This day in history: On this day in 2021, Tony Eyles, 42, died at a McDonald's drive-through in Vancouver, Canada, after partially opening his car door to retrieve a dropped credit card. His car rolled forward and collided with the restaurant's structure, pinning him between the car door and the vehicle's frame. Despite attempts to revive the victim, he died on scene.
In 2018, a man in St. Louis died after trying to get his food from a Jack In The Box drive-thru and also was pinned by his car.
Similarly, a 69-year-old man in Ohio in 2020 died after he dropped his change at a McDonald's drive-thru and opened the door of his pickup to retrieve the change and got caught between the vehicle door and a pole.
This Day in History: On this day in 1984, a 41 year-old man walked into a McDonald's restaurant in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, and using three guns (a shotgun and two 9mm semi-automatics) and opened fire, killing 21 people and wounding 19 others before being killed by a police sniper approximately 77 minutes after he had first opened fire.
Referring to the July 1984 massacre at the McDonald’s restaurant, Israeli criminologist Abraham Tennenbaum wrote that: "what occurred at a [crowded venue in] Jerusalem some weeks before the California McDonald's massacre: three terrorists who attempted to machine-gun the throng managed to kill only one victim before being shot down by handgun carrying Israelis. Presented to the press the next day, the surviving terrorist complained that his group had not realized that Israeli civilians were armed. The terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowd spots, thinking that they would be able to escape before the police or army could arrive to deal with them."
"The presence of concealed handguns should reduce both the number of public shootings and the amount of harm caused by any one event. Consider the following examples. During a recent shooting spree at a public school in Pearl, Mississippi, an assistant principal retrieved his gun and physically immobilized the shooter before he caused additional harm. And in the public school related shooting in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, which left one teacher dead, a shot gun pointed at offender while he was reloading his gun prevented additional harm. The police did not arrive for another ten minutes." Source
The best antidote to guns in the wrong hands is guns in the right hands.
This day in history: Ray Kroc, the "Founder" of McDonald's fast food restaurant died on this day in 1984. The movie "Founder" starring Michael Keaton was a great movie, but it painted an unflattering picture of Ray Kroc. Kroc saw something in McDonald's that the real founders did not, and he was ruthless in his efforts to make Mcdonalds the worldwide phenomenon it is today.
From Sean W Malone: Films that celebrate entrepreneurship, and reveal that great drama of business success, are rather rare. We have a new one in “The Founder.” It is the story of how an innovative little hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, turned into the international corporate franchising giant we now know as McDonald's.
Kroc becomes obsessed with the idea that this model should be franchised all over the country.
The film centers around Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a traveling salesman who first encountered the original McDonald's restaurant by selling several multi-mixer milkshake machines to owners Dick (Nick Offerman) and Maurice (John Carroll Lynch) McDonald – the McDonald brothers.
After a string of middling business ventures in food industry sales, Ray was shocked to receive an order for 6 of the machines for a single restaurant and immediately drove from St. Louis to San Bernardino to see what kind of restaurant could possibly need to make 30 milkshakes simultaneously.
As the story goes, the McDonald brothers proudly give Ray Kroc a tour of their unique "Speedee Service System" and Ray becomes obsessed with the opportunity to take their model and franchise it all over the country.
At first, the brothers are skeptical, having previously failed in an attempt to franchise their business due to quality control concerns, but a persistent (that word is very important to this film) Ray Kroc eventually convinces them to allow him to become their new head of franchising operations. They draw up a contract which the wary McDonald brothers believe gives them tight control over the whole business, and Ray gets to work.
He aggressively pushes the expansion of new locations, starting first in his home of Illinois, quickly adding McDonald's restaurants throughout the Midwest.
Marketing vs. Quality
Unfortunately, not all is well under the Golden Arches.
Even as Kroc's hard work is generating new business and building the McDonald's brand, his own finances are faltering on just a 1.5% commission, and his own ambition begins to create conflict with the much more cautious and quality-minded Dick and Maurice.
Kroc is a man of almost unlimited ambition who in the end works to strong-arm and even cheat the McDonald brothers out of their own business.
As their disagreements build, their relationship breaks down and Kroc, who is the first to pitch McDonald's as the "new American Church" and a place that should be synonymous with family, begins to look and act more like Gordon Gekko than a middle-American minister.
Keaton's performance is fabulous, if often a little off-putting through a harsh nasally accent, and the character writing throughout is excellent. Kroc is a man of almost unlimited ambition who in the end works to strong-arm and even cheat the McDonald brothers out of their own business. And while it's very hard to define Ray Kroc as an evil person, he does increasingly unethical or shady things in the pursuit of his own interests throughout the film both in business and in his personal life, including leaving his first wife (Laura Dern) in order to pursue the wife of one of his franchise owners, Joan (Linda Cardellini).
The title of the film itself is a reference to Ray's low character, as he begins to refer to himself as the "Founder" of McDonald's when meeting new people, even claiming the first restaurant was located in Illinois, leaving Maurice and Dick out of the story entirely.
Given that its central protagonist is a Walter White-like figure, descending into a pit of greed and disreputable behavior, it would be understandable for many to then perceive the film as a whole as "anti-business," but I think that this would be a mistake.
There are many aspects of the film that show the beauty of innovation and entrepreneurship in ways you don't often get to see on screen. For example, director John Lee Hancock depicts the McDonald brothers developing their system and the work they put into their business. This is filled with adoration and love, and even Ray Kroc is presented as extremely hard working, smart, and in many ways, a true visionary in spite of everything else.
What Causes Success?
The film raises many important questions about what makes a business successful.
For all their innovations in efficiency, Dick & Maurice McDonald didn't see what Ray Kroc saw. And although Maurice berates Kroc over the phone in one climactic scene, asking him what he'd ever invented or done, the truth is that Ray actually did invent quite a bit and added a great deal of value to their partnership.
There are many lessons to be drawn from this film for entrepeneurs of any age.
In fact, Kroc fundamentally solved the McDonald brothers' core problem, quality control, by building effective systems and eventually even a new business structure that allowed him to more effectively train, and then maintain control over, franchise owners. The film doesn't cover this, but those systems eventually turned into what is now called "Hamburger University", a 130,000 square foot training facility in Oak Brook, IL (set up by fry cook-turned-Chairman, Fred Turner) where franchise-owners go to learn the essence of what it means to run a McDonald's.
There are many lessons to be drawn from "The Founder" for aspiring entrepreneurs.
The first is that while ambition is a key component to success, it should always be subordinate to strong ethics and personal character. Another lesson is that being a great entrepreneur is not always the same thing as being the inventor of a new product or service, or even about being a great "manager" who gets a business off the ground. Often the greatest entrepreneurs are the ones who are able to see the opportunity and possibility in what's already around them when everyone else can't.
Certainly the way the film tells this story, Dick and Maurice McDonald got the short end of the stick once Ray figured out how to get around their original contract, and they were downright screwed in many ways once their partnership dissolved. But they didn't build what Ray built. The McDonald brothers created one good hamburger stand. Ray Kroc created an empire.
Sean W. Malone has spent over a decade building creative teams and producing content with the goal of effectively communicating the value and importance of human freedom to as many people as possible.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Today in History: American director and producer Morgan Spurlock was born on this day in 1970. He is best known for his anti-fast food documentary Super Size Me where he eats nothing but McDonald's food, three times a day for 30 days. That worked out to 5000 calories a day when you also add in the "super-size" and one gallon of soft drinks. As a result, the then-32-year-old Spurlock gained 24 lbs, had a 13% body mass increase and increased his cholesterol and experienced mood swings etc.
Even while watching Super Size Me I had problems with the film. How many people actually eat like this? Sure, maybe a few, but most don't. I might eat at McDonald's 4 times a year. Critics of the film, including McDonald's, argued that the author intentionally consumed an average of 5,000 calories per day and did not exercise, and that the results would have been the same regardless of the source of overeating.
When you factor in that an Egg McMuffin, orange juice, and coffee for breakfast; a grilled chicken bacon ranch salad and iced tea for lunch; and a double cheeseburger, medium fries, and diet Coke for dinner total fewer than 1,800 calories, this comes well under the 2,500 calories Spurlock's doctor says he needed to maintain his starting weight of 185 pounds. By contrast, Spurlock says he consumed some 5,000 calories a day, while deliberately avoiding physical activity.
After eating exclusively at McDonald's for one month, Soso Whaley said, "The first time I did the diet in April 2004, I lost 10 pounds (going from 175 to 165) and lowered my cholesterol from 237 to 197, a drop of 40 points." Of particular note was that she exercised regularly and did not insist on consuming more food than she otherwise would. Despite eating at only McDonald's every day, she maintained her caloric intake at around 2,000 per day.
After John Cisna, a high school science teacher, lost 60 pounds while eating exclusively at McDonald's for 180 days, he said, "I'm not pushing McDonald's. I'm not pushing fast food. I'm pushing taking accountability and making the right choice for you individually... As a science teacher, I would never show Super Size Me because when I watched that, I never saw the educational value in that... I mean, a guy eats uncontrollable amounts of food, stops exercising, and the whole world is surprised he puts on weight? What I'm not proud about is probably 70 to 80 percent of my colleagues across the United States still show Super Size Me in their health class or their biology class. I don't get it."
In 2009 Tom Naughton created the documentary Fat Head refuting Spurlock's claims. When I add this video to my blog (see above), a warning is placed over it by our big tech overlords.
