Retail History | McDonald's — The Counter That Replaced the Carhops
· 1948
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Retail History | McDonald's — The Counter That Replaced the Carhops
kevin
People treat McDonald's as a brand that arrived already wearing golden arches and a clown.
The first pin is a San Bernardino lot that sold barbecue to cars.
In 1940 Richard and Maurice McDonald moved an octagonal stand from Monrovia to the southwest corner of 14th and E Streets and opened McDonald's Famous Barbecue. A May 1940 clipping called it a drive-in cafe.
Carhops in satin uniforms carried ribs, sandwiches, and shakes to the parking lot. There was no indoor seating.
In 1948 the brothers shut that model down. They cut the menu to hamburgers, fries, and drinks, replaced carhops with a walk-up window, and timed the kitchen as a line.
That Speedee Service System is the mechanism. The restaurant stopped being a place you waited in and became a place that assembled an order.
The 1940 building was later demolished. In 1953 the brothers put a Golden Arches store on the same lot. That building came down in 1972.
What stands at 1398 North E Street today is a later structure. Albert Okura bought the site in 1998 and opened the unofficial First Original McDonald's Museum, run with Juan Pollo.
Admission is free. The original restaurant is not inside. The corner is.
Ray Kroc did not invent this lot. He licensed the system from the brothers in the mid-1950s and built the corporation that later bought them out.
The surviving oldest operating McDonald's with arches is a separate pin in Downey. This one is the origin of the method.
Photo: Marykdan, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.
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