DID THE MCDONALD BROTHERS REGRET SELLING THEIR HAMBURGER BUSINESS?

PEOPLE

 

The McDonald Brothers Sold Their Hamburger Business for Just $2.7 Million. Did They Regret It?

By Victoria Edel  Published on September 22, 2026 08:59PM EDT

 

Richard “Dick” McDonald and his brother Maurice “Mac” McDonald had the ideas that started it all.

 

In 1940, Richard and Maurice opened the original McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, Calif. But at the time it wasn’t the McDonald’s millions know today. Instead, it was a drive-in restaurant, where carhops, often women, would bring people their food to their cars.

 

But after eight years, the brothers were frustrated that their modest business wasn’t bringing in enough money. They thought they could do better. They fired all the carhops, closed the restaurant and reopened with a new menu: a hamburger (that cost 15 cents), a cheeseburger, soft drinks, milk, coffee, potato chips and a slice of pie. Chips were soon replaced by fries.

 

They also got rid of anything that would need a fork, knife or spoon, and replaced dishes and glassware with paper cups and bags. “It was a complete disaster at first,” Richard told the Associated Press in 1984. “There were times we were tempted to throw in the sponge. The carhops were gone. People didn’t like having to wait on themselves and throw away their own trash.”

 

But their biggest innovation was how they divided labor. “The guiding principles of the factory assembly line were applied to the workings of a commercial kitchen,” Rolling Stone wrote in 1998. Every worker performed just one task. They called it the Speedee Service System, and it ultimately became the standard in fast food.

 

‘‘Our whole concept was based on speed, lower prices and volume,’’ Richard once said, per The New York Times. Every burger was sold with the same condiments — with no substitutions. He imagined a scenario where a ‘‘guy comes in, you ask him what he wants on his burgers; he says, ‘I got to go back to the car to ask my wife.’ Wouldn’t work.’’

 

Richard also helped plan one of McDonald’s most defining features — the Golden Arches. “I thought the arches would sort of lift the building up,’’ he told The Chicago Tribune in 1985. ‘‘Our architect said, ‘Those arches have to go.’ But they worked — it was luck, I guess.’’

 

By 1954, McDonald’s had 21 franchises. At the same time, Ray Kroc was in business selling milkshake machines, and the McDonalds were some of his best customers. Kroc asked them for a job as their franchise agent. They agreed.

 

In 1955, Kroc founded the Franchise Realty Corporation and opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Ill. He later changed the name to the McDonald’s Corporation. By 1960, there were 228 McDonald’s franchises in the country.

 

In 1961, Richard and Maurice decided to sell Kroc the business. He paid $2.7 million, worth around $30.4 million in today’s dollars. According to Kroc’s memoir, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, Richard and Maurice landed on that number because then they’d each have $1 million after taxes.

 

Did the brothers mind that they had missed out on major paydays if they had kept the company? Not at all. Richard told the Associated Press in 1984, “Everybody has an ego and I must admit I enjoyed seeing my name on restaurants all over the world.” He added to journalist David Halberstam in his 1993 book The Fifties, “I would have wound up in some skyscraper somewhere with about four ulcers and eight tax attorneys trying to figure out how to pay all my income tax.”

 

Richard told PEOPLE in 1975, “I still eat at McDonald’s, and I like the food.” He added, “But, to be honest, I don’t think they’re as good as they were a few years ago, before they went to frozen patties and French fries.” In 1984, Richard was on hand to eat the 50th billionth burger that McDonald’s served.

 

After the sale, Maurice and Richard planned on opening a chain of no-frills motels, but abandoned the plan when Maurice’s health began to fail. Maurice died in 1971 at the age of 69. Richard died in 1998 at 89. The story of Kroc and the McDonald brothers was told in the 2016 film The Founder, starring Michael Keaton as Kroc and Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch as the McDonald brothers.

 

Kroc imagined there could one day be 1,000 restaurants, but today McDonald’s has over 36,000 restaurants in over 100 nations, per the company’s website. Kroc, who died in 1984 at 81, was acknowledged as the founder of the McDonald’s Corporation, which Richard took some issue with. He told The Spokesman-Review in 1991 that he thought the decision to refer to Kroc as the founder was “probably a public relations stunt,” but that was his “only complaint” about the sale.