Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc

innocent about money matters. She also had a remarkable intuition. It bordered on the psychic at times, and she had a childlike faith in it. I saw it work the first day she was in my office. I sent her over to the bank to make a deposit. She had exactly twenty cents, as she explained later, and that was her carfare home. But she passed a Salvation Army band playing on the corner, and something in her heart would not let her go by with that money in her purse. So she tossed the two dimes into the kettle and went on to the bank. When she got back to the office, she was ecstatic.
    â€œOh, Mr. Kroc, what a wonderful day this is! I got this job, and it’s my little boy’s birthday. He’s still up on the farm, of course, and I was wishing I could buy a present to send him but it seemed impossible.” She then went on to tell me about having only twenty cents to her name and how she’d tossed it into the Salvation Army kettle. As she left the bank, coming back to the office, her heel caught in a sidewalk grating. She looked down to dislodge it, and there, next to her foot, was a twenty-dollar bill! “I went back into the bank and asked the tellers if they had any idea who had lost it. One of them looked at me and said, ‘Lady, I think you really ought to keep it.’ Can you imagine such luck?”
    That’s typical of the kind of thing that happened to June. I thought it was good to have a lucky person around, maybe some of it would rub off on me. Maybe it did. After we got McDonald’s going and built a larger staff, they all called her “Mother Martino.” She kept track of everyone’s family fortunes, whose wife was having a baby, who was having marital difficulties, or whose birthday it was. She helped make the office a happy place.
    It wasn’t easy to be cheerful about my business in the early 1950s. Al Doty once told me that he liked to have lunch with me because he always learned something about his own business trends. “You seem to be able to see further into the future than the rest of us,” he said. I believe I did. And what I saw made me very unhappy. It was clear that Multimixer’s days were numbered. Liquid Carbonic Corporation’s stockholders had engaged in a big proxy fight. The man who had inherited the presidency was determined to continue the firm’s manufacture of soda fountains out of dedication to employees who had served that division loyally for many years. His opponents wanted to scrap the soda fountain division, because it was losing money. They won. Other manufacturers were cutting back, too. The handwriting was on the wall, and Walgreen’s underscored it when, for the first time, they began pulling soda fountains out of their stores.
    The upshot of all this, I knew, was that I had to find a new product. Preferably something that would be as innovative and as attractive as Multimixer had been fifteen years earlier. I thought I had it in a unique folding kitchen table and benches that a neighbor of one of my salesmen had made. The idea appealed to me, so I went out to the man’s home to see it. The table and benches folded up into the wall like an ironing board. It seemed like a great spacesaver for small kitchens. I had Louis Martino construct a model for me. It looked great. I had some reservations about it, but my anxiety to get a new product for my salesmen to market overcame my doubts. I gave it the name “Fold-a-Nook” and had the sample shipped to the Beverly Hills Hotel in California, where I intended to introduce it with a big splash.
    All the top developers and builders I’d invited for the occasion came and sipped cocktails in the elegant room I’d rented. They admired the fresh flowers and praised the hors d’oeuvres. The party was a terrific success, but “Fold-a-Nook” was an enormous flop. I got not a single order.
    I might have pursued that project, disappointed though I was at the