The Founder (2016)
The movie begins with Ray Kroc, who is a salesman, giving his sales speech to a restaurant owner. He travels all around the country trying to sell a 5-spindle-multimixer with no luck. Then, he receives a call from a successful restaurant in San Bernardino asking for 5 multimixers. Kroc skeptical asks if there is a mistake for this order and Mac McDonald, who is the owner of this restaurant, replies “yes! Send us 8 instead”. Astonished, Kroc decides to travel to California to see this restaurant. He discovers a successful restaurant different to all of the ones that he has visited; then, he meets the owners and gets a personalized tour through the restaurant. He is amazed by such amazing process they have created to deliver food rapidly, a huge problem for restaurants at that time. After seeing all the process, Kroc proposes a visionary idea to the McDonald’s brothers. To create franchises for McDonalds and to build a restaurant in every single town in the US. The McDonald brothers weren’t fully convinced, as in the past they have tried to branch out franchises and they failed. Kroc promised to the McDonald brothers that he was going to make it successful. By networking Kroc was able to sell the franchises to people in the Midwest. Nevertheless, not everything was peachy, he started having some trouble with the standards of the processes and the electricity bills because of the freezers. While trying to solve these problems and proposing innovative solutions to Dick McDonalds, who was the genius behind the whole idea of McDonalds restaurants. Dick always refused to new ideas because then the original concept of McDonalds would start to distort. Kroc frustrated and with a mortgage debt he needed to pay, doesn’t know what to do anymore. Suddenly, he meets Harry Sonneborn at the bank and tells Kroc that he might be able to help him. He clears Kroc’s mind about what business he really should be pursuing, the real estate business and not the burger business. This is all Kroc needed to know to make McDonalds a further success.
This story is interesting because the turnaround that the movie had towards the end, I didn’t expect it. Before watching The Founder, I did not have any idea of McDonald’s story. Now, that I have watched the movie, I realized that it had an evil exponential growth, thanks to Ray Kroc. I state that it was evil because the way that Kroc buyout the company wasn’t very fair to the McDonalds brothers. Greed and ambition overtook Kroc who stole an amazing idea, which perhaps, on the other side it would have never taken McDonalds to the big company that is now, probably other food restaurant would have overtaken the fast-food market.
From an entrepreneurial and society perspective, the movie the Founder is a clear example of pure capitalism. At the beginning of the movie, I was thrilled to see how Ray Kroc and the McDonalds brothers partnered to expand such a great innovative concept that McDonalds restaurant at the beginning was. The McDonalds brothers worked in developing an efficient process to deliver the food more quickly, creating higher value to consumers. But to achieve this, they needed to change completely the food industry and remove some aspects of the processes that did not help to have an efficient environment in the restaurants. Although they weren’t very successful at the beginning, because society at that moment didn’t fully understand the new concept for restaurants that the McDonald brothers were trying to introduce to consumers. It took a while for customers to start understanding the new innovation the McDonalds brothers introduced to the market. They basically founded what today we know as fast-food restaurants. Moreover, the McDonalds brothers had the potential to become the richest men in the world, but their vision wasn’t that. However, Ray Kroc’s vision was pointing in that direction and beyond. At some point, Kroc wasn’t sure of what his position in the company was, but Sonneborn opened his eyes. Sonneborn told him, and I believe this phrase changed completely the direction of McDonalds, “You don’t seem to realize what business you’re in, you’re not in the burger business, you’re in the real estate business” [1:19:15, 1:19:52]. This is when Kroc discovered the real business, he real estate business. He created an empire after this, however, the outcome for the McDonald brothers was tragic.
