Sounds like the industry is going through what McDonalds is trying to fix. Remember the term "Economic Hostility" where basically the products being produced are exceeding demand. My opinion is that there are just too many restaurants everywhere and portion sizes are too big. Like MCD too many stores, too many employee's and too many operators. At some point there has to be a correction. I don't know how so many stay in business.
The corporation will do well, camouflaged by stock buybacks. Franchisees will continue to see deteriorating cash flow due to no return on capital expenditures and transaction count reductions.
Too many changes that are costly to franchisees and do little to increase sales and profitability. Big changes in our region. Many people let go, many franchisees selling. Deep discounting continues.
It has become apparent we have jumped “The Shark” on Menu items. I spent Friday and Saturday working various stations with one of our teams. Avg restaurant not one of my Best or Worst but avg. It was impossible to get a flow in the Kitchen due the different Products and Builds. It was impossible to get a flow working the Front Counter Order-Taker position due to all Happy Meal questions we must ask. It was impossible to get a flow at the D/T cashier position because of the App and all the different deal combinations.
I would radically give up a number of menu Items just to pick up speed. My customers are begging for us to be much faster with 73% of Customers going through D/T.
WAKE UP McDonald’s it is about Good Food at a Lightening Pace Fast.
It is very unsettling for sure. However, I believe that before Easterbrook that McDonald's had begun to circle the bowel. Thompson was doing nothing to move the business forward. The bureaucracy was only looking out for the bureaucracy. The company was doing so many expensive things that had absolutely nothing to do with selling product. The company was spending a half a billion dollars per year more than necessary to run the company. Something had to be done. I support Easterbrook's moves but I believe that his methods have been harsh. So many of the company serious problems were self imposed and a correction was coming. Easterbrook acted to fix things rather than to wait and react to serious decline. We all know and remember and talked about the direction the company was going. We didn't expect the changes would come so fast and be so necessary and so expensive. These changes are costing me millions like a lot of operators. It's like starting your career all over again. There was a fork in the road and he took the one to bring things back. I hope it works.
I agree with the comments that change was necessary and agree it is happening way too fast. The problem with it happening way too fast is that our customers don’t give us credit for it. They don’t know. When you talk to customers and they don’t know that 4:1 is fresh and off the grill, that’s a problem. And then after quickly launching, we add Smokehouse and Cold Brew at the same time and it masks what we are trying to build on. So now fresh beef is in the background and we don’t get credit, cold brew, which articles described as better then Starbucks and DD, was hidden during the launch of Smokehouse. So we are not communicating to the customer effectively anymore. I know the vision at MHQ is that we have to react quickly because customers habits change, but are we moving too fast and customers are not realizing what we have done? We need to ride a new initiative/product through its normal path (6 weeks until it spikes) and then bring in the next initiative/product. Versus rolling everything at once. We have a lot of new ideas but if we do it all at once the customer doesn’t see it. The customer want new things so we need to level out how roll them out. And maybe it will work.
6 comments:
Sounds like the industry is going through what McDonalds is trying to fix. Remember the term "Economic Hostility" where basically the products being produced are exceeding demand. My opinion is that there are just too many restaurants everywhere and portion sizes are too big. Like MCD too many stores, too many employee's and too many operators. At some point there has to be a correction. I don't know how so many stay in business.
The corporation will do well, camouflaged by stock buybacks. Franchisees will continue
to see deteriorating cash flow due to no return on capital expenditures and transaction
count reductions.
Too many changes that are costly to franchisees and do little to increase sales and profitability. Big changes in our region. Many people let go, many franchisees selling.
Deep discounting continues.
It has become apparent we have jumped “The Shark” on Menu items. I spent Friday and Saturday working various stations with one of our teams. Avg restaurant not one of my Best or Worst but avg.
It was impossible to get a flow in the Kitchen due the different Products and Builds.
It was impossible to get a flow working the Front Counter Order-Taker position due to all Happy Meal questions we must ask.
It was impossible to get a flow at the D/T cashier position because of the App and all the different deal combinations.
I would radically give up a number of menu Items just to pick up speed. My customers are begging for us to be much faster with 73% of Customers going through D/T.
WAKE UP McDonald’s it is about Good Food at a Lightening Pace Fast.
It is very unsettling for sure. However, I believe that before Easterbrook that McDonald's had begun to circle the bowel. Thompson was doing nothing to move the business forward. The bureaucracy was only looking out for the bureaucracy. The company was doing so many expensive things that had absolutely nothing to do with selling product. The company was spending a half a billion dollars per year more than necessary to run the company. Something had to be done. I support Easterbrook's moves but I believe that his methods have been harsh. So many of the company serious problems were self imposed and a correction was coming. Easterbrook acted to fix things rather than to wait and react to serious decline. We all know and remember and talked about the direction the company was going. We didn't expect the changes would come so fast and be so necessary and so expensive. These changes are costing me millions like a lot of operators. It's like starting your career all over again. There was a fork in the road and he took the one to bring things back. I hope it works.
I agree with the comments that change was necessary and agree it is happening way too fast. The problem with it happening way too fast is that our customers don’t give us credit for it. They don’t know. When you talk to customers and they don’t know that 4:1 is fresh and off the grill, that’s a problem. And then after quickly launching, we add Smokehouse and Cold Brew at the same time and it masks what we are trying to build on. So now fresh beef is in the background and we don’t get credit, cold brew, which articles described as better then Starbucks and DD, was hidden during the launch of Smokehouse. So we are not communicating to the customer effectively anymore. I know the vision at MHQ is that we have to react quickly because customers habits change, but are we moving too fast and customers are not realizing what we have done? We need to ride a new initiative/product through its normal path (6 weeks until it spikes) and then bring in the next initiative/product. Versus rolling everything at once. We have a lot of new ideas but if we do it all at once the customer doesn’t see it. The customer want new things so we need to level out how roll them out. And maybe it will work.
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