McDonald's

"Businesses that need to operate uniformly wherever ever they are-McDonald's or Wal-Mart, for example-must ple-must be shaped by relatively few people. In such a business, centralized decision making is a very sensible approach. Businesses that serve diverse markets, on the other hand-or that experience very different conditions in different locations, or that rely more on high levels of innovation and flexibility than on uniformity-are best shaped by a wider array of people.... That is, by the people closest to where the work actually gets done. Those businesses must tell people on the front lines to "trust your instincts." And businesses that tell their people to "trust your instincts" generally should be decentralized. A decentralized structure pushes the power to set strategy, spend money, make decisions, and create policies out toward the marketplace. It promotes motes local autonomy. Managers within companies can look at the operations ations for which they are accountable in much the same way. In your department or work group, what's more important, uniformity or innovation? Consistency tency or flexibility? If your success depends heavily on uniformity and consistency, centralized decision making may be justified. If your success relies more on innovation and flexibility, you should make a conscious scious effort to push decision-making power down."

"There’s the mode of human behaviour which …to make a gross generalisation—if you’re preparing a wedding or a wedding anniversary and you’re choosing a restaurant, you’re probably much closer to maximising: what’s the best, most memorable, remarkable place you can take people to? Alternatively, when you’re just on the road and you’re stuck in Sheffield City Centre and you’re bloody hungry, you get a McDonald’s, and that’s satisficing. Right. It’s probably not the best experience you could possibly have but actually it’s far from being the worst experience you’ve had. The worst experience you could have is being mugged or getting food poisoning, and so on that scale of absolutely brilliant to shite, McDonald’s is still at a 7 or an 8. The reason it does well is because when you’re satisficing, your question isn’t really what’s the best meal you can possibly have, it’s also actually, “how can I avoid having a crap meal.”"

"If I were competing with McDonald’s, I’d say that actually what McDonald’s does well is the level of cleanliness and the design of the restaurants. They’re really, really clean. Even when you’re in a slightly grubby part of town the McDonald’s is a fantastically well kitted out thing. Secondly, the imagery that McDonald’s has employed and the new colourways they’ve employed have done a lot to take it away from its industrial associations. A lot of advertising people would say: “yeah but that’s not an idea”, but the effect it had by taking away the predominance of yellow and creating a thing that’s yellow on a dark brown background with some green furniture is … there are basic heuristics within the restaurant scene and this suggests that they have been to a farm, that they know what a chicken looks like, etc. Once you understand what the heuristics are in design, that can make me choose a shampoo."

"To align with the "drive-thru" shopping method, I decided to computerize the cash registers. Because traditional cash registers lacked efficiency and could not keep up with the times. Therefore, I entrusted the development of a new type of cash register to Matsushita Communications Industry of Japan. Matsushita Communications Industry agreed to take on the commission; however, they still asked me how many units I planned to order, as the cost would relatively increase if the quantity were too small. Around the year 1979, there were only about 200 McDonald's outlets in all of Japan, yet I boldly assured Matsushita Communications Industry that I was willing to order the new cash registers for 500 stores. My approach startled them. Once Matsushita Communications Industry received my commitment, they immediately began development and manufactured a new type of computer cash register system, called POS—Point of Sale. This computer cash register system, unlike traditional cash registers that make a lot of noise, and at the moment the money is inserted, the day's sales statistics appear, including the total sales amount and how many of each type of burger were sold. Moreover, the work hours of shift staff are also instantly displayed on the cash register system's screen. Thus, the head office could quickly grasp the sales conditions of stores nationwide. Before McDonald's adopted this computer cash register system, every morning from 10 a.m. to noon, ten female employees from the head office had to call each of the hundreds of stores across the country to inquire about the previous day's sales and then compile the statistics. When communicating by phone, it is often impossible to omit the pleasantries of greeting—employees would inevitably start the conversation with “Hello!" “Good morning,” or “How's the weather?” before getting to the point and reporting the previous day's sales. Such a method was not only a waste of time, but long-distance phone charges were also substantial. More critically, with telephone communication, mishearing or recording errors were inevitable. The head office would compare sales reports sent by the stores from the previous day with the numbers heard over the phone and often found discrepancies. However, since computerization, what used to take three hours of statistical work from 9 a.m. to noon is now completed from 9 a.m. to 9:05 a.m., with instantaneous delivery to the head office. This saves two hours and fifty-five minutes every day. Then, by laying off the ten employees who were making phone calls and saving on personnel expenses, and replacing the use of phones with computers entirely. This also saved 25 million yen in annual telephone expenses."

"In contrast, McDonald's, just twelve years ago from the US across the ocean, "landed" in Japan, overthrew traditional food, and dominated the food industry. So, what does McDonald's rely on? My explanation is that the world's food industry trend is moving towards hamburgers, and I was able to accurately catch the trend and succeed. Conversely, resisting the trend would mean inevitable failure. Stay slightly ahead of the trend"

"My hamburger shop is different from traditional stores because it includes a swimming pool. This swimming pool is not an ordinary indoor pool. The pool's roof is arched and can be opened and closed at will. In summer, the roof opens to allow sunlight, and in winter, the roof is closed, transforming it into a heated pool. And closing the roof saves one-third of the energy compared to the average heated pool. Modern people pursue a multi-purpose lifestyle, and simple dining is no longer satisfying. People want to do something before eating. Therefore, I had the idea to set up a swimming pool in the McDonald's hamburger shop, so customers can swim before eating."

"What we call "Drive-Through Shopping" mainly refers to driving through; however, children don't think that way, they figured as long as you can drive through, it's fine, so they came in groups on bicycles to buy hamburgers. More unexpectedly, at the Enoshima branch, someone even came on horseback to buy McDonald's hamburgers."

"My hamburger shop is different from traditional stores because it includes a swimming pool. This swimming pool is not an ordinary indoor pool. The pool's roof is arched and can be opened and closed at will. In summer, the roof opens to allow sunlight, and in winter, the roof is closed, transforming it into a heated pool. And closing the roof saves one-third of the energy compared to the average heated pool. Modern people pursue a multi-purpose lifestyle, and simple dining is no longer satisfying. People want to do something before eating. Therefore, I had the idea to set up a swimming pool in the McDonald's hamburger shop, so customers can swim before eating."

"I set my sights on indoor swimming pools and indoor tennis courts, which can be said to represent the happy sweat industry, combined with the fast food industry's McDonald's burgers."

"I believed that by the watershed year, McDonald's in Japan must expand to have at least 100 stores, or else McDonald's in Japan would not be successful. Thus, I set the target customer for McDonald's to be the "young class who is not averse to bread and beef." Then, using 1975 as the target, I aggressively expanded the business. After the watershed year, with the post-war population in Japan continuously increasing, the young class who are not averse to bread and beef also increased year by year. Since then, we entered the whirlwind era of McDonald's burgers."

"Making Money with Television The "drive-thru" system consists of customers ordering the goods they need through television. Currently, televisions are extremely common; almost every household has one or two, but only my McDonald's makes money using television. I use the television meant for entertainment for business, to take orders from customers."

"Keep up with the trends On July 20, 1971, Japan's first McDonald's opened in the Ginza district of Tokyo. At that time, the mass media unanimously believed that Ginza was not a suitable place to sell hamburgers. However, I personally disagreed with the majority and insisted that my judgment would not be wrong. Now, there are five hamburger shops in Ginza, from none ten years ago to five nowadays; the growth rate is quite fast. If all other conditions are ignored and the ratio is projected, in ten years, there could be ten hamburger shops in the Ginza area."

"I believe that by 1985, my McDonald's will have become a company with an annual turnover of ten billion yen and will have also formulated a long-term strategy for McDonald's. According to one set of statistics, Japan's consumption of rice is decreasing by an average of 2% per year, therefore predicting a 20% decrease in ten years, and 40% in twenty years{{id_0000}}."

"However, this is not something I decided to do on a whim, without any statistics to back it up. I call the combination of swimming pools, tennis courts, and indoor sports halls the "sweat industry"; I believe the era of the sweat industry has arrived. This means that making customers sweat can make you money. Therefore, I combined the swimming pool with burgers, integrating the sweat business with the fast food industry. McDonald's hamburger shops attract customers with the sweat industry, while the other eleven coffee shops lack any distinct characteristics. As a result, the customer's choice is quite apparent. Fast food + sweat business — I can confidently say that this is a typical example of the third industry."

"For example, the McDonald's people found out that the quality of the fries depended significantly on the starch content of the potatoes used, which had to be 21 percent. Ray Kroc sent specialists to the potato suppliers, who measured the starch content of the potatoes with a strange device - a hydrometer. The sight of the McDonald's specialists with their hydrometers left many a potato farmer speechless. They had never experienced someone showing up to subject their potatoes to thorough testing. But Kroc was still not satisfied. He inquired about how the potatoes were stored, and was shocked to hear that most suppliers stored the tubers in artificial caves lined with peat. So he began to look for processing companies that were willing to invest in modern storage with automatic temperature control. But that wasn't enough. With scientific precision, he had the frying process in the restaurants analyzed and potential improvements worked out. The husband of Kroc's secretary, who had previously worked as an electrical engineer for Motorola and then opened a McDonald’s restaurant with his wife, studied the frying process for the fries for several months in the basement of his restaurant. Eventually, he came to the belief that McDonald’s needed its own research lab, because despite all the improvements, the quality of the fries varied – and Kroc would not tolerate this. Kroc eventually agreed to the proposal to set up a small laboratory."

"for Harrison. Bob knew that Carleton County potato farmers were shipping a lot of potatoes to the Birds Eye plant in Maine that processed them into frozen french fries. He felt that there was something promising there, something worth exploring, and he was right. Fast food restaurants with french fries as a central focus were slowly making their pres- ence felt. McDonald’s, Burger King, A&W, Kentucky Fried Chicken all appeared in the mid-1950s in the United States, and the list has kept growing ever since, as did their demands for french fries. Fast food outlets had arrived to stay and they were grabbing a large share of the restaurant food market.25 Bob suggested to Harrison that the time was ripe for a home-grown"

"LensCrafters was founded in 1983 by Dean Butler, a Michigan entrepreneur, who had set his mind on changing the world of opticians. Why wait days to deliver complete glasses after the visit? Just add a lab to the store and the processing can be done immediately. The idea had come to him when he was a manager at Procter & Gamble, helping a colleague who had resigned to take over the family's optical shop. With a few television spots, he had managed to quadruple sales every month, demonstrating how backward the sector was from a commercial point of view. There were prairies to conquer, given that the American market for opticians had just been liberalized and most of the sales were covered by health insurance. Visiting the labs, he realized that the operations to make a complete pair of glasses lasted no more than twenty minutes, yet customers were made to wait for days. "It all happened by chance, I saw an incredible opportunity. How was it possible to wait weeks when you could deliver finished glasses in less than an hour?" he tells the website of the University of Michigan. Butler opens his first store in Kentucky, in the Florence shopping center, across the Ohio River, in the great suburbs of Cincinnati. The idea exploits the boom of the "malls," the new agoras of Americans, the indoor squares where they go shopping and eat fast food, where love stories are born, where grandparents are taken to cool off in summer and to warm up in winter. The concept of glasses prepared on the spot is perfect for American customers, who while waiting go to eat at McDonald's, go shopping at Macy's, or take children on the indoor colorful rides. LensCrafters was thus born, the first chain of stores that assembles your product within an hour. Butler then sold the chain to the US Shoe Corporation conglomerate, remaining CEO."