McDonald's
American fast food restaurant chain
McDonald's Corporation is an American multinational fast food restaurant chain. Founded in 1940 as a restaurant operated by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California, the company has grown into one of the world's largest restaurant chains. At the end of 2025, the McDonald's system comprised 45,356 restaurants in more than 100 countries, approximately 95% of which were operated by franchisees.
The McDonald brothers introduced their streamlined food-production system, later known as the Speedee Service System, during the 1940s. The Golden Arches design was introduced in 1953. Businessman Ray Kroc became a McDonald's franchise agent in 1955 and opened a restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois. He purchased the brothers' ownership stake in the company in 1961 and oversaw its domestic and international expansion.
McDonald's generates revenue from sales at company-operated restaurants and from rent, royalties, and fees paid by franchisees. At the end of 2025, the company owned approximately 56% of the land and 80% of the restaurant buildings within its consolidated markets. McDonald's directly employed more than 150,000 people, while more than two million additional people worked at independently operated franchised restaurants.
The public source identifies “McDonald's” as american fast food restaurant chain. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around McDonald's, American and fast.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q38076. VIAF identifies the subject as 136891459. The Library of Congress control number is n50000582. None of the 61 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940, 2025, 1953 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “McDonald's” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.