Mrs. Stewart
English 2 Honors
August 9, 2012 The main characters in the novel Fast Food Nation are Richard and Maurice “Mac” McDonald, Ray Kroc, Walt Disney, Carl N. Karcher, and Dave Thomas. The McDonald’s brothers are from New Hampshire. They opened up the first McDonald’s restaurant in 1937 in southern California. They revolutionized the fast food industry in 1948 by ridding their business of carhops, and using disposable plates and cups to serve finger food. Ray Kroc was a high school drop-out from Illinois. He sold milkshake makers until he met the McDonald brothers in 1954. He sold milkshake makers to them, and bought the right to franchise their company. He is known as a pioneer in the fast-food industry for creating characters that rivaled others such as Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney became Ray Kroc’s biggest rival after refusing to put a McDonald’s in Disneyland, which was model marketing to children. Carl is also one of the American fast-food industry’s pioneers. At twenty-years-old, Carl moved to Anaheim, California where he began his first hotdog stand. Carl eventually turned his hotdog stands into drive-in restaurants. After observing the first McDonald’s restaurants success, Carl started expanding and developed the Carl’s Jr’s restaurants. In 1997, the corporation expanded dramatically with the new possession of the Hardee's Restaurant chain. In 2004, CKE Restaurants, Inc. had revenues in excess of 1.4 billion dollars. Dave Thomas dropped out of school at fifteen-years-old. After working as a bus boy and a cook, he eventually founded Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant in Columbus, Ohio in 1969. Today, there are thousands of Wendy’s restaurants and they remain popular throughout the world. Dave is probably best known as the "guy on the Wendy's TV commercials". From 1989 to 2002, Dave appeared in over 800 commercials for the restaurant chain. He died after a long battle with liver cancer in 2002. The setting of this novel