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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

I think you are drastically underestimating McDonald's - they have 36k+ stores in almost every country on the planet serving 69MM+ customers daily with a brand recognition in line with Apple, Coca Cola, and Nike. They also spend money on advertising across every conceivable channel.

Number of SKUs has nothing to do with it (which likely numbers in the many hundreds across the globe considering regional & seasonal specialities).

McDonald's has everything to gain by infusing this kind of DNA into their operations.

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On a side note: I recently watched "The Founder", which tells the story how Ray Kroc scaled McDonalds. Highly recommended!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc

Book version is so much better: https://www.amazon.com/Grinding-Out-McDonalds-Ray-Kroc/dp/03...

If you liked the story of Ray Kroc, you'll like the story of Howard Schultz scaling Starbucks; the similarities are spooky.

Any book recommendations?

The first half of Schultz's Pour Your Heart Into It.

Even its title, similar to Kroc (his: Grind It Out).

Not a book but there’s a good episode of the How I Built This podcast that gives a great overview. https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=551874532:554086519

I really enjoyed Schultz's "Onward," which talks about his return as CEO in 2008 to turn around Starbucks, which was struggling mightily at the time.

Yes, there was a time when Starbucks was not doing well.

> McDonald's has everything to gain by infusing this kind of DNA into their operations.

That seems logical but how much will it infuse Machine Learning into McD's DNA if the acquired startup sits in Israel? It seems to me the employees will not even interact much with each other, how can there be much of incorporating thinking, methods or practices?

> It seems to me the employees will not even interact much with each other, how can there be much of incorporating thinking, methods or practices?

What does physical proximity have to do with anything?

McDonalds does $20B+ in revenues, has 210k direct employees and 1.9M when you include franchises. At this scale, the only people that need to interface is senior management.

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