1948 - Restaurants

Restaurants

The McDonald's barbecue joint that opened in 1940 at San Bernardino, Calif., becomes a self-service restaurant. The McDonald brothers have shut down the operation that was earning them $100,000 per year, dismissed its carhops, streamlined its menu to include just nine items, mechanized its kitchen (infrared heat lamps keep the french fries warm), introduced efficiencies that save time, and soon have long lines waiting to buy 15¢ hamburgers, 19¢ cheeseburgers, 10¢ french fries, 10¢ soda pop, and 20¢ milkshakes. Adopting golden arches as their symbol, the McDonalds begin to franchise their name to other fast-food entrepreneurs; by 1954 they will have sold 21 franchises and opened nine outlets (see Kroc, 1954).

U.S. sales of oregano will increase by 5,200 percent in the next 8 years as demand is boosted by the growing popularity of pizza pies and other Italian specialties discovered by servicemen in Europe (see 1953).

The Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain begins its growth as Illinois-born California entrepreneur Burton "Butch" Baskin, now 32, and his brother-in-law Irvine Robbins, now 30, merge the small chains started 3 years ago with Burton's, opened at Pasadena, and the Snowbird Ice Cream stand opened by Robbins December 7, 1945, at Adams and Palmer streets in Glendale. Baskin has run a retail clothing store in Chicago; Robbins has helped his father operate a dairy-products business at Tacoma, Wash., and learned that there was more profit to be made from selling ice cream in the family's own small store in a local alley than in supplying products to grocers and druggists. The two men soon had eight stores, and sales were increasing, but they were not making money until they got the idea of selling the store to the managers. They will choose the locations and supply the ice cream and will soon begin manufacturing it themselves. Impressed by their marketing skills, the co-owner of a Phoenix ice cream maker will obtain a license to manufacture and sell product under the Baskin-Robbins name, and Baskin-Robbins will eventually have more than a dozen regional subcontractors making ice cream and handling local franchisees.