Words matter. These are the best Jim Cantalupo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When you’re doing that you lose your focus on the discipline of the business, and how you train people at Hamburger University, and everybody gets on a bigger, different vision, and they’re not on the same page.
But, on balance, we seized the marketplace. We’ve got a great infrastructure. And yes it’s struggling in some areas because of some external factors and some internal factors.
Playtime and toys are good for kids, or they wouldn’t buy them. McDonald’s can provide that experience. And having dinner with the family is good for kids.
The fact of the matter is, most of our orders are not supersized. Less than five per cent are supersized – that’s never mentioned. The whole issue has been supersized itself.
But I tell you, I would really be interested if there was a partner we could take in, that could put them over here on the side, that would allow us full leverage and access down the road.
When you raise prices, you’ve got to make sure you get it to the bottom line. You can fritter it away because of the way you’re running the business, with maybe not a totally disciplined approach.
I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that’s about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back… so by the end of next year, I hope most of that’s in place.
But in terms of the code by which we go to market – it’s not telling kids to supersize, we’re not selling them, generally, products, in the advertising we do to them.
McDonald’s is almost 50 years old. For 47 years we had a pretty consistent track record of being able to deliver admirable sales.
I think this year we’ll open up 900 gross, we’re closing some, so the net count is lower, but the 900 are spread all over the place. Some of the closures are relocations, where you’re moving it to another place in the marketplace.
I think we’ll still be a family restaurant, we’ll be contemporary, we’ll be lifestyle, we won’t be old, we won’t be 60 years old in the view of the consumer.
Some of the analysts were saying, Now you’re a cash cow, there’s no growth at all, pay it all out in dividends, give me it all, you can’t invest wisely.
And so if your competitors aren’t growing, if there isn’t a competitive reason to grow, and you want focus and discipline to add customers to existing stores, you adjust your strategy.
Every year we close 300-400 stores anyway, just relocations.
And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.
The markets where we’ve got real good presence are the older, more mature markets like Australia, and Western Europe – where we’ve only got 6,000 stores, compared to the US with 13,000.
As I said, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about partner brands.
Because we only feed in the United States less than 1 per cent of the meals, most of them are eaten elsewhere. Most meals are eaten at home. So to make McDonald’s the target is not going to solve the problem.
But we had a pretty diversified portfolio of businesses around the world and things tended to offset each other. But one or two years ago, we had a lot of things happening at the same time.
So Europe’s a big driver. And at one point, if the euro hadn’t devalued, they would have been making as much money as the US with half the stores. Returns were higher.
We have very specific rules about how we go to market with children, and I think they are very responsible.
We cover hamburgers, chicken, veggie burgers, salads, we’ve got a pretty broad range. To me, McDonald’s isn’t only about the food. It’s about the prices, it’s about the way we eat.
