The first CEO of what would become the McDonald’s Corporation of franchises, Ray Kroc expanded the company into its current global behemoth—the Golden Arches. The McDonald’s headquarters, in Illinois, has a Ray Kroc Museum, describing, in part, Kroc’s relationship with other major corporate executives of the immediate post-war period, including Walt Disney.
Ray Kroc Quotes in Fast Food Nation
The Fast Food Nation quotes below are all either spoken by Ray Kroc or refer to Ray Kroc. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Mariner edition of Fast Food Nation published in 2012.
Chapter 2: Your Trusted Friends
Quotes
This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.
Related Characters:
Ray Kroc (speaker)
Related Symbols:
Golden Arches
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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Ray Kroc Character Timeline in Fast Food Nation
The timeline below shows where the character Ray Kroc appears in Fast Food Nation. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: Your Trusted Friends
...IL, where he goes to the McStore—an enormous gift shop for the company—and the Ray Kroc Museum. Schlosser is impressed and slightly confused by the overwhelming amount of McDonald’s merchandise for...
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Both Kroc and Disney were self-educated, and their training facilities they christened “universities,” to make employees at...
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Schlosser notes that, after purchasing McDonald’s franchising rights, Kroc sent a letter to Disney, then already quite famous as head of the Disney movie...
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...quality, of a machine producing something customers, especially children, might want, was deeply influential for Kroc, who imagined the McDonald’s Speedee Service System nationwide, as a blueprint for the efficient production...
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...the United States, was, for example, part of the Disneyland opening ceremony. Schlosser argues that Kroc’s politics were harder to trace, since Kroc tended not to get involved in national political...
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...“progress,” not unlike Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl’s Jr. In particular, Disney’s progress, like Kroc’s, involved an America that looked more suburban, and required families to drive on major interstate...
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Kroc also believed in this kind of progress. He tried, for a time, to plan a...
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...Disney’s theme parks,” Schlosser notes, stating that “the life’s work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle.”
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Chapter 4: Success
...tail end of the 19th century, it was really the fast food industry, and Ray Kroc in particular, who pioneered and perfected the idea. Many fast-food companies, like McDonald’s, now make...
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Schlosser notes that Ray Kroc encouraged “tenacity” and “competitiveness” among his early franchisees in the 1960s and ‘70s, and he...
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Chapter 5: Why the Fries Taste Good
...Simplot “began selling frozen, pre-cut french fries” directly to consumers, and by the 1960s, Ray Kroc began buying Simplot’s frozen fries, since they tasted nearly similar to the fresh-cut variety in...
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