From novelty to everyday life: How McDonald's became an American icon

This story is part of the Iconic Brands series, a USA TODAY network project showcasing the companies and brands that helped shape the nation's identity, economy and culture. The series celebrates American ingenuity with a deeply reported examination of how brands intersect with history, community and everyday life in celebration of the nation's 250th anniversary. Find more at https://usatoday.com/usa250/iconic-brands

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Of all the ways McDonald’s has dominated as America’s most famous fast food empire, like how a 1995 survey suggested the chain’s “Golden Arches” logo was more widely recognized than the Christian cross, the burger behemoth also created a universal food language.

That's thanks to the culinary giant’s best-selling French fry, according to the company. About 9 million pounds of the crispy, salty sticks are sold daily across the globe, and they hit your tongue identically whether you live in Irvine, Kentucky, or Irvine, California, or whether you ordered the item 20 years ago or 20 minutes ago. They allow you to share the same sensory memory as your mother, grandmother and several million strangers.

“You know exactly what the French fries are going to taste like whenever you go into McDonald's, and it doesn't matter which McDonald's you go into,” Adam Chandler, author of “Drive-Thru Dreams,” told the Louisville Courier Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network.

French fries have long ranked among America’s most popular foods and that crown goes back to before the country even turned 30. Thomas Jefferson, the country’s third president, probably couldn’t have dreamed up DoorDash or drive-thrus when he first introduced a version of the fried potato dish to the U.S. at a White House dinner in 1802, but the founding father must have thought French fries were worth a place on America’s table.

About 146 years after that White House dinner, the originators behind McDonald’s began the relentless mission of making sure French fries, and the overall McDonald’s brand, were forever entangled with America.   

Spoiler alert: They did just that.  

“McDonald’s has this incredible ability to balance nostalgia and innovation, creating new memories while tapping into the old ones,” McDonald’s archivist Mike Bullington told The Courier Journal. “That’s why it feels so relevant. It is a constant reflection of past, present and future.” 

As Bobby Beauchesne, an Austin, Texas, resident and one of the country’s top collectors of McDonald’s memorabilia, said, McDonald’s is “part of the American experience that's irreplaceable.”  

“McDonald’s is unavoidable. You drive down a road to this day, you're going to see a billboard for McDonald's. You're going to see the Golden Arches pop up,” Beauchesne said. “McDonald's is a distinctly American entity and success story. It's a part of every single one of our lives as Americans. You cannot avoid McDonald's, no matter how hard you try.”  

How McDonald's evolved

If you follow the McDonald’s trail, you’ll find that many things standing in the brand’s glow tend to grow, or become more interesting, by association. That goes for Michael Jordan, whose superstar NBA status was amplified by a McDonald’s partnership in the early 1990s highlighted by the "McJordan" burger.  

It also rings true for McDonald’s own logo, which, according to Bullington, was hand‑drawn into the original red‑and‑white building by co-founder Dick McDonald. A sign maker later suggested lighting the arches in yellow neon, sort of resembling two floppy French fries, “and suddenly they became something more.” 

“What’s remarkable is how something so simple became such a powerful symbol,” Bullington said. “You can travel almost anywhere, and the arches mean familiarity, welcome and consistency.” 

Just like trying to drive around while spreading ketchup on a carton of French fries, the brand’s origin story is not without its messiness. 

It started with brothers Dick and Mac McDonald, who moved from New England to Southern California with Hollywood-tinted stars in their eyes. Their movie theater business failed, but they caught a spark of success with drive-in restaurants. By 1948, the brothers took a risk and shed most of the restaurant’s food offerings like fried chicken and barbecue and introduced the industry-changing Speedee Service System. It was essentially an assembly line, as Beauchesne says, turning McDonald’s into the “Henry Ford of fast food.”

The streamlined system featured just nine menu items, mainly 15 cent hamburgers, milkshakes and potato chips. Just a year later, in 1949, they replaced chips with French fries.

“What McDonald's did was basically take the existing model of drive-ins and changed it entirely,” Chandler said. “It got rid of servers, it got rid of cups and plates and dishes and utensils, things that would slow operations down, things that required you to hire more people, and make the food more expensive, and it passed on the savings to the consumer.”  

While another California-based operation, In-N-Out Burger, is known for inventing the drive-thru in 1948 and the Kansas-founded White Castle is recognized as the world’s first fast food hamburger restaurant as of 1921, McDonald’s staked its own claim to fast food fame: Efficiency. 

“By the time the words left your lips of what you wanted, they were handing you a bag with your food,” said Beauchesne, who counts more than 40,000 items in his collection. “And that was just inconceivable back then.”  

The timing mattered in post-war America of the late 1940s, when the country saw a baby boom, a bullish financial market and, as Chandler said, “people were starting to drive everywhere.” Just as McDonald’s began to hit the market, so did a significant expansion of the interstate highway system in 1956.  

In the background, McDonald’s was also working away at a grander innovation, said Greg Ritzer, a retired professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who coined the phrase “The McDonaldization of Society” and put out a book of the same name in 1993.

“I think that efficiency has become more and more important in American society and society in general because of McDonald's example and people's experiences at McDonald's,” Ritzer said. “That's had a powerful influence. I think we're more and more accustomed to doing things efficiently. And one of our main experiences with efficiency is the way in which McDonald's operates. So, I think it has led to greater efficiency in terms of the way we do things.” 

That includes our modern, convenience-centered way of eating.

“The industry that hadn't seen anything like that before, and it ultimately influenced the way that people eat today, because we're comfortable eating food with our hands on the go in paper wrappers in our cars,” Chandler said. “And that was something that McDonald's was at the vanguard of.”

The brothers didn’t build what we know as McDonald’s today alone. Ray Kroc, a Chicago-based milkshake mixer machine salesman, visited Dick and Mac in 1954 and quickly became a franchise agent.

“What fascinates me most is how much of McDonald’s early success came down to perseverance – and trust,” Bullington said. “When people think about Ray Kroc, they often focus on ambition, and rightly so. He believed deeply that McDonald’s could be something special. But belief alone wasn’t enough. In those early years, nothing was guaranteed.”

In 1955, Kroc opened the first McDonald’s east of the Mississippi Riverin Des Plaines, Illinois. By 1961, he acquired the rights to the brother’s company for $2.7 million and got the brand on a fast track to selling 1 billion burgers by 1963 and expanding to 1,000 locations by 1965. 

As Bullington said, McDonald’s relied on the “shared faith that franchisees, suppliers, and company people placed in one another.” 

“I see that as the foundation of the brand,” he said. “McDonald’s didn’t grow because one person had a vision; it grew because thousands of people chose to trust that vision together – and then worked incredibly hard to make it real.”  

Beauchesne, the collector, noted that if you’re just going by 2016 movie, “The Founder,” which dramatized McDonald's origins, “they really do make Ray Kroc seem like a pretty bad dude.”  

“I will say it’s maybe exaggerated, right?” he added. 

Beauchesne likes to bring up Kroc’s favorable qualities, like how he and his wife, Joan, got into charitable giving, including $1.8 billion to the Salvation Army and millions to NPR, medical research, peace studies and, perhaps most famously, the founding of Ronald McDonald House Charities, which has provided a "home-away-from-home" for families of children receiving hospital care since 1974. McDonald’s donates $200 million to the cause annually. 

Kroc also set into motion the McDonald’s that has reportedly employed 1 in 8 Americans. 

“All of that is because of the entity of McDonald's, but really it's because of Ray Kroc,” Beauchesne said. “I can't imagine that there's any brand that is better known in the world than McDonald’s. And that was his contribution to the world.” 

How McDonald's helped shape America's culture

Growing up in a small Wisconsin town as one of eight siblings, Don Gorske considered McDonald’s a special treat. And during one visit in 1963 with his father, 10-year-old Gorske made a special proclamation.

“After we both had a cheeseburger, I told him, ‘Someday, I'm going to eat here every day,’” Gorske recalled.

It could have been just a child's musings, but Gorske made good on the promise.

His dedication to McDonald’s kicked up on a Wednesday in 1972, when Gorske had earned enough shoe-shining money to buy his first car. He drove straight to the nearest McDonald’s.

“I went in and ordered three Big Macs, a small fry and a large Coke,” he said. “And I fell in love with Big Macs right away. For me, that was the best sandwich I ever had in my life.”

Gorske, then 18, thought for sure he’d get drafted soon for the Vietnam War. To cope, and maybe as a distracting challenge with the draft looming, Gorske started eating nine Big Macs a day.

“It was just something that, I guess, made me feel better about life,” he said. “I figured I could eat my favorite food every day before I ended up going to war.”

“By some miracle,” as Gorske said, the draft ended shortly after in January 1973 — but he kept eating Big Macs.

“It really just became an everyday habit,” he said. “I kept eating them and eating them.”

As a prison guard clocking tons of hours who didn’t enjoy cooking, the convenience and quickness of McDonald’s appealed to Gorske.

“I could eat my Big Macs without it interrupting my life too much,” he said.

By around 1997, the Guinness World Records started to notice.

Since then, Gorske has often been recognized as the “ultimate Big Mac fan” and holds the world record for eating the most Big Macs. As of early 2026, the 72-year-old said he’s consumed 35,685 of the signature sandwich. The number grows every day.

Gorske proposed to his wife, Mary, at a McDonald’s and last year, they celebrated 50 years together.

“McDonald's means everything to me,” he said. “I plan on eating McDonald's right up till the day I die.”

McDonald’s means a lot to Bullington, too.

“As a brand that serves 90% of people in the U.S. every year, McDonald’s is woven into the fabric of American life,” he said. “Almost everyone I meet has a McDonald’s story – and that’s true for me, too.”

One of Bullington’s earliest memories goes back to America’s Bicentennial, when his father and neighbor decided to celebrate the occasion by taking their sons for a McDonald’s breakfast.

“I don’t remember everything, but I’m pretty sure I ordered Hotcakes and sausage,” Bullington said. “Those moments matter. McDonald’s isn’t just a place to eat — it’s where families gather, where traditions start and where everyday memories are made."

Beauchesne, the 40-year-old collector with 52,000 followers on Instagram, enjoys the thrill of finding one-of-a-kind items, like one connected to McDonald's first-ever attempt at a “HappyMeal,” which included a Filet-O-Fish sandwich and was called the "Captain Crook Sea Bag."

He enjoys them just as much taking his 5-year-old granddaughter, Isabella, to the McDonald’s drive-thru.

“Basically, her entire day revolves around getting a ‘Happy Meal,’” he said.

Together, they’re practicing a ritual familiar to so many Americans since McDonald’s began and since “Happy Meals” officially launched in 1979.

“If you grew up in the last 70-plus years in the United States, McDonald's is like our reward system,” Beauchesne said. “If you did good at the school play, you got a good report card or it's your birthday, you were going to McDonald's."

McDonald’s also means a lot to people who have worked for the place, including a franchise owner who goes by “McFranchisee” on X.

“McDonald’s has changed my life,” McFranchisee told The Courier Journal. “Not only has flipping burgers given me the opportunity to be successful, but I am in the position to see others gain the same success who work with me. I have employees who started out scrubbing floors and they are now leading multi-million dollar restaurants with a vacation house. It makes me feel very proud to see others’ success.”

For Matt Dodd, a franchisee based in Louisville, Kentucky, owning a McDonald’s is a longtime dream in the making.

“It represents my version of achieving the American dream,” he said. “To me, this means owning my own business, serving and giving back to my community and creating opportunities to help others succeed. Whether it’s a crew member starting their very first job or a leader on our team reaching major life goals, being able to help people grow is one of the most rewarding parts of what I do. McDonald’s allows me to bring all of this together and truly make a difference in a way that only a brand that has been around for 70 years can.”

When Beauchesne chats with people from across the world, they tell him the first place they’ll visit is a McDonald’s.

“It's almost like our embassy,” he said. “It's like we've planted our flag in almost every country in the entire world by having McDonald's everywhere. And how many other institutions can say that?”

Whether peoplearevisiting the McDonald’s at Time Square in New York City or the oldest existing McDonald's in Downey, California, the French fries will taste the same.

Now with 13,500 restaurants in the country, the multi-billion dollar company is still at the top of the French fry game.

“I know all of McDonald's competitors try their absolute best to come up with fries that stand up to McDonald's,” Chandler said. “And they can't do it. And I don't think anyone does.”

And, maybe, no one ever will.

How the list was selected

The USA TODAY list of 50 Iconic Brands identifies American companies that have profoundly shaped the nation’s identity, economy and culture. The list is not definitive. Editorial selection factors included historical significance, industry-building innovation, measurable economic influence and lasting cultural impact. These brands were chosen for transforming daily life or becoming enduring symbols of American values. Long-term relevance and sustained national influence carried greater weight than short-term financial performance or recent popularity. Brands did not have a role in shaping the list or our coverage to ensure journalistic independence and to maintain the credibility of the selections.

This story has been updated. Staff writer Lillian Metzmeier contributed to this report.