Love J.F. McDonald's. Behind the Arches

John F Love

McDONALD'S BEHIND THE ÀRCHES Revised Edition

BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

MCDONALD'S: BEH!ND THE ARCHES

A Bantam Book PUBUSHING H!STORY

Bantam hardcovcr edition/November 1986 Bantam revised trade paperback edition/August 19.95 Ali photographs courtesy of McDonald's Corporation. Ali rights reserued Copyright© 1986, 19.95 by John F. Loue

Book design by Barbara N. Cohen Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Love, .lo!m F McDonald 's: bellind the arc/7es /John F Love - Reu. cd. p. C!ll. Jnc!udes index. ISBN 0·553-3475.9-4

1. McDonald's Corporation. 2. Kroc, Ray. 19023. Restaurateurs-United States-Biography. !. Title. TX94S.S.M33L68 1995 338.7'616179573--dc20

95-/1540 CJP

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including pllotocopying, recording, or by any information storage and re trie val system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

ISBN 0-553-34 759-l Pub!islted simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Jnc. Jts trademark, consisting of the words "Bantom Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Ma rea Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York. PHINTED

IN

TIIE

UNITED

BVG

STATES

20

OF

AMERICA

In memory of Philip W. Love, father, reader and storyteller, and fascinated observer of hu man events.

Acknowledgments

This is not a corporate book, not the type of history that companies commiSsion to commemorate sorne mitestone. 1 am an independent journalist, and McDonald's Corporation had no editorial control over this work. However, 1 could never have revea!ed the secrets of success of one of Americ:a's most visible but !east understood corporations without obtaining its cooperation in the reporting process. Rarely has a company revealed so much about itself to an outsider. That is particularly surprising for McDonald's, traditionally one of America's most secretive companies. Yet, whcn it cornes to this book, no question went unanswered; no source was inaccessible. lt has taken four and a half years and interviews with more than three hundred people inside and outside of McDonald's to complete the book, but this close-up view of McDonald's was only feasible because the corn· pany was willing to subject itself to such intensive scmtiny. 1 have Senior Chairman Fred Turner to thank for that. 1 am also thankful to the many people who agreed to be interviewed and to share their persona! experiences. The McDonald's System-ils corporate executiv~s, its franchisees, and its suppliers-is too broad and diverse to be exPlained merely through interviews with top executives. Th us this book tells the persona! stories of clozens of inclividuals who are closely associated with the McDonald's System and who give us their unique perspectives on it. Given the detailed repotting required, 1 could never have completed a project such as this without some special assistance from a number of people inside McDonald's. 1 benefited enormously from

research provided by Ken Props, the eighty-three-year-olcl clirector of

Jicensing. Ken is a walking encyclopedia on McDonald's, and 1 was fortunate thal he was an open book to me-each week sending me aclclitional historical data. My special thanks also to Helen Farrell and Gloria Nelson, who gathered and verifiee! hundreds of facts, making this a more complete and current work. lnterviewing so many sources

would also have been a much more difficult task were it not for the assistance of Merne Bremner and Jan Woody, who located sources, hclped arrange interviews, and opened doors to contacts who otherwise wou lei not have been as receptive. Finally, 1am indebted to Chuck

Rubner of McDonalcl's, who coordinated the search for historical photographs.

This final version of the McDonald's history bas been favorably innuenced by Ann Poe, who read the initial manuscript and suggested revisions. Ann's enthusiasm for the McDonald's story gave me a boast

at a critical point-when the first draft is clone and the author is drainee!. Sile helped me see how much better the story wou id read if the first draft were trimmed considerably. However, 1 only listened to Ann's advice because 1saw her commitment to the quality of the book. But the greatest commitment came from my wife, JoAnn, who was told nearly five years ago thal this would be a one-year project. As 1 hele! two jobs for nearly the next five years, JoAnn raised our children with too little help from me. She also supportee! me whenever the project got more involved-and ffiore frustrating. More important, she

prodclecl me to cio what ali journalists must do, however reluctantly, with a great story-finish it. JoHN LovE

November 1986

Contents

Foreword

THE UNKNOWN McDONALD'S

Ch opter 1

YEs,

Chapter 2

THE SALESMAN

30

Ch opter 3

THE FRANCHISING DERBY

48

Ch opter 4

THE ÜWNER/ÜPERATOR

67

Chapter 5

MELTING PoT

87

Ch opter 6

MAKING HAMBURGERS

113

Ch opter 7

MAKING MoNEY

151

Ch opter 8

THE BUYOUT

187

Ci> opter 9

PARTNERS

202

Ciwpter JO

Go1NG PUBLIC

231

Chapter Il

McDONALD's EAST, McDONALD'S WEST

249

Chapter 12

HIGH GEAR

270

Chapter 13

MEDIA MAGIC

301

Chapter 14

"McDONALDIZING" THE SUPPLIERS

321

Chapler 15

niE

354

Chapter 16

CHECKS AND BALANCES

380

Clwpter 17

EXPORTING AMERICANA

410

T11ERE

ls

A McDoNALD

PUBLIC CHALLENGE

9

Epilogue

449

Index

472

Foreword THE UNKNOWN McDoNALD's Just outside Senior Chairman Fred Turner's former office on the eighth Ooor of McDonald's Plaza in Oak Brook, Illinois, the suburb west of Chicago where McDonald's Corporation is headquartered, there used to be a small circular conference room called the "war room." lt was where top management meetings were held, and if the name seems pretentious, it depicts with remarkable accuracy how seriously this

company plays the hamburger game. There is little else pretentious about it. Like everything at McDon· ald's, the war room is strictly functional, even egalitarian. lt has little more than a large circular table where corporate managers face one

another as equals and freely debate policies. There is no mahogany furniture, no high-back leather chairs, and no ex pensive wood panel· ing. The room is devoid of any trappings thal might be expectecl in the inner sanctum of an organization with an nuai worldwicle, sales of $24 billion and climbing. Even the telephone is a Bell misfit, with one of those numbers thal gets more than its share of misdialed calls. On one suc:h occasion,

Turner himself interrupts a meeting to lake the cali. "Hello, McDonald's," he answers. The caller is confused, and Turner clarifies: "No, you've called McDonald's Corporation." The caller still does not under· stand, and lUrner persists with a final clarification: "We're the ham· burger people." Forget that the caller unwittingly has the chairman of the world's largest food service company on the line. The real puzzle is that Ile

needs an explanation of what McDonald's is. This is the system thal spends more than $1 billion a year promoting the most advertised

2

MCDONALD'S: BEHIND THE ARCHES

br;md in the world. lts advertising .spokesman-a clown named Ronald

-is as weil recognizecl by American youngsters as Santa Claus. lt has rnore retail outlets th an any other merchant in the United States. How can anyone have trouble lin king McDonald's to the "hamburger peo· ple'"l The caller can be forgiven. This type of cali has been made to the war room clozens of times before. More important, the hesitancy to link the McDonalcl's hamburger to a major corporation is commonplace. ivlcDonald's is now perhaps the world's most recognized retail !rademark, but the organization behind it is one of America's least understoocl corporations. The marketing image is fabled. The corporate reality is unknown. There are sorne goocl reasons for that. One is certainly the way the colllpany is covered by the press. WI,Ti!e McDonald's is now America's fourth largest retailer, the press is fascinated mostly with the company's glossy exterior. When McDonalcrs opened its eight thousandth restaurant or served its fifty billionth hamburger-bath of wllich it did in 1984-it made big news. But the strategies McDonald's uses to dominale the $200 billion food service industry in the United States never get such attention. Such trivial coverage cannot be attributed entirely to the fourth estate. McDonald's itself has had a hand in promoting the lighter aspects of ils business. From the Ôeginning, it encouraged press reports théll focusecl on hamburger sales volumes. The McDonald brothers started il in 1950 when they Oashed their sales in neon on the sign in front of their California drive-in. lt reac!: "Over 1 million solcl." Since then, McDonald's has churned out numbers revealing how many times the hamburgers il has sold wou Id stretch lo the moon and how many times the Mississippi River bed could be filled by the ketchup it has dispensed. Whe.n McDonald's wasn't promoting such statistics, it was presenting itself tllrough roman tic, but often superficial, tales of its colorful and legendary founder, Ray A. Kroc. The story of McDonald's became the story of ils founder. ln many minds, Kroc so embodied his company's success that the corporate McDonald's lacked an iclentity of ils own. lndeed, McDonald's seems to prefer corporate anonymity. Though anxious to promote its marketing image, McDonald's is secretive when it cornes to its internai workings. lts executives eschcw participation in tracle shows, just as the company refuses to ioirr indusll)' Jssocbtions. And over the years, McDonald's corpo-

THE UNKNOWN McDoNALD's

3

rate managers have been hesitant to grant interviews to the business press.

There is yet another reason why the inside of McDonald's remains a mystery. It is sim ply th at the chain's exterior is now such a common feature of the American lifestyle that the organization behind it is laken for granted. Fully 96 percent of American consumers have eaten at one of its restaurants in the last year. Slightly more than half of the U.S. population lives within a three-minute drive to a McDonald's unit. ln a typical television market, its brand is promoted through thirty televi· sion and radio advertising spots aired each day. lt is as if McDonald's retail presence is so expected thal ils corporate presence and power go unnoticed. McDonald's is the closest thing America has to a retailing utility. lt is such an integral part of American culture that the competitive and economie significance of ils more than 14,000 restaurants worldwide is rarely measured in a meaningful way. Everyone knows MeDan· ald's is big, but very few know just how significant its impact on American business really is. A casual observer knows from reading the sign un der the Golden Arches that McDonald's has served more than 100 billion hamburgers. But in an industry that has nearly 200,000 separate restaurant companies, huw many wou id even guess that Mc~ Donald's captures 14 percent of ail restaurant visits in the United States -one out of every six-and commands 6.6 percent share of ali dollars Americans spend on eating out? How many wou id know that it contrais 18.3 percent of the $72 billion fast-food market in the United States-more than the next three chains combined? How many would suspect that McDonald's sells 34 percent of ali hamburgers sold by commercial restaurants and 26 percent of ali french !ries? Those are figures that astound even George Rice, whose GOR/Crest Enterprises compiles su ch market share information. Says Rice, "Our first reaction ta figures like th at is to say, 'This does not compute.' " Control of su ch market share has given McDonald's an impact on the food processing system in the United States that food processors themselves do not !ully comprehend. With ils staggering hamburger sales, McDonald's is the country's larges! purchaser of beef. The chain serves up so many french !ries th at each year it purchases 5 percent of the entire U.S. potato crop harvested for food, and 2 percent of ali the chicken. Because of those volumes and because of its insistence on product quality and consiste ney, McDonald's has wrought revolution-

a

ary changes in meat and potuto processing.

l'v1c00Ni\LD's: 81-:lii~D Tl lE i\RCHES

It has su ch enormous purchasing power th at the successful intro· duction of a new product into its system changes eating habits of most Americans and in the process creates fortunes for certain food processors and growers. Wh en the chain introduced the Egg McMuffin as the first item on its breakfast menu in the early 1970s, English muffins were big sellers only in certain regions of the country. By popularizing the muffin nationwide, McDonald's helped create a major market segment thal has since grown twice as fast as the baking industry as a whole. Its novel Chicken McNuggets had much the same type of impact when they were introduced in 1982. Now, chicken nuggets are widely duplicated, and McDonald's-the hamburger king-has become the second largest purveyor of chicken (behind Kentucky Fried Chicken). McDonald's impact is aIso evident in the competitive positions of major companies in the food processing business. Consider the impact on the soft drink business alone: McDonald's stores account for 5 percent of ali Coca-Cola solcl in the United States-whether through fountains or in botties and cans. And if McDonald's shifted to Pepsi-. Cola as the required cola for its stores, the Coke brand's eight percentage-point Iead over the Pepsi brand would nearly be eut in hall, and Coke's better than two-to-one lead in fountain syrups wou id nearly be eliminated. McDonaJd's economie power as it relates to nonfood industries is even less understood. It is likely that most real estate experts do not realize that McDonald's in 1982 surpassed Sears as the world's largest owner of retail real estate. In fact, it is the company's control of real estate thal explains why McDonald's profits so handsomely from ils industry-leading food volumes. Were it not for ils real estale connection, McDonald's would never have become the fi nan cial powerhouse of the food service business, one th athas enjoyed an average return on equity of 25.2 percent and an annual earnings growth of 24.1 percent since becoming a public company in 1965. Yet, its financial performance is now so expecled and predictab1e thal ils growtll no longer excites industty watchers. Perhaps only those who still hold the McDonald's stock they bought when the company went public two decades ago fully appreciate the chain's growth. Their initial investment of $2,250 for 100 shares has grown through el even stock splits and one stock dividend to 37,180 shares worth more than $1 million on June 30, 1994. But it is in the area of man power th at McDonald's innuence on the Amerîcan economy is perhaps most overlooked. With more than

·' 500,000 people on the payroll at any one time, the McDonalcl's System is easily one of the larges! employers in the United States. Because the chain trains so many high school students for the ir first jobs, most of its workers quickly advance to higher-paying jobs, which explains why McDona\d's turnover rate at the restaurant leve! \lns historically run better tl1an 100 percent per year. But it also exp lains how McDonald's in its first thirty-seven years has employed about eight million Ame ri· can workers now in other jobs-fully 12.5 percent of the American work force has worked for McDonald's. One out of every fifteen Ameri· can workers got his or her first job from McDonald's. And wh ile most of those now work elsewhere, it was at McDonald's where they first learned about work routines, job discipline, and organizational team· work. McDona1d's by now has replaced the U.S. Army as the nation's larges! job training organization. Merely explaining the economie impact of McDonald's, however, does not begin to reveal the unknown McDonald's. lt is the cha racler of McDonald's-the people who run it and the way they operate-that is its most intriguing unknown. Th at is where ·the image of McDonald's conflicts SQ·-sharply with reality. Here is the most successful service company in a nation increasingly dependent on service industries, and we really do not know its secrets of success. Those are buried under layers of often misleading images. By sorne accounts, the secrets of McDonald's are al most completely con· tained in Kroc's entrepreneurial spirit. However, wh ile Kroc's contributions to the food service business were monumental, the Ray Kroc legend does not do justice to Kroc's genius. Kroc has long been portrayed as the dreamer who conceived of a whole new forrn of food service. Others have pictured him as a marketing maven who f-iguree\ out how to sel! hamburgers to the masses. Kroc is son1etimes St'en as the disciplinarian who treated his franchisees almost like children, regimenting them to confonn to his rules. Above ali, he is rememberecl as an omnipotent corporate founder, the font of ali corporate wisdom. The perception is understandable. Even today, Ray Kroc's disciples in McDonald's are legion. Their reverence to his principles has no bounds. Yet, when it cornes to isolating the reasons for McDonald's suc· cess, the founder's legend misses the target. Kroc was a dreamer, but he did not dream up the fast-food invention and was not t11e first to discover the' McDonald brothers wllo die\. Nor was Kroc primarily a marketing expert. Every food procluct he thought of introducing-ancl

6

McDoNALD'S: BEHIND THE ARCHES

the list is long-bombed in the marketplace. And while the founder was known for dressing down franchisees who permitted litter in

their parking lots or who kepi hamburgers in the serving bin too long, his creativity in franchising was not found in his regimentation of fran·

chisees. Few people outside McDonald's unclerstand thal Ray Kroc's bril!iance is fou nd in the way he selected and motivated his managers, his franchisees, and his suppliers. He had a knack for hrînging out the best

in people who worked with hi m. To be sure, Kroc's success with McDonald's is a story of his own entrepreneurship. But it is more. He

succeeded on a grand scale because he had the wisdom and the courage to rely on hundreds of other entrepreneurs. Kroc traveled light-years ahead of other franchisers of his day, but not by disciplining franchisees. lnstead, he used franchising to unleash the power of operators who have an ownership stake in their businesses. Though he demancled adherence to strict operating standards, he a iso freed franchisees to market their service as they saw fit, and

he motivated them by giving them an opportunity-unheard of in franchising-to become rich before he became rich. He made them fiercely competitive by creating the food service industry's most efficient supply system, a testimony to his own expertise in perfecting operating details. And because this supply system was built by relying exclusively on nedgling ven dors of food and equipment, it became as entrepreneurial-and as loyal to McDonald's-as Kroc's franchisees were. Ali three elements of the McDonald's System-franchisees, corpo rate managers, and suppliers-represent more than 3,700 independent companies, and Kroc skillfully bonded them into one family with a common purpose.

But Kroc's management talents are best renected in the type of organization he built to bring together ali the elements of his system. Kroc was olten considered the archetypical corporate founder who dominated his subordinates_ In fact, he constructed a corporation of

nalively intelligent, fanatically aggressive, and extremely divergent personalities. The striking uniformity of McDonald's 14,000 restaurants creates the impression of a corporation with a centralized bureau-

cracy. Viewed from the outside, it is easy to assume thal McDonald's is run by Ray Kroc clones. Those on the inside know different. Kroc built franchising's most talented sE:>rvicc organization not by dictating to his managers but by gi\·ing them cnorn1olls decision-making authority. From the beginning,

THE UNKNOWN MCDONALD'S

7

his management team consisted of extremely diverse individuals, not the type of managers who typically survive in corporate bureaucracies. These were not organization persans, they were Kroc's version of corporate entrepreneurs. Decisions at McDonald's have always been the product oi individua\ initiative. ldeas are never homogenized by committees. New directions are the result of a c:ontinuous trial-and-error process, and new ideas spring !rom ali corners oi the system. The key ingredient in Kroc's management formula is a willingness to risk !ail ure and to admit mistakes. James Kuhn, a former vice president and a twenty-year veteran oi McDonald's, graphically described the disparity between the image and the reality oi McDonald's management: "We have a public image oi being slick, proiessional, and knowledgeable marketers who also happen to be plastic and shallow. ln !act, we are a bunch oi motivated people who shoot oii a lot of cannons, and they don't ali land on target. We've made a lot oi mistakes, but it is the mistakes th at make our success, because we have learned from them. We are impulsive, we try to move faster than we can, but we are also masters at cleaning up our own messes." The iundamental secret to McDonald's success is the way it achieves uniformity and allegiance to an operating regimen without sacrificing the strengths of American individualism and diversity. McDonald's manages to mix conformity with creativity. The dichotomy is evident in the way the three elements of the McDonald's System-ils franchisees, managers, and suppliers-relate to one another. Ail are entrepreneurs in their own right. None is the other's master. Ray Kroc's greatest accomplishment is thal he fou nd a way to make them mesh in an extremely productive manner. lt is unfortunate that the very hero worship thal surrounds Kroc as the fou nd er of McDonald's depicts him inaccurately as the wellspring of ali of its attributes. The unknown McDonald's is not the expression of a single man. lndeed, it is not even a single company. lt is a federation of hundreds of independent entities connected by an intricate web of partnerships. The participants of the system have common economie incentives and a common standard of quality, service, and cleanliness. But nothing else about them is the same. Nor is there any structure to their relationship. ''You never know who is really in charge of anything at McDonald's." observes Ted Per!man, a longtime supplier. "There is no organization ch art there." Th at la cl< of structure can be traced to Kroc.

8

f'V]CÜUNAU.J's: fkHINfJ THE AECI-IF.S

who had a habit of pic:king new ideas from anyone who offered thern. What counted was not where the idea came from but whether it worked. And because the system still places such a premiurn on individual performance, McDonald's remains surprisingly entrepreneurial despite its formidable size. Wh ile individuals within the system are driven by entrepreneurial self-interest, se\fish interests never prevail. The entities in McDonald's are so diverse and power is so fragménted that the system has no master. A large part of the real strength of McDonald's can be attributed to the fact that the relationship between the corporation's managers, its 3,500 franchisees, and the systern's 500-plus suppliers is one based on a concept of checks and balances. The meticulous store inspections the company uses to en force operating disciplines are weil known. What is not known is the power franchisees have in checking the excesses of corporate managers. Supplier re!ationships are built on similar principles: Yendors are not outsiders but part of the family, every bit as responsible for preserving McDonald's quality as franchisees and managers are. The history of the McDona!d's System is the story of an organization that learned how to harness the power of entrepreneurs-not severa! but hundreds of them. lt is run by decisions and policies considered to be for the common goocl. But the definition of common good is not set by a chief executive or by a management committee. Rather, it is the product of the interaction between ail the players. Ray Kroc's genius was building a system that requires ail of its members to follow corporate-like ru les but at the same time rewards them for expressing their inclividual creativity. ln essence, the history of McDonald's is a case study on managing entrepreneurs in a corporate settfng. At a time when sorne American corporations are looking to emulaie their foreign rivais. the story of McDonald's reminds us that businesses can stiJl succeed-beyond their creator's wildest dreams-by relying on typically American traits. This is not merely a corporate history, because McDonald's is not strictly a corporate success story. Rather it is the story of the company that changed the eating habits of Americans, that revolutionized the foocl service and processing industries of the United States, and that legitimized the now widespread practice of franchising. lt is the story of the unknown McDonald's, America's first modern entrepreneurial success-a system that bridges the gap between entrepreneurs and corporations.

Chapter 1

YEs, THERE Is

A

Mc DoNALD "Over the years, 1 have received letters and phone calls from television stations, radio stations, authors, reporters, et cetera, and they ali told me the same story. lt seems thal if they contact your company in Oak Brook regarding my present address, they have been told that the company has no idea where 1 live or

if 1 am even alîve. On severa!

occasions they !lave been told th at there really was never a McDono!d. They were told McDonald's was only a Actitious name that was chosen because it was easy to remember.'' Richard J. McDonald wrote this in a letter shorlly alter McDonnlcl's announced that it would close the McDonald's unit that Ray Kroc had built in 1955 in Des Plaines, a suburb northwest of Chicago. The announcement drew protests from local history buffs who proposecl converting the store into a museum (which McDonald's clid), and newspapers around the country carried the story of the dosing of the "original" McDonald's. If tl1ose stories mentioned the Mc Donald brothers at aU, it was only by way of explaining the common notion that

Kroc had gotten little more from them than their name. Kroc, everyone accepted, built the Arst McDonald's. Somehow, the Iwo brothers whose name adorns 14,000 McDonald's restaurants have been ali but washed out of the McDonald's legend. ln an age of massmedia, the first one to mass market a 11ew product is credited as its inventor. So, it is not surprising that Kroc, who founded the company th at look the fast-food concept to the masses, is celebrated at; the creator of the self-service, quick-service restaurant. !t is not surprising, but it is not accurate. Ray Kroc did not invent fast food. He clid nol invent the self-

\0

McDONALD'S: BEHIND THE ARCHES

service restaurant. And hfs first McDonald's restaurant was not the first \VIcDona\d's. The credit for those firsts properly belongs to the brothers \VIcDonald, Richard and his older brother Maurice, more intimately known as Dick and Mac. They were inventors who had the vision but lacked the cl rive and organizational skills needed to capitalize on their invention. How t.hey discovered the fast-food concept provides fascinating insight on the process of invention. How they failed to develop

il is the key to unclerstancling what Ray Kroc brought to the party. The McDonalcl brothers were not restaurant men by training or background, and in the tradition-bound food service business, that

may have been something of a prerequisite to igniting a revolution in t11e !rade. Restaurants are typically family businesses, and industry traditions are passed down through families established in the business. The brothers were not bound by such traditions. They v ore not long out ol high school wh en they left their native New Hampsnire and moved to California in 1930 in search of a new opportunity~anything th at promised a belier fate th an had bef allen their father. A foreman in a shoe factory, the Depression !1ad laken away the only job he ever !lad. The shoe fac:tories and cotton mi lis of New Han1pshire were closing, and California offered a fresh start in new trades.

Not surprisingly, the McDonalds looked for the obvious opportunity first-in Hollywood. T\1ey ianded jobs pushing sets around for Hollywood movies, primarily one-reelers of slapstick comedian Ben Turpin. lntrigued with the potential of a brand-new industry, the brothers openecl a movie theater in Glen dale. But in four years of operation, they never made enoug\1 money to pay the $100 monthly rent on the theater. and only regular concessions from the landlord kept them in business. But the brothers never ceased looking for better entry-level business opportunities, and they fou nd it in the form of a new service that was .taking California by storm-the drive-in restaurant.

The ycar ws \937, and already Californians were beginning to clevelop their extraordinary dependence on the automobile. Sorne independent operators in southern California were just beginning to

capilalize on the trend by building restaurants thal catered to the drivein customer. The idea was not completely noveL As early as the J920s, sorne restaurants in the East had developed a so-called curb service, where waitresses delivered sandwiches and drinks to customers

parl