McDonald's Restaurants by the Numbers: Can You Help?

Did you know that every McDonald's restaurant has a number assigned to it?

Ever since the launch of the chain, each new store has been assigned a consecutive number identifying its special place in the historical timeline.

Thus, a low number store has been around for a long time. If a store closes for good, its number gets retired.

Which brings me to today's McTopic.

Regular blog contributor and historian Dennis Thompson has been compiling a numerical list of all the original McDonald's restaurant from the very first one. He’s been doing pretty well and has many of the first one hundred stores identified. Now he’s working on the second hundred, and trying to fill in the gaps caused by the stores that are no longer in business.

His problem? He’s trying to find out what number was assigned to Lorain's original (and defunct) McDonald's restaurant on West Erie Avenue. He knows that it’s in that second hundred batch, because he already knows the numbers of some other local ones that came later and are still in business.

He’s reached out to McDonald’s corporate offices but hasn’t heard back.

Trying to research it locally, we've looked in the Lorain city directories, in phone books and in the ads that appeared in the Journal when it first opened in June 1960.

Unfortunately, the store's number is not mentioned anywhere.

So if any former employees of Lorain’s very first McDonald’s can help solve this problem, be sure to drop me an email. Dennis would sure appreciate it.

One place to possibly find it is on an old store cash register receipt. Anyone have one in a scrapbook as a treasured memento?