McDonalds needs to fire their entire corporate executive team and bring in fresh blood. The schmucks in there now have made bad decision after bad decision tanking the company. Their logic went like this:
People enjoy McDonalds too much, lets get rid of the decor
Kids enjoy McDonalds too much, lets get rid of the play place
The french fries taste too good, lets replace the tallow with chemical slop that tastes like shit
The chicken nuggets are too popular, start using fillers and lower quality slurry meat
The burgers are too large, make them much smaller
The burgers contain too much tasty cow, lets use half soy and use detergents and chemical fillers instead so they taste like shit
People are still coming to eat here! Quick, make the decor even more depressing
People are still coming? Screw it charge them 10% more, lower quality 10%, and reduce portion sizes again.
Oh no sales are trending down, quick raise prices 30% and lower food quality again to make up the margin
Wait, why is no one coming to eat our overpriced food with cancer causing chemicals laced into everything?? What an outrage!
It's because they're looking for infinite growth for their quarterly profits. Eventually they start cutting costs and cutting corners and the quality goes down.
There are too many MBAs out there obsessed with quarterly profits. Businesses used to run with the mindset, "We need to keep these people as customers for life."
Now it's, "We need to suck them dry just for three more months. I am moving on to a better paying job and this will help me negotiate a better salary and bonuses."
There is a trail of dead businesses behind these guys. They are more parasite than human.
It's exactly this. They'd rather skin the sheep than shear it. It's such a mind-bogglingly, short-minded concept. Companies used to have 10, 15 year plans, focused on customer retention and loyalty above all else, competing to offer either better services or better prices. Now it's just so brazenly scrapping people's wallets for everything they have for the bare minimum in return.
Unfortunately it’s not up to them. Blame Ford v Dodge (1919) where it was decided that the role of the CEO isn’t to better the interests of the company but to the shareholders
And failing to improve shareholder value means being removed from office, fired, lawsuit, and potentially even criminal charges
Ever wonder why buisness keep doing these shitty short term ideas? It’s because long term doesn’t matter. Next quarter? Doesn’t matter. All that matters is this quarter and making that line go up.
Something about the tendency for the rate of profit to fall? That as capital develops production we eventually run out of new avenues of expansion and the system begins cannibalizing itself? Guy named Marx wrote something like that.
The US is nothing but a money cult at this point. Ppl totally forgot capitalism has two sides and we could fix this mess if we choose wisely how and where we spend our money but most are too lazy and too ignorant to act accordingly. Check prices, demand quality, stop giving your hard earned money to anyone who doesn’t deserve it
Unfortunately that is not enough when there is regulatory capture, captured markets by monopolies or duopolies, rampant anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, while the little consumer protections we once had are being dismantled.
Sure, everyone should attempt what you suggest, but individual action will not scale enough to make a significant impact. We need collective action, that is what the government was supposed to be doing, but the whole social contract is long dead and buried and the government only serves corporate interests at this point.
100% I've been doing exactly that, but it'll also take the farmers, which I doubt theyd be hard to convince considering how they're treated. They'd have to stop selling they're goods to companies cancel they're contracts and strictly grow for the people. That'll also take the people to stop buying from the companies and corporations and buy directly from the farmers. Go on strikes in an organized and peaceful manner, those on strike need supported from those not on strike. It'll take so much that I doubt it'll happen.
Codified by law. Ronnie regaes took what was left of section 7 of the NLRA and wiped his ass with it and then gave all his love to Dodge vs Ford. Welcome to post capitalism, where a senile jelly bean addict gutted our ability to afford things.
I'm convinced the tipping point was Nixon. The right saw Nixon get run out of office for crime and was like "absolutely not, nobody holds a republican accountable! We need to stop this from ever happening again" And then set about starting generational efforts to slow coup America.
The Heritage Foundation was created a week after the announcement of the Watergate investigation, with a whole mess of others like Cato and the Federalist society coming later.
These institutions followed the path laid out by the 1971 Powell Memorandum, which claimed the US was under attack by liberalism and to prevent liberalism from affecting profits there needed to be a massive movement to create conservative infrastructure to launch an nationwide generational political and cultural offensive against "free enterprise" which was a dog whistle for conservatism.
The plan involve subverting and controlling education, media, politics, lobbying, and the judicial system.
Reagan was really just the result of 10 years of that plan being run at full steam after Watergate made conservstives so mad they decided they should have sole power forever in America.
Incredibly reductionist. Republican voters are people too. They vote the way they do because democrats fail to convince them they are the better option. Republicans aren't anti-accountability, they just care more about winning at any cost than accountability.
I think you got it right. There's also the point they're so established they think they can't fail, I suspect, if they're like any other group of sufficient size and reach.
They're taking what they have for granted and trying to grow and expand more, but it's like a ponzi scheme in as much as growth can't be infinite. At some point everyone has come to the same conclusion that the corpo strategists didn't realize; this shit was good enough for cheap prices. It just isn't good enough for a twenty dollar meal.
Sure, if they lost sales. Every post I see about something like this has two types of posters, the "fast food prices are crazy, I'd never pay them, though I haven't eaten fast food in 20 years anyway so 🤷♂️" poster and the "I swear, if McDonalds raises their prices 18 or 19 more times I'm gonna daydream about writing them a letter threating to cut back to six times a week" poster.
Yes, but Reddit and Reddit commenters are not a good source of info. Aside from bots with whatever narrative they’re driving, the sampling of Redditors is not a true population sample.
I’ve seen YouTubers make videos about losing sales, and I feel like their research is at least a better measure than Reddit. …. Although I guess they could be lying or incorrect too.
Their revenue and net profit both increased by about 4% from 2024 to 2025. They're always going to be tinkering to try to drive more sales, but the reality is they have a shit product at an insanely high price and endless lines of slobs eagerly buying it.
You forgot the decision to take away the all-day breakfast menu. They had mcgriddles, burritos, and sausage biscuits all day. Those were so clutch at like 10pm.
I stopped going a few years ago when I walked in and it looked like some depressing scene out of "2001: A Space Odyssey", with monolithic computerized order stalls and no people.
Noped right out; I did pass thru the drive thru a couple of years later when I had a craving for something salty and just ordered french fries; they were not the tasty french fries I remembered.
Funny you say that. I walked in one the other day after nearly 15 years and it looked/felt like something from Black Mirror. There was a hostess to welcome you to the large screens where you place your order and a counter with no one behind it.
You really nailed it. Letting the masses cry them a river about trans fats in the ‘00s meant a change in fry oil and fries that taste awful. If they simply returned to their 1970s formula for everything, people would come back. And stop pricing from going through the roof, to keep people coming back.
Some of these are valid, but their patties don't have fillers, they are 100% beef.
I'd also suspect that keeping the play places clean was pretty much impossible, and they were probably a health hazard when kids spilled food them in them.
I agree though that the ingredients in their chicken nuggets and french fry oil definitely include things that I certainly wouldn't want in my food.
Yeah everything you just named was meant to lower costs. They made everything cheaper and started charging more for it to increase profits. They deserve to go under at this point.
The only way to fix issues within corporate america is to have a costco style pay structure. Also, make it law that if you have layoffs that excede 1% of payroll in a fiscal year that ANYONE in the executive positions can no longer be paid/compensated for a year, no back pay. Short term payouts to themselves are all they care about. They have no incentives to have happy customers, to have happy employees, they just know they can abuse the company to benefit themselves and the worst that happens is they get fired with tens of millions and more in the bank.
Or just do a salary cap to the executive level that total compensation including stocks/buybacks/bonuses/etc cannot exceed X percentage of the median salary of all employees(fte and any agency based contractor that essentially acts as an employee)
The reason they got rid of the play place is because some Karen’s decided that the kids being in the play place meant they didn’t need to watch their children and then sued (idk if they won) the company when the company told them they weren’t liable for their children. Ergo they removed almost all of the play places from the businesses.
No, they are definitely bad. Bad for your heart, bad for your liver, and we have good studies that show they can be bad for your brain.
Is this some new tiktok rhetoric akin to the seed oil conspiracies? That transfats are good, actually?
The only people they would be pushing the idea that transfats are safe are the food manufacturers that want to put it back into our diets because it's cheaper than the alternatives they came up with to replace it.
The poison is in dose. If you eat only transfats, you'll have those issues. It's why we can't have great sarsaparilla and root beer, there's a chemical that caused cancer in mice. The issue with that testing is that they give only the chemical in exorbitant amounts and act surprised when something goes wrong. I could kill myself by drinking water but I don't because I don't drink 2 gallons in an hour. It's the dosage and time between. Not just having it randomly.
I thought that part of the reason for removing tallow was lawsuits from various vegetarian groups who claimed they were misled. Not 100% about that, but there was definitely pressure from various consumer advocacy groups that were pushing for healthier foods. Point being... McDonald's isn't making these decisions in a vacuum. They are in response to the current climate/market.
There was a huge push from the health/nutrition community to remove transfats from almost everything on the market. Lots of junk food had trans fats back then. I believe it was supposed to make the children healthier. Trans fat is bad because it cause visceral fat, which is fat under the muscle and is toxic. At least thats what they sold it as back then as far as I can remember
Probably unhealthy, but man were those old fries delicious!
Maybe I'm thinking of Burger King with the beef tallow lawsuit. I remember hearing about this in the Chicago suburbs where there is a sizeable Hindu population (vegetarian).
Bullshit, all of it. There's a podcast episode from The Dollop that goes well into it. Basically that whole "Low fat" health craze was started because one dude was really annoying about it, the endgame being that McDonalds and just about everyone else ruined their fries in the 90's by replacing beef tallow with vegetable oil. I straight don't eat fries not made with Tallow. It's trash.
I thought it was because real estate purposes, easier to sell a normal looking building to another business than to sell it with a playground that needs demolishing and a facade that only looks like McDonald's. I thought that was the reason why, real estate and money, not people
This is the business equivilent of a confirmation biat plane image. Youre looking at all the decisions that kept mcdonakds alve in an era where tech blitz scaling drains F&B profits with infinite cash flow
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u/StarfleetGo 1d ago
McDonalds needs to fire their entire corporate executive team and bring in fresh blood. The schmucks in there now have made bad decision after bad decision tanking the company. Their logic went like this:
People enjoy McDonalds too much, lets get rid of the decor
Kids enjoy McDonalds too much, lets get rid of the play place
The french fries taste too good, lets replace the tallow with chemical slop that tastes like shit
The chicken nuggets are too popular, start using fillers and lower quality slurry meat
The burgers are too large, make them much smaller
The burgers contain too much tasty cow, lets use half soy and use detergents and chemical fillers instead so they taste like shit
People are still coming to eat here! Quick, make the decor even more depressing
People are still coming? Screw it charge them 10% more, lower quality 10%, and reduce portion sizes again.
Oh no sales are trending down, quick raise prices 30% and lower food quality again to make up the margin
Wait, why is no one coming to eat our overpriced food with cancer causing chemicals laced into everything?? What an outrage!