Finance History | 1398 North E Street — Fifteen Cents and a Kitchen Drawn in Chalk

People treat McDonald's as a Des Plaines franchise story that later listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company name and the kitchen method both start on this corner.

On 15 May 1940 Richard and Maurice McDonald opened McDonald's Barbecue Restaurant at Fourteenth and E Streets in San Bernardino.

The stand had come from Monrovia as an octagonal building they moved onto the lot.

Twenty carhops served a twenty-five-item menu to a parking lot built for 125 cars.

In 1948 the brothers closed the barbecue for three months.

They drew the new kitchen in red chalk, assigning one station to the grill, one to the fries, one to the window.

The Speedee Service System reopened in December 1948 as a self-service stand with nine items.

A hamburger sold for 15 cents in 1948.

French fries replaced potato chips the next year at 10 cents.

The original building was demolished in 1972.

A historical marker and an unofficial museum now occupy the lot at 1398 North E Street.

The mechanism is a limited menu and a divided kitchen that cut the labor in each burger.

Ray Kroc licensed the system in 1954 and bought the brothers out in 1961 for 2.7 million dollars in 1961 currency.

The S and P 500 name still sits on the same corner as the first Speedee window.

Photo: Marykdan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.