McDonald’s Arches Now Extend to the North Pole

Guess who the North Pole’s biggest attraction is this Christmas season?

Well, for starters, it isn’t Santa Claus.

It’s Ronald McDonald, the hamburger chain’s peripatetic clown, who spent the weekend in the small Alaskan town of North Pole to help inaugurate the town’s first hamburger outlet.

North Pole thus becomes the northernmost outpost in North America for McDonald’s Golden Arches.

Despite its exotic name, North Pole, population 2,500, is not all that isolated--and it is hundreds of miles south of the real North Pole. It is 15 miles outside of Fairbanks, within a few miles of two military bases. The McDonald’s is next door to the town’s biggest tourist attraction, Santa Claus House.

“It’s part of McDonald’s expansion into small towns,” explained Jerry Kinn, who together with his wife, Debra, operates the McDonald’s in North Pole and two others in Fairbanks. McDonald’s, which is based in Oak Brook, Ill., is focusing on small towns and other atypical sites for future growth because it has run out of conventional locations.

As a result, McDonald’s outlets can be found at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport, near the Spanish Steps in Rome, at the Toronto Zoo and in the Netherlands Antilles. The fast food company operates 9,000 outlets worldwide--7,000 in the United States, of which 24 are in Alaska.

In North Pole, where there are only three to four hours of sunlight during winter, the McDonald’s follows conventional hours of 6 a.m. to midnight. “People have learned just to live with the environment,” Kinn said in a telephone interview. “We experienced temperatures of 40 below zero the week we opened (in mid-November), but people still came.”

Prices in North Pole are a little higher than at most conventional McDonald’s because of higher freight costs. The food is shipped by water from Seattle to Anchorage, then transported by rail to Fairbanks and finally by truck to North Pole.