A burger, drink, and fries – the classic American meal
The Big Mac has three slices of bread
Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sessame seed bun.
Ray Kroc mortgaged his home and invested his entire life savings to become the exclusive distributor of a five-spindled milk shake maker called the Multimixer. Hearing about the McDonald's hamburger stand in California running eight Multimixers at a time, he packed up his car and headed West. It was 1954. He was 52 years old.
Ray Kroc had never seen so many people served so quickly when he pulled up to take a look. Seizing the day, he pitched the idea of opening up several restaurants to the brothers Dick and Mac McDonald, convinced that he could sell eight of his Multimixers to each and every one. "Who could we get to open them for us?" Dick McDonald said.
"Well," Kroc answered, "what about me?"
Ray Kroc opened the Des Plaines restaurant in 1955. First day's revenues-$366.12! No longer a functioning restaurant, the Des Plaines building is now a museum containing McDonald's memorabilia and artifacts, including the Multimixer!
In 1965 McDonald's went public with the company's first offering on the stock exchange. A hundred shares of stock costing $2,250 dollars that day would have multiplied into 74,360 shares today, worth approximately $3.3 million on December 31, 2006. In 1985 McDonald's was added to the 30-company Dow Jones Industrial Average.
"Introduced systemwide in 1968, the Big Mac was the brainchild of Jim Delligatti, one of Ray Kroc's earliest franchisees, who by the late 1960s operated a dozen stores in Pittsburgh."
