McShake-up from an icon
Dear McDonald’s Corp.,
What a downer about your stock tanking. I’m not among your stockholders (at least I don’t think so, but with all these mutual funds, who knows?), but like many Americans, I am a former employee and an occasional customer.
Since your stunning announcement that you are shutting down 175 stores, I have been disoriented. McDonald’s opens restaurants, it doesn’t close them!
It’s taking awhile for the news to sink in: McDonald’s, the company that invented supersizing, is downsizing. You’ve named a new CEO to step in Jan. 1, and have announced you will “close three countries” and restructure four. You could not have shaken us more if you had announced you were switching from Coke to Pepsi.
At your very heart has always been the belief that we live in an ever-expanding universe, one full of infinite possibilities for the spread of your systems and meal plan. You’ve always been a leader (you make a dollar menu, Burger King follows with a 99-cent one) and ready to fry new foods (pie!).
It was while working for you that I learned about the importance of not simply giving customers their food, but of presenting it. I learned that “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” And I learned through your unprecedentedly detailed training films how to settle a shake, wrap a burger, dress a bun, salt fries -- and to place orders with precision in crisply opened paper bags before sliding them smoothly forward across a shiny clean counter into the hands of valued customers.
Recently, I stopped in at the McDonald’s where I used to work and hardly recognized the place. Sure, you had added a Playland, but that’s not what threw me: You had put in one of those self-serve soda fountains. Where’s the presentation in that? It just seems so Wendy’s.
Also, there didn’t seem to be the masses of people coming in. I remember how the lunch and dinner crowds and tour buses seemed endlessly to be pulling into the parking lot. We were really cooking then, huh? You know, I was one of the few who could run a rolling double-48 on the grill (that’s 96 little all-beef patties sizzling at once) -- but then, of course, I couldn’t have done it without the unflinching support of a crack bun crew.
But I digress. It was you who turned fast food in this country into a system, into a cash cow, and took the concept to new continents. It is in some of those newer markets that you’re pulling back -- in Latin America and the Middle East. You say that the stores you are closing are under-performing. Are they not in strong traffic centers? Has quality control been uneven? Or is it a trickier issue, such as a finite IEO (Informal Eating Out) market?
You have more than 30,000 stores sprinkled across the universe. Not evenly of course, the greatest concentration is right here in the USA, where, let’s face it, the market was ripe for the picking back when Ray Kroc saw what a great thing Dick and Mac McDonald had going over in San Bernardino. Some parts of the world have been totally with the game plan -- like Japan, where the teriyaki burger has been a hit and you squeezed 2,400 restaurants into a very small space. Europe has been tougher -- just 1,200 sites in the U.K., 900 in France and 230 in Italy. They are so full of Old World ideas over there about food and dining, aren’t they? Then there’s all this anti-globalization and mad cow disease.
Has the universe simply gotten too unruly? Or are 121 countries just too many to keep track of? I’m sure the customers who’ve learned to love the Big Mac in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala are nervous -- just as I would be if I thought the franchises in my neighborhood might vanish.
I know you’re still grappling with all this, but I don’t doubt that just as you have always charged ahead with McConfidence, you will pull back with it.
All the best in the new year.
