Quotes from Ray Kroc

One man's famine makes another man's feast.

Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer. We must take the risks involved in our free enterprise system. This is the only way in the world to economic freedom. There is no other way.

I worked at something whenever possible. Work is the meat in the hamburger of life. There is an old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I never believed it because, for me, work was play. I got as much pleasure out of it as I did from playing baseball. Baseball

I had spent the previous summer and lunch hours during the school year working in my uncle Earl Edmund Sweet's drugstore soda fountain in Oak Park. That was where I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what they'd come for was a cup of coffee.

It is impossible to grant someone happiness. The best you can do, as the Declaration of Independence put it, is to give him the freedom to pursue happiness. Happiness is not a tangible thing, it's byproduct of achievement.

Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness.

No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter, and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client

As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot

Now, to most people, a french-fried potato is a pretty uninspiring object. It's fodder, something to kill time chewing between bites of hamburger and swallows of milk shake. That's your ordinary french fry. The McDonald's french fry was in an entirely different league. They lavished attention on it. I didn't know it then, but one day I would, too. The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me,

It was the drive-in restaurant, a product of the Great Depression's crimp on the free-wheeling lifestyle that had grown up around movie-happy Hollywood. Drive-ins sprouted in city parking lots and spread along highways and canyon drives.

I couldn't tell, and I cared not at all. It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement

Her apprehensions about my becoming Mr. Multimixer had been laid to rest at this point, and I don't think she ever got over the shock of discovering that we were nearly $100,000 in debt. She couldn't seem to handle it. For me, this was the first phase of grinding it out—building my personal monument to capitalism. I paid tribute, in the feudal sense, for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald's on the foundation I had laid.

The agreement gave me 1.9 percent of the gross sales from franchisees. I had proposed 2 percent. The McDonalds said, "No, no, no! If you tell a franchisee you are going to take two percent, he'll balk. It sounds too full and rounded. Make it one and nine-tenths, and it sounds like a lot less." So I humored them on that one. The brothers were to get .5 percent out of my 1.9 percent. This seemed fair enough, and it was.

Another aspect of the agreement was that I was to charge a franchise fee of $950 for each license. This was to cover my expenses in finding a suitable location and a landlord who would be willing to build to our specifications. Each license was to run for twenty years. My contract with the McDonalds was only for ten years. That was later amended to ninety-nine years. I

One of the reasons his subordinated lease idea worked so well was that in the late fifties we didn't have the proliferation of franchise operations and the fierce competition for commercial fringe property that developed in the course of the next twenty years.

Besides, the brothers did have some equipment that couldn't be readily copied. They had a specially fabricated aluminum griddle for one thing, and the set-up of all the rest of the equipment was in a very precise, step-saving pattern. Then there was the name. I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald's was exactly right.

There are things money can't buy and hard work can't win. One of them is happiness.

Ethel was incensed by the whole thing. We had no obligations that would be jeopardized by it; our daughter, Marilyn, was married and no longer dependent on us. But that didn't matter to Ethel; she just didn't want to hear about the McDonalds or my plans.

This was the beginning of real income for McDonald's. Harry devised a formula for the monthly payments being made by our operators that paid our own mortgage and other expenses plus a profit.

Opportunity is dead in the United States!" "The tax structure has destroyed all incentive!" How often we have heard such laments during the past thirty years, when in fact greater fortunes have been made and higher living standards achieved than ever before on earth! Those

This historic year of 1976 will see McDonald's Corporation surpass one billion dollars in total revenue for the first time. Casual students of business history may not realize the significance of the fact that this milestone will be reached during the twenty-second year of the company's history.

For the practices pioneered or perfected by McDonald's under Ray Kroc's leadership have revolutionized an entire food service industry, changed eating habits throughout the world, and raised customer expectations. Who among us is not now less tolerant of slow service, overpriced meals, soggy french fries, or a lack of cleanliness in eating places? Mr.

She dutifully attended McDonald's gatherings in later years, and she was liked by operators' wives and by women on the staff, but there was nothing more between us. Our thirty-five years of holy matrimony endured another five in unholy acrimony. I

Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself.