Coalition of Franchisee Associations

January 24, 2015

This Headline Says It All

McDonald’s tried to be all things to all people. It didn’t work. - WaPo
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is absolutely true that most of MCD's problems are self-inflected. They would never listen to the operators when these problems were starting and being predicted. MCD market share policies of building new stores and adding products have never been fully effective and created serious financial problems for operators and the system. This war for customers is not going to be won at the super bowl or other expensive media buys. They help but it will be won in the individual trading areas with aggressive local store marketing and community involvement which the company has purposefully walked away from. Thinking they can over power competitors with more locations and take the attitude that competitors products are inferior. It doesn't work. The company has a bloated army of unqualified employees, too many low volume stores built solely to gain market share and not on good business principles. The company needs to be closer to the operators and thus the customers. They need to put their clip boards down and listen. They need to close many stores, get out of bad leases, trim the staff, close some regions, put political correctness on the back burner and build cash flow. We are a BUSINESS and Business is about profit! We are not a social welfare organization. MCD once they get profitable again and they will they need to resist the temptation to grow staff and unnecessary but nice programs. The culture has got to change. Its got to be all about making money. It will surprise them how problems will then begin to disappear.

Anonymous said...

Simple solutions-

CUT the MENU 15-20%

Replace Thompson & upper Management with folks who have actually run a restaurant

Consolidate regions and cut total corp staff by 10-15%.

Stop forcing operators into equity destroying debt

Anonymous said...

Although Oak Brook blames the Operators (as usual)the REAL culprit here is McDonalds itself. For far too long we have attracted customers not by smart marketing, but by incessant DISCOUNTING. This has lead the public to believe our food is NOT worth full menu price, and worth only the discounted promotional price. Some items (the dollar menu) were permanently relegated to discount status. Also the extreme constant discount pricing made our customers believe our food couldnt be HIGH QUALITY, because we could sell it so cheap.So 25 years of constant discounting has convinced the consumer we only sell cheap, low quality junk. Discounting destroyed the Quality perception. Now we are paying the price for it.

Richard Adams said...

Anonymous - what you've written is exactly what McDonald's staff were trained to tell Operators who wanted to do discounting in the 1970s and 1980s. Then same store sales got soft in the late 80s and early 90s and Oak Brook paniced. I remember it being a big deal when OPNAD ran the very first national price point discount TV ads.

Big Mac EVM for $2.99?. or was it $1.99?

Anyone know what year that was? 1990?