Friday / Weekend Open Lines


This week in 1955, a small hamburger restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois-the first of what would become one of the world’s best-recognized brand names — McDonald’s. The franchise shop belonged Ray Kroc, whose main interest at the time was selling the machines that mixed milkshakes. The name came from two McDonald brothers who operated a hamburger shop in California. The first day’s revenue at the Illinois franchise was $366 and 12 cents. That shop is now a museum housing artifacts from the growth of the chain into one of the most successful food-serving operations in history, having famously served billions of hamburgers in operations around the world. In the U.S. today, there are over 211,000 fast food outlets serving hamburgers and $151 billion worth of other comestibles per year. Profile America is in its17th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.