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July 30, 2020

ADB says, "I'll Be Back"

Translated, this comment by Bloomberg's analyst Michael Halen means "Franchisee 
profit be damned, bring back all-day breakfast".

“McDonald’s kind of underperformed a little bit early on in the pandemic. I think part 

of that was the fact that they halted their all-day breakfast to kind of help to improve franchisee margins and throughput at the drive-thru during lunch and dinner times."
- Michael Halen

But we can't blame analysts. For four years they've been told ADB was a huge success.

It's now official Wall Street lore and management can't go back and say, "ADB was not a
big deal".

McDonald's Earnings Disappoint, Starbucks Beats - Restaurant Engine

July 25, 2020

Why Would McDonald's Promote Sauce Complexity?

It appears McDonald's has a "deep state" of marketing and advertising people who are 
driven to promote menu diversity and complexity that has nothing to do with what's 
happening in the restaurants.

Why all these sauces? Why would you advertise that you had so many sauces?

This is something completely contrary to what's working at McDonald's yet OPNAD is 
wasting their budget on a counter-productive commercial.

Five/six years ago I visited a McDonald's to sample the latest new chicken product. I placed
my order with a young man and he asked me what sauce I wanted. Since I was the only one 
at the counter I mischievously asked, "What kind do you have"?

He looked at the POS screen and started rattling off the various sauces. He looked like 
a healthy teenage fellow but his respiratory system couldn't handle the list and halfway 
through he stopped to take a breath and mumbled, "McDonald's has too many sauces".

If there had been a line behind me how much would I slowed up service times? Worse yet, 
what if I'd been in drive-thru?

Yeah, McDonald's has too many sauces yet OPNAD is blowing their budget promoting the 

There's a deep state in McDonald's that doesn't support or understand menu simplif -
ication. If such ads are on the air it concerns me that some of those in the deep 
state are Owner/Operators who participate in such decisions.

Candidate for the dumb commercial of the year: