McRevolt: The Frustrating Life of the McDonald's Franchisee (2015)
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
McDonalds problem is the same problem they've always had. The food just isn't very good. It never was. No amount of spiffing up the storefront or juggling menu items can help them when competition the likes of the above moves in. All they're doing is driving their prices higher which helps the competition even more.
You could call it Hershey Syndrome. Hershey's chocolate is not very good. In fact, it tastes like vomit. Yet the entire US has grown up eating Hershey bars.
Hershey don't compete on quality, they compete on "Hersheyness".
Likewise, McDonalds can't simply improve quality, because they would be losing their very essence in the process.
But they could make a better burger. I heard the McAngus was great. They should bring that back.
Large Fries: 440 calories
Blueberry muffin: 400 calories
Medium coke: 170 calories
Total 1500 calories.
That's close to recommended daily calorie values (2000 for women, 2200 for men).
What a dumb thing to say.
Also, I got the sense that they don't have a great relationship with their franchisees. For example, there's a special salt shaker called AccuSalt[0] that the McDonald's Corporation requires franchisees to own which costs hundreds of dollars if I remember correctly. It's a total ripoff because the thing is a cheap plastic POS that breaks whenever it's dropped and franchisees aren't allowed to buy a generic one. As a result of this and probably 100 other little things, I once heard that the franchisee I worked for got the McDonald's Corporation to fly out an HVAC tech across the country to fix a thermostat out of spite.
[0]: https://www.sonoco.com/productsandservices/plastics/accusalt...
The idea behind tools like this is uniform product preparation. Fries in one McDonalds are almost identical to fries in another.
Instead there are generic shakers that could get a very similar result with some training, even though they don't have a built-in measure. All commercial kitchen supply outlets have them.
Better yet, when kitchen staff are ultimately replaced by robots (or the salt dispenser gets built in to the fry station) this won't be an issue anymore.
I'd love to know where the new products in this article come from.
Largely a moot point now, since I try to eat fast food sparingly, but boy do I wish they had all day breakfast when I was in my early 20's.
You should figure out your TDEE, macronutrients and micronutrients and base meals off of that. Burger at 8am? Who cares if it's what you need.
Also, liability for the fast food workers would be with the franchisee and not the corporation. I don't know in the US but in my country, if you have more than around 50 employees or you are a public listed company, you are held to much higher labor standards than of you are a small company.
The product line is the value McDonalds provides to it's customers (the franchisees) if that value decreases then the money it gets paid by it's franchisees in aggregate decreases.
He says it's literally a license to print money, and he is now obscenely rich.
> McDonald's exemplifies the role of small businesses in Americans' upward mobility. The company is largely a confederation of small businesses: 85 percent of its U.S. restaurants -- average annual sales, $2.2 million -- are owned by franchisees. McDonald's has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12...
I have no idea if that's likely or not, but without that analysis, it's no different than saying that Lamy make the book American Gods possible, just because Gaiman used one of their pens.
I have to say I think this is a pretty big leap. True, you can't do a controlled experiment with no McDonald's in the market to see what would have happened. But that doesn't mean you immediately throw up your hands and say "no useful or meaningful knowledge to be gained here because we can't do an impossible study." You might not get to 100% certainty but you can definitely figure some stuff out about how things are probably working, and the magnitude of the impact of the McDonald's system.
Win!
I'll never be able to find the original reference, but apparently, chain stores can have a "market making" effect that mitigates the harm they do to consumer choice at the local level.
Starbucks used to take a lot of criticism for displacing indy coffeeshops, for example. Then, someone pointed out that a huge proportion of indy coffeeshops never existed in the first place until Starbucks normalized the idea of selling coffee and related beverages at extremely large markups.
So arguably McDonalds has opened the way for other burger restaurants and chains to enter the market, rather than blocking it.
Their competition (Wendy's, Burger King) aren't really making good burgers either. I'm lucky that Austin has a wide choice in burgers from various independent restaurateurs.
Their burgers are much better though.
If they wanted to think, they should have kicked a different business.
If McDonalds didn't sell this hard to prepare "foo-foo coffee" then potential patrons will just go across the street to Starbucks... and pick up a sandwich there for lunch too.
I can see why a complex menu creates financial and operational demands on restaurants, but driving customers to other restaurants does too.
If I could order a burger combo and have it dropped off at work or home, and be cheaper than an entire pizza plus tip, i'd order from it way more often than I should.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/newfound...
Oh yeah, I remember that era. 1981, just after Carter's re-election.
http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html
If you look, rates were typically in the 8s up through midway through Carter's term, then spiked in to 9, 10, 11, then 12-16 in 1980, and it took most of Reagan's 2 terms to come back down to the 9 range.
Someone in 1981 would still be thinking of Carter's effects on interest rates, and the rates were "Jimmy Carter-era". They were also "Reagan-era", but not many people point the finger at him for rates going to 16, since he wasn't even elected when that happened.
The rates in 1977 and 1978 were lower than any in Reagan's two terms. Conversely, rates in 1981, 1982, and (barely) 1984 were HIGHER than any in Carter's term.
Sure, Carter's policies had some effect on those interest rates, inasmuch as he made Paul Volcker Fed Chairman. However, the high interest rates were necessary to bring down inflation rates, which started spiking under Nixon/Ford, and Reagan's massive budget deficits did not exactly help either.
So putting the August 1981 interest rate on Carter's doorstep smacks a bit of partisan bias (hardly unsurprising in a magazine owned by a perennial GOP presidential candidate), though admittedly with a bit more justification than e.g. blaming 1992 events on Bill Clinton's presidency.