The Founder traces how McDonald's became an iconic American success story
There’s a story told by market capitalists. It’s one about the importance of tenacity, about the necessity of bootstrapping, about the power of elbow grease. It’s a nice story, filled with fairy tales about American innovation and small town success. But like most fiction, it’s never the whole truth.
While necessity may be the mother of invention, inventions themselves are just products to be packaged and sold. Highly successful businesses aren’t built on handshakes, trust, and mutual respect. They’re built by undercutting the competition, breaking contracts, and overpowering enemies with capital and lawyers.
The real message of American trade has always been look out for number one. This idea is on display in The Founder, another biopic about a famous American business man who single-handedly created the fast food industry. He never made a hamburger, never manned a fryer, and never mixed a shake. Instead, he took someone else’s idea, sold it around the country, and took credit for its success.
He was a Willy Loman-style salesman that managed to strike while the iron was hot. Ray Kroc gave the world McDonald’s by stepping on the dreams of the people that started it. The Founder tells the story of how he did it.
Kroc (Michael Keaton) spent most of his life as a salesman, the type that hawks various gadgets that nobody really needs. He went door to door selling “As-Seen-On-TV” products before they were marketed on channels like QVC. When we meet him, he’s moved on to selling five spindle milkshake mixers to mom and pop drive-ins across the U.S. He sees the same thing everywhere he goes—hordes of teenagers making messes, long waits for mediocre food, and inattentive wait staff with poor customer service skills.
But then he gets an order from a place in California requesting five milkshake machines at once. It’s a burger stand in San Bernadino and its revolutionary. Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) have created the “Speedy” system of food preparation, complete with a kitchen designed around giving the customer a fully cooked burger and fries in under thirty seconds.
Packaging has been designed as disposable, so there are no plates or silverware to wash. Customers walk up to the window, order their food, and eat it outside or in their cars. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen.
Kroc immediately recognizes the potential of franchising. But the brothers have tried it before—they discovered that they were unable to ensure quality across the different locations. Still, Kroc convinces them to try it again, with him at the helm. His approach is similar to theirs, at first, but when he experiences the same problems, begins a new strategy.
Through trial and error, Kroc begins to understand that he’s really in the real estate business. Lease the land to franchisees, pull their lease if they break from the standards set out by the company. Thus, corporate food service is born.
To the credit of the film, Kroc is not portrayed as an especially likable person. He’s a salesman, single-minded, unconcerned with personal relationships beyond what others can do for him. He is emotionally estranged from his first wife after years of selling her on “the next big thing” and divorces her as soon as someone better comes along (the always welcome Linda Cardellini).
His drive leads to great success at the expense of those that created the product he sells. It’s hard not to feel bad for the brothers McDonald, especially considering their obsession with quality. That they became famous for second-rate hamburgers is only second to how much they lost on an ill-advised, handshake deal.
But the story itself is about Kroc. At the beginning of the film, we see him listening to a record called the Power of the Positive, repeating old adages about the strength of persistence. At the end, we hear Kroc preparing a speech, recalling the record word for word. It’s a reminder of who he is—a peddler of other people’s dreams, a thief of good ideas, and marketer of empty platitudes. There’s nothing more American than that.
The Founder is a good film, one that reminds us why we can’t have nice things.