about themselves.

So not not a bad thing to read, not a bad thing to pick up.

There is, you know, in kind of popular history, you know, you want to look at these guys and

just demonize them.

And on the one hand, okay, can you say that certain great men were without scruples, sure.

On the other side, there's there's a little bit of this where the people who ride in the

popular histories just are seemingly jealous of men like this and they don't really know

how to take them.

Yeah.

But the history of great men, not just in the 20th century or the 19th century, but all

of history has been the grind and having to ruffle feathers and then go with it every

time.

There are no other, there just are no other options.

I think, I think that maybe the, maybe the chief reason for that, if, if it is being

setting good faith, if it's being set in bad faith, it's, it's just envy or it's, you

know, if it's setting good faith, right?

And in a good faith example of this, the people may have heard of is Eric Schlosser's book,

Fast Food Nation, I think a documentary came out of it.

I think even a fictionalized movie they did, you can find that book at any, used bookstore

of any kind anywhere.

Any airport bookstore, any airport bookstore is going to have that.

And the idea, the idea there is now extremely common on all your social media platforms,

which is history works by virtue of a single explanatory factor that I, the person relating

it to you, has discovered.

So you don't, you don't have to, you don't really have to think about why did Americans

start eating out so much.

Is that just because there was a McDonald's within driving distance, did it have anything

to do with mom, not actually being home to cook anymore?

You know, there are a lot of factors here that you might ask yourself about, right?

But if you can find one factor, you just kind of run with that and it, it's a, it's

a good way to believe that all of history is a series of conspiracies and that Ray Crocs

out there thinking, I want to destroy the American populations, body mass index.

How can I do that in the simplest way?

He didn't.

He was trying to serve food in a standard, clean, reliable, pleasant way to as many people

as possible.

He was trying, he was trying to make money and yeah, you know, beginning in the 70s and

80s, they started to say, okay, fast foods rising, people are unhealthy at a time when

people are immeasurably more healthy than they are today.

No question.

No, here, here are two things.

There are more additives into fast food.

You eat fast food in 77 and then you, you get in the time machine and you eat fast food

today.

You're going to feel much worse after eating it today than back.

You're not eating the same meal.

You're not eating the same meal, right?

And people are much more obese, but it's not just McDonald's fault.

It's, it's what's in the food.

It's eating more of it than you would in the 70s and 80s.

It's having a sedentary lifestyle.

So like not letting everybody off the hook here, but there are certainly more factors going

on than just saying, oh, it's a big grand McDonald's conspiracy to keep you stupid.

Now, there are grand conspiracies to keep you kind of dull.

I, that's probably true.

But it's, it's not simply like you said, Ray Crock in the 60s, like I don't want to sell

milkshake machines.

I want to destroy the world that that wasn't, that was in fact not what happened and, and

things have changed and, and it's not a fast, not only a fast food thing, it is an virtually

everything you eat if you are not careful.

Things have happened that have caused this.

But people will say, let people eat what they want to eat.

That's fine.

I still like the peer food and drug act and, you know, thanks to the impart to Teddy Roosevelt

and at the jungle, the fast food nation of its day, which is a, which is an interesting

book because if you remember, the jungle is just a pro communist manifesto, but everybody

just latched onto the food stuff in it.

That's a true story.

Nobody, nobody took away from that.

Like, I need to care about the plate of Lithuanians.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was just something that there's humans in the meat, which is a conspiracy theory

that's out there, even today regarding McDonald's.

Folks not realizing that McDonald's is probably not selling human meat because it's, it's

just not cost effective to do so.

So anyway, to kind of go back to where we were, yeah, it's not this big grand sort of conspiracy

there.

America has changed.

And what she wants is, in the 70s, 60s, they like cheap and they like quality.

Today we allegedly like cheap, but we overpay for everything.

So you don't get quite the menu items that you did and you don't get them for anything,

even adjusted from inflation, approaching the same price across the board at food.

And it's probably time we could say in MacCOVID, because this was happening before that

as well.

Right.

But, but this happens because people continue to put up with it.

There were many competing franchises that went up against McDonald's in the 60s, 70s,

80s, even 90s.

And they couldn't compete not always because they couldn't go up against the juggernaut

that was McDonald's, but because they could not perform to McDonald's standards.

They didn't have the consistency.

They didn't have the quality.

They didn't have a flavor that people wanted.

And they went under because people didn't go there.

That's in the simplest way how businesses worked and why McDonald's initially succeeds.

I would argue that it continues to succeed today.

And a lot of these large ones, the ones that do succeed in sort of a negative sense is

because a little bit of business inertia, a convenience, you know, you're going to find

numbers of certain kinds of restaurants much easier.

And then places like Chick-fil-A succeed because they follow something very close to the

Old McDonald's model.

I would argue Culver's is another example of this.

Although Culver's is a little bit different because they, you know, serve you at your

table.

Well, I guess Chick-fil-A does, too.

So, scratch that.

They can deviate from the McDonald's model a little bit and still succeed.

There is still a place for customer service, still a place for quality food, and still

a place for the grind out there.

To be a little bit aggressive, Culver's is making people work when church is going on.

So, there is a difference there.

Well, this is true.

This is why they will never approach the profits of Chick-fil-A.

I will never.

I mean, and there is something to be said for loyalty here.

And this is a, you know, I think one of the, you know, the most wholesome thing about

the story is, like I said, Ray Crock starting late and going.

And another thing that we forget about is, is brand loyalty because we don't understand

the concept of loyalty anymore in American business or family life, church life, anything

anymore.

Yeah.

With the pace that things move, we switch political loyalties all the time or ideological

loyalties all the time.

In church life, in the 70s, you went to church here.

This is where you went to church.

We're Methodists.

We're going to first Methodists.

People jump around everywhere.

In the 70s, we're McDonald's family.

We'll try Wendy's, but, you know, we're not going to do it all the time.

We're a Burger King people, whatever.

What keeps people coming back to a place like Chick-fil-A is, is frankly, a devotion to

the brand.

They like the product.

They like the service.

They're treated well.

They feel they receive a fair product for a fair price and they, and they keep coming

back.

There's something kind of wholesome in that.

I know that it sounds wrong to say that to a, because we're talking about a large company,

but it is effective.

You give them this.

They give you money for it and they're pleased with the exchange and so they keep coming

back.

We easily saw it.

Can we talk about lack of brand consistency in the LCMS?

Are we allowed to, is this a safe place to do this?

This is a safe.

This is a place of a circle of trust, brother.

Because I have often thought, like, why don't we just do a Chick-fil-A thing?

Like, why are we trying?

We do feel kind of like, especially before McDonald's started building, the newer ones that

are obviously optimized for using the kiosk or using an app.

Yeah.

The ones look like prisons all the way from orange and yellow and red.

But they're often cleaner than the older ones.

Yeah.

Steril.

I know.

I'm steril.

I'm sorry.

I mean, I'm running against your 1980s aesthetic here.

Well, everything you say applies to the 80s aesthetic because it's still the consistency

thing.

Yeah.

It's consistent.

But I guess what I'm saying is you go in and you don't really know what's on the

menu, although right now with McDonald's, I know that I can get a Shamrock shake.

But the original idea was simply, this is, you get what you get and you don't get upset.

And these are like the six things you can get there and they're going to be really

good.

If you do that with church, now churches like infinite choice, the stakes are obviously

much higher, souls are at stake and we're like, well, you can have any of the following

like 17 options and you don't even, you're like, I don't even want any of those.

I don't even know what to do with any of those.

So I think that there's kind of a lot of times in the church, there's a lack of insight

into human psychology that people who engage professionally in customer service think

about obsessively, not just what am I putting out there, but also what are people able to

handle and interested in handling?

And then I'm just going to run with that and that's going to be, that's going to be

everything because the stand, it's, the church has gotten less standardized as food has

gotten more standardized.

Yeah, the church has adopted the Burger King, have it your way model, and Burger King has

suffered some measure of decline because of that.

They do tell you in restaurants not to have a menu that is too big and restaurants are

a good business indicator here because most of them fail and a huge chunk of them fails

in the first year, and even larger within five years and even larger within 10 years.

And one of the fundamental things that business folk will tell you is that you need to really

have a pretty small menu and do that very, very well.

Now, Chinese and Mexican restaurants can kind of get away with this because it's sort

of the rotation of about five different ingredients, but American cuisine, you know, and which

incorporates European, it can kind of, you know, it's kind of weird to go into a place

where you're like, you're going to have everything from a cheeseburger to fried cod to chicken

parm, you know, that, okay, they're not going to be able to do all of these things very

well.

It is a diner in the Northeast, and you should either order breakfast or just skip to

the Greek stuff because this is 100% true, which is another thing, which I will protect

whatever a Greek diner does at all costs.

I will defend that.

But yeah, I know what you're, okay, so you apply this to churches, and I know people are

already uncomfortable because we're talking about it as a business, but the problem is,

people who are not business minded have been employing bad business tactics to it, and

it's not really worth it, it's too late, and we're not, we're not talking, I'm not even

talking about, I'm talking about sort of the experience, like, yes, and it's easy, it's

easy enough if you travel at all.

Yeah, we're not saying do this to get tied to something, it's saying, it's talking about

brand consistency.

Yeah, like even just from the perspective of like, I don't want this to be difficult, particularly,

I don't want this to be difficult to a lifelong Lutheran.

Yeah, we, we, we, we allegedly believe the same things, confess the same things into

whatever degree, practice the same things.

Yeah, LCMS, a person who's a member of an LCMS congregation should be able to go anywhere

in the country that we have an LCMS cross on the sign and reasonably expect what to

see.

Yeah, right.

And then you can't.

So then the question becomes, then why, if you, if you said, okay, I've got to make

Donald's here in Arkansas, you've got to make Donald's there in Pennsylvania.

Yes.

And I'm traveling there.

And if I make Donald's in between, I can reasonably stop at assuming it's managed according

to Ray Crocs principles and know what I'm going to get.

Why?

And that's right.

You didn't have that.

If you didn't have that, you couldn't put the golden arches on it, it didn't call it

McDonald's.

No, that's right.

And there, I mean, there, there is even very, like around here, the variation is everyone's

supposed to be Roman Catholic around everybody.

So every restaurant is advertising its fish menu.

And probably the fish menu is bigger right now here than it is in Idaho, probably.

I don't know that, but probably.

I can't get a fundamentally different burger.

So if you have variation, you have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of this variation?

And a lot of times in the church, it seems that the purpose of the variation is it's

kind of a local political maneuver.

It's answering hyper-local demand, but it has its own momentum because if I'm like, well,

the hyper-local demand is for innumerable different kinds of fish.

We want to McDonald's that is essentially like a fire hall or a Catholic church fish fry,

such as we have around here.

Well, McDonald's can't really do that menu.

If you start stretching, and I feel like we just don't really talk about this because

I'm mostly concerned about normal people.

There are people who are going to see through it, they'll figure it out.

There are also people who are going to be completely dismayed and just like run away

the first time there's any variation of any kind.

I'm just saying if the person has a basic acquaintance with something and you are purporting

to be a national thing, then you should deliver on what his basic acquaintance has provided

with him with in a different part of the country.

That just seems kind of like honesty and advertising to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But when you'd off the model of cater to whatever, then consistency doesn't really matter.

And some people would say we don't care about consistency.

In which case, I would just ask the question of them, why do you care about the brand?

Yes.

This is kind of the, and this is where like, you know, I want to have the golden arches,

but I want to only serve, you know, fish, right?

I want to serve, I want to serve rivers.

Why?

Because they know that there is at least some draw with having those arches.

Even if they don't care about the operations manual, they know that there's some reason

that we have to have this.

And in church terms, it would probably be something weird like, well, I was Ray Crog's

nephew third removed, you know, I've been a McDonald since it would probably have to

do with blood relationships.

You're right about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And here's the thing.

It's America.

Like, if somebody wants to make a burger place and not be a McDonald's, that's great.

Just don't put McDonald's on it.

This is so good because Ray Crock, Crock not spelled like it's an English word because

it's not.

Ray Crock, Bohemian American, knew that people would go to a restaurant called McDonald's.

Not a word.

It would include a restaurant.

Called Crock's.

So he bought in that $2.7 million, or included the naming rights.

The name.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the McDonald's brothers kept the original location.

You can visit it.

It's a museum.

I think a Japanese businessman bought it and made it a museum about McDonald's.

Ray Crock put it out of business, which was kind of funny.

Yeah.

I shouldn't laugh at this, but they wouldn't sell the original one.

And Crock is not happy.

Right.

And it was called the big M. So Ray Crock's like, I'm just going to open a McDonald's

by it.

We're going to let the market sort this out.

And it did.

But to their credit, they renamed it.

Yeah.

They renamed it.

They weren't like, well, this is really still McDonald's.

Like, it wasn't like the real McDonald's, right?

Geneseo McDonald's.

Yes.

There we go.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so, and so then if people are just too concerned, you know, we want to be careful

because McDonald's does have a slightly higher budget than we do.

They have so much money, they're still had courted in Illinois, like, what a loss move.

You know, they're like, we'll pay the taxes.

It's fine.

Yeah.

Not a big deal.

Yeah.

But I mean, you know, I mean, imagine if we had a Crock, imagine if we had a Crock going

on the LCS churches and inspecting the track rack and seeing what's going on.

What are you reading here?

What's that?

What are you doing?

And why have you not cleaned the floor?

I mean, there are, I think especially the stuff, especially applicable to churches,

is not about revenue growth, it's a, but it is about like customer service.

Like why am I doing less for people than McDonald's is doing for them?

Let alone check for life.

Why am I doing less?

Do I have a good reason?

I don't.

I never do.

Right.

Why am I being consistent?

Yeah.

Why am I going against the operations manual here?

Right.

What happens?

We have an operations manual.

Nobody wants to talk about this, but we literally do.

We have the Bible, we have the book of Concord, and we have bylaws.

Yeah.

You know, so just stick with the manual.

This sounds like say the black, do the red.

It is actually if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean is what we're saying.

Yes, sir.

No, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah, because I think and I, I, I know that we did have a move in this direction.

I mean, we don't, we don't have the same latitude or we don't, we don't elect people

to high office necessarily who are sort of driven in a rake rock way.

But a guy that we've mentioned from time to time in the podcast who wrote a book called

Organized for Action, you know, Merkins, did produce something like this that, that was

kind of the idea was you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you start a church,

1950s America.

He started a church.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Right.

Just, just do things this way.

This is the letter you're going to send out to people.

It's not that complex.

Just do this and make sure that you follow up quickly and that kind of stuff.

That's what usually matters to human beings much more than the sense that you are correct

about this or that thing that they heard about on the internet.

Yeah.

Okay.

That does happen.

No question.

I've seen it myself, dealt with it myself.

For your average person, the fact that you followed up, that it was nice, that you were

pleasant, all of that, you know, that they could understand what was going on in reading

the bulletin.

That kind of stuff does actually matter a lot.

And so my plea isn't, this is going to fix everything.

My plea is, why wouldn't we do this if we could?

Okay.

That's really key to say is this is not a surefire way any more than anybody was guaranteeing

Ray Croc would die a millionaire.

But if you can do things that make it easier for people, simpler, more pleasant, why not?

Why not?

Well, I think that's going to do it.

Now that everybody's really wanting to go to McDonald's and they might actually feel bad

after eating fast food.

I'm still immune from the feeling, but I mean, I can wait.

It is lunchtime for me, but I'm still not, I'm not feeling on.

You should go to White Castle.

I can't.

I mean, that's, that's Midwest air and skips and then it's New York, New Jersey.

That's the reason why most of us can't go to White Castle.

I'm not going to Crystal.

I'll say that much.

I mean, the good people at Crystal, they're great people, wonderful people, but just not

my, I'm going to go get a sandwich at Eaton Park.

So there you go.

Enjoy the smiley face, Cody.

Yes, sir.

Well, all right.

Well, this has been a brief history of power mining to check out Momento70.com.

That's Momento70.com.

The first men's only Lutheran devotional dedicated to fasting, square prayer, scripture,

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Colonel Grills, here with Dr. Kunz, God love you and God bless.

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