Grinding It Out
Ray Kroc was a 52-year-old milkshake-machine salesman in 1954 when he visited a single San Bernardino burger stand run by Maurice and Richard McDonald. He talked the brothers into letting him franchise the concept, spent the next seven years grinding through partner fights and undercapitalized expansion, and bought the company outright in 1961 for $2.7 million. The memoir, written in the late 1970s with Robert Anderson, walks through every early franchise battle, the McDonald brothers buyout, the real-estate strategy that actually made the company profitable, and the personal cost of building a fast-food empire from a Des Plaines parking lot.
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Ray Kroc tells how a 52-year-old milkshake-machine salesman turned a single San Bernardino burger stand into a global fast-food empire across two bare-knuckle decades.
Grinding It Out is Ray Kroc's autobiography, told from his perspective. The McDonald brothers and others have disputed his account of how the McDonald's empire was built. The 2016 film The Founder draws on Grinding It Out alongside other accounts.
Yes, indirectly. The 2016 film The Founder directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Michael Keaton is based partly on Grinding It Out and partly on critical accounts of Kroc's career.
Grinding It Out was written by Ray Kroc, published in 1977 by St. Martin's Paperbacks.
Grinding It Out is 218 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Grinding It Out takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Grinding It Out is a standalone novel by Ray Kroc, not part of a series.
Grinding It Out is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.