The slow death of McDonald's in North America?

also a shift in eating habits is going to affect city centre markets more, where greater density and variety can mean more players, (and perhaps greater short term fluctuations), whereas economies of scale, and ability to penetrate a vast market means out-of-town markets are 'safer' in terms of ability to hold onto market share?

and the bad publicity that mcdonalds has had in recent years are probably going to affect more, where the clientele has more changeable eating habits

couldn't find store closing info for the us.

Not sure why a salad is "faux healthy" but anyway... My impression was that the "healthy choices" moves have been more slowing decline than generating growth. People who don't like McDonald's (and McD's food) are not going to go there now just because they have salads, at least not in any significant numbers. The effect would be more of people who prefer to eat healthy choosing salads over Big Macs and, more importantly, creating a defense against all the bad PR they're getting.

Also, McD's has been fairly stagnant in the US for years - the market is generally saturated. Growth has been international, opening in places where they have had only limited presence (eg., Russia).

And, to reiterate what someone else said, I think city center McD's may close down -- competition from other fast food, plus delis and sit-down restaurants. But it's pretty damn hard to put them out of business in the suburbs, etc. While NY, at least, has plenty of those "awning" McD's, down here in Charlotte they are doing things like building a consolidated gas station/mini mart/McDonald's: most of the floor space what would be a standard-sized restaurant is now the minimart selling candy, chips, sodas, etc.

A number of our McD's are now open 24 hrs, which has attracted some notice.

Depending on the egg/cheese/meat/salad dressing, some of the salads have as much fat/calories as a burger.

Where I am (eastern WA) and from what I saw recently in the midwest, McDonalds has focused on the Playland concept, hoping to draw in parents with small (as in 6 and under) kids. This is the group influenced by the childhood obesity epidemic news, also it seems the parents I know in this group are more about scheduled playdates and such than random turn-'em-loose-in-the-ball-pit sorts, a shift I think from the majority of parents just 8-10 years ago. The target market of the McDonalds facility seems disjointed with the target market of their "healthier" food options. There's no salad-based Happy Meal, just a swap of fries for carrots or apple slices, and water/juice/milk for soda with your burger/McNuggets/fish fingers.

"The enormous success of the Dollar Menu, where all items cost $1, has helped stimulate 36 consecutive months of sales growth at stores open at least a year. In three years, revenue has increased by 33 percent and its shares have rocketed 170 percent, a remarkable turnaround for a company that only four years ago seemed to be going nowhere.

...

"Just three and a half years ago, McDonald's was struggling mightily. Its stock had tumbled 56 percent in 10 months and the company had reported its first quarterly loss. Sales at existing stores in the United States, by far McDonald's biggest market, were not growing and in many instances were declining.

"Stung by obesity lawsuits and criticism from books like "Fast Food Nation," the company's brand seemed passé and the high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium cuisine appeared poised for a long decline.

"But that did not happen. Today, McDonald's business, both in the United States and globally, is growing; the chain gets some one million more American visitors a day than it did just a year ago."

I think this was a conscious branching out decision taken by the Australian management.

I remember that when I was working at a cinema where Supersize Me was playing, the McDonalds across the road had all these "Fact & Fiction" signs up, saying things like:

"Fiction: That movie says our salads have as many calories as two burgers
Fact: Australian McDonalds Salads have less than x grams of fat"

well, mcdonalds bought like 90% of chipotle, and they're doing pretty ok

Why is this? They have served billions of people and given probably millions of people jobs. Not to mention that they are the only restaurant many people can afford to go to. Is all of that offset by using liberal buzzwords about Big Business to describe them?

i saw some article about how the food in mcdonalds in europe, asia have far less fat/cholesterol/etc and far fewer trans fats. lucky them

ha! high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium cuisine will never go out of style. that's where the flavor is!

I'm starting to think that Seattle is just an exception here. It's the Pacific northwest -- where hybrid co-op megamarkets do better than the chain markets, and also a bit middle-to-upper class in the central parts, so McDonald's are going to suffer greatly here, but only here, and SF and Portland and Vancouver to some degree.

I will say that I can't imagine a place more stressful to work than McDonalds, and this is based not so much on what they do but on how the staff shout at eachother. It's not even a nasty or vindictive shouting - they're just aggressive and demanding with eachother as a matter of course, as if it's necessary to be this way to have anyone pay attention to you.

yeah - mcdonalds is incredibly gross and borderline poisonous. what're they doing to all those delicious fatty calories? knowing that there's millions of people that eat it regularly (every day even) bums me out.

Dick's burgers are probably 10 times worse for you than McDonald's burgers even (and LeCoq claims they taste 10 times worse even), but you know, Dick's are LOCAL and INDEPENDENT and they're namedropped in a SIR MIX-A-LOT song! heh.

In Manhattan, I guess it's the same effect as in Sydney and Melbourne... chain places can rent a spot on several blocks and just operate and be successful as such.

I guess my main focus was on the classic free-standing McDonald's restaurants with all four colorful sides, the golden arches, and an attached McPlayLand dying slowly... and I believe, in bigger cities, that is indeed happening, but these will always have a life in more sparse areas in the future.

Hell, Pioneer Chicken still exists! They just operate about 5 stores in the country now, but they're not technically dead yet.

In Communist Civic Pride, Food Faster Than YOU!

The only place I see McD's like that here is the few in country towns, on the side of the freeway betwixt Sydney and Melbourne, purpose-built for the 12 hour drive stop off. I havent seen a Maccas or Pizza Hut fully standalone with its classic building design/livery/etc in years - it seems really 80s and long gone.

Cue several abandoned buildings around the place.

Speaking of abandoned buildings, all the former Sizzlers in Adelaide (before they pulled out ten years ago) are still like that. Oh, one was going to be turned into a "casino" but that didn't work out.

So why is that Queenslanders love Sizzler so much it still exists there? I don't want to say "because they're fat idiots", but...

There's no real alternative to Insurance. People fucking hate Walmart, see that indie film that was doing the rounds last year. Public campaigns against logging companies don't really go anywhere because people are soooo far removed from the companies. Credit Cards are a v. American problem, but people be loving free cash.

Also, none of these except Visa have a big international name.

The disproportionate anti-McDonalds attitude amongst liberals/lefties is I think an example of a certain level of cultural snobbery that can infect their otherwise legitimate complaints. McDonalds and Coca-Cola offend merely by dint of their sheer American-imperialism-ubiquity

There's been very very little anti-Coca-Cola aggro even after No Logo (where the only actual negative mention is the "schoolkid suspended for wearing Pepsi T-shirt to Coke Day", which hardly Shell in Nigeria), up until the recent noise about companies that they subcontract to killing people, partly because duh, twitchy activists love caffeine, and partly because Coke tends to keep its nose clean and content itself with a water tower full of gold coins.

The main reason, as far as I'm aware, for the focus on McDonalds, is the McLibel case. Two untrained protestors almost winning a UK libel case over a cadre of corporate lawyers and dirty tricks, and possibly getting the libel laws changed to the point where they could win it, is exactly the sort of story that gets people's attention.

(I guess I'm only speaking from a UK perspective here)

Also snobbery's a really tricky word to be using here.

Not a lot of McDonald's in Wisconsin overall. Well I think it's more that Wisconsin isn't exactly in "cross-over" or "drive through" country. There aren't a lot of huge interstates in Wisconsin. If you've been there, you'll see there are not a lot of McDonalds, but that's less a matter of "civic pride" than it is a matter of McDonald's having the sense not to put up restaurants in areas with relatively little traffic. It's not a sprawly state, like its neighbor Illinois.

wasn't there a shitload after it came out about how they were fucking people & land over in india? it felt like it to me... think it was around then i actively stopped buying coca cola and their other drinks because they are scum rather than passively not buying it just because i don't like it. also there was the selling tap water thing, but that was sort of funny: dude, you live in a country where the tap water's safe and you buy bottled water? hahahaha you kind of deserve what you get.

But I do think that cultural distaste for fast food (esp. of the multinational conglomerate variety) is partly a taste issue, and is influenced by factors such as class, education and location.

In saying this I'm not implying that such a position is automatically a bad thing: I have an attitude towards Starbucks in particular that I would happily describe as "snobbish": I much prefer the idiosyncracies of all the little city cafes that Melbourne is so ostentatiously proud of. This exists alongside a certain cynicism w/r/t Starbucks' work practices (particularly the stuff detailed in, yes, No Logo, about squeezing out competition by oversupplying the market). But my cynicism about Starbucks as an aggressive multinational chain and my distaste for the homogeneity of the Starbucks experience are mutually reinforcing, and I'm not going to pretend that without the latter my position on the former would still be as strong.

I think that, with McDonalds, I feel less antipathy b/c the fast food experience seems to me to be it's own thing at this stage, whereas Starbucks and all the other coffee chains still present themselves as capturing the "cafe experience". I react against what I instinctively perceive to be the false version of something which I enjoy. And again this is partly snobbery coming into play: when we identify and react against a faux version of something we like we are demonstrating our qualities of discernment and taste in a way that is more sophisticated (relatively) than by simply making the broad distinction b/w what we like and don't like e.g. "fast food = uncultured; coffee = cultured"

I assume "Severe Recession" = "Big Profits" for Big Macs.

― Daniel, Esq., Sunday, April 26, 2009 7:22 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, mcdonald's is insanely profitable right now (have to write two-three stories about this for work every week)

This thread is tempting me to go to the 24/hr McDonald's around the corner, but I don't think I can face the poor employees. Graveyard shift at McDonalds, how depressing.

If McDonalds plays the McCafe thing right, they can really cut into Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. I got a McCafe cappuccino once but either the dude or the machine screwed it up. I could tell it would have tasted pretty good if the proportion of coffee to milk hadn't been way out of whack.

the mccafe thing is already cutting into dunkin' donuts and starbucks, mainly because it's significantly cheaper. mcdonald's is adding mccafes at all of its u.s. outlets.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/apr2009/db20090422_083186.htm?campaign_id=yhoo

The McDonald's coffee I've had is terrible. Weak and tasteless (Not that Starbuck's is so great, mind you, but it errs in the opposite direction). Is McCafe's coffee different?

That McDonald's photo reminds me of Krusty's comment on the ribwich, "I don't mind the taste!"

Good to see all those women in high places. Looks there's one and...er...another one.

Except EDF naturally - bloomin' hippies.

the mcdonald's in my town is ass, I won't go in there. but when I walk by it I still want to buy their fries.

when I was a kid going to mcdonald's was really exciting and fun! I can't imagine it would be for my son these days, unless there are nicer mcdonald's somewhere.

The regular McDonald's coffee is pretty bad - drip coffee that's been kept on the heater pad for god knows how long, til the water evaporates off and all that is left is bitter and acrid mud.

McCafe's coffee however is pretty decent, at least here in Hong Kong - it's a better cup than Starbucks. They used a lighter roast, so your coffee doesn't taste all burnt. Coffee is brewed to order - if you get drip coffee then they use some industrial sized single-serve machine. The quality of lattes, macchiatos etc. still depends on how skilled the barista secondary school kid working at minimum wage is at frothing the milk. I think if their beans were of better quality they really could be pretty good - the equipment is definitely up to par.

I had a McCafe cappuccino and it was surprisingly OK; I expected grossly sweet and got something with a bit of (the correct kind of) bitterness to it.

McDonald's coffee has so much caffeine it's like a cattle prod shoved up my ass. I drink it every morning.

Actually quite cute, and I like the recyclable aspect:
http://fashionista.com/2012/06/mcdonald-draper-mcdonalds-new-uniforms-are-inspired-by-mad-men/

Sorry, but if you're not wearing a brown polo shirt i'm sure as hell not going to trust you with my McNuggets.

Admittedly the mod thing kinda makes sense, though. Not too difficult to imagine Grimace tooling around on a Vespa

http://cdn.gunaxin.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/grimace-valentine.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/vmQqk.jpg

not gonna lie, i'm totally interested in what the arancine might taste like

http://e.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/1280/poster/2014/06/3031843-poster-mcdonalds.jpg

je suis en train de l'aimer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93KTpF9JDWo

http://i.imgur.com/yHPO2Rm.jpg

I just had a McDonald's shake. Don't do that. Never do that.

I mean honestly it wasn't *that* bad but it was sooooo fucking sweet, just crammed down with syrup. I did at least take the whipped cream off.

Person sitting next to me on the bus this evening had just been to McDonald's, because there was that warm cardboard smell.

The frozen yogurt's actually not bad tho for $1

http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/

Today McDonald’s makes its money on real estate through two methods. Its real estate subsidiary will buy and sell hot properties while also collecting rents on each of its franchised locations. McDonald’s restaurants are in over 100 countries and have probably served over 100 billion hamburgers. There are over 36,000 locations worldwide, of which only 15% are owned and operated by the McDonald’s corporation directly. The rest are franchisee-operated.

I predict the slow death of McDonald's in North America is going to be a very slow, long, drawn out, exceptionally tedious event.

I predict the slow death of McDonald's in North America is going to be a very slow, long, drawn out, exceptionally tedious event.

I dunno, it's been a pretty exciting slow death thus far!

for a huge fast food chain ya

p nuts

theyre determined to not die

Mayor McCheese would have won

Crooked HamBurgler

I remember liking their fries before I became a dietary vegan, though I thought their burgers were the worst (blandest/sweetest/most catering to childhood tastes) of the main franchises. Their core market is harried parents, and rural folk who don't know any better, I think.

Now I have no desire to eat anything they have to offer.

Fast food for me is only sampled on road trips, and I'll drive another 10 miles to the next Subway or Taco Bell, which at least have options (too few). I've heard McD overseas have a more interesting menu. I could live with McD India fare.

rural folk who don't know any better

lmao

Well, or have no other choices. The only places I've seen long lines at a McD are off the interstate and at airports.

http://i.imgur.com/VRYBGUu.png
RIP

looks like all day breakfast was a good idea

I ate McDonalds yesterday AMA.

did anyone see that movie The Founder a few months ago? Michael Keaton played Ray Kroc. p good i thought. didn't know their main source of income was real estate.

looks like all day breakfast was a good idea

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, April 21, 2017 12:56 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Their decision to go after Starbucks also helped their bottom line imo

what about the grand mac has anyone fucked with that yet

you mean is there a video of somebody fucking a grand mac?

McDonalds hamburgers taste so strange to me. Sanpakyu otm up there

Still like McChickens though. Even though they too, taste nothing like actual chicken.

I figure the grand mac is just a stunt to give them something new to talk about in ads, because their franchisers aren't interested in doing anything new that requires substantial investments rn.

you mean is there a video of somebody fucking a grand mac?

c'mon you and i both know there have to be multiple videos out there of somebody fucking not just the grand mac but the entire macdonald's menu, doubtless with particular focus on happy meals

hell yeah hit me with some links

/r/fuckdonalds iirc

There's an infamous but LOLworthy-as-hell video of someone who at least wants to fuck a McDonald's burger - well if not quite a video at least an animated GIF - and the amazing thing is it's not from some internet rando who posted it online, but rather an actual paid McDonald's banner ad!

http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/id_hit_it_-_mcdonalds_banner.gif

It appeared on espn.com in 2005 before some horrified McD exec managed to reach ESPN and get it pulled within an hour, but not before several bloggers captured it for all eternity. Exhibit A for why advertisers (and ppl in general) shouldn't try to be hip by using slang catchphrases until they're sure they know what they mean....

Here in Joliet our local McD's is busy nearly all the time. It's particularly mystifying as there are excellent Mexican restaurants all around it, plus a BK and a Checkers. There is so much traffic in and out of there that it's a frequent car accident zone. And I must admit that I'm guilty of hitting it once a month or so, meself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/04/22/mcdonalds-new-uniform-hot-or-existentially-depressing/?utm_term=.a4f7a84bcdb5&tid=sm_tw

mcd's jumping on the health goth bandwagon two years too late