Statistics McDonald's restaurants are in 120 countries and territories and serve 68 million customers daily. There are 41,800 McDonald's locations as of 2023, and 45,000 employees in the United States. The McDonald's on-demand delivery concept, which began in 2017 with a partnership with
Uber Eats and added
DoorDash in 2019 (with select locations adding
Grubhub in 2021), accounts for up to 3% of all business as of 2019. The $100 billion in sales generated by McDonald's company-owned and franchise restaurants in 2019 accounts for almost 4% of the estimated $2.5 trillion global restaurant industry.
Stock holdings Focusing on its core brand, McDonald's began
divesting itself of other chains it had acquired during the 1990s. The company owned a majority stake in
Chipotle Mexican Grill until October 2006, when McDonald's fully divested from Chipotle through a stock exchange. Until December 2003, it owned
Donatos Pizza, and it owned a small share of
Aroma Café, from 1999 to 2001. On August 27, 2007, McDonald's sold
Boston Market to
Sun Capital Partners. making it one of the
S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. The company is ranked 131st on the
Fortune 500 of the
largest United States corporations by revenue. In October 2012, its monthly sales fell for the first time in nine years. In 2014, its quarterly sales fell for the first time in seventeen years, when its sales dropped for the entirety of 1997.
Monetary loss In the United States, it is reported that drive-throughs account for 70 percent of sales. McDonald's closed down 184 restaurants in the United States in 2015, which was 59 more than what they planned to open. This move was the first time McDonald's had a net decrease in the number of locations in the United States since 1970.
Business trends The key trends for the McDonald's Corp. are (as of the financial year ending December 31)
Business model joined the chain in 1954 and built it into a global franchise, making it the most successful fast food corporation in the world
Ownership McDonald's owns the land on which many of its restaurants are situated, The company earns a significant portion of its revenue from rental payments from franchisees. These rent payments rose 26 percent between 2010 and 2015, accounting for one-fifth of the company's total revenue at the end of the period. In recent times, there have been calls to spin off the company's U.S. holdings into a potential
real estate investment trust, but the company announced at its investor conference on November 10, 2015, that this would not happen. CEO
Steve Easterbrook discussed that pursuing the REIT option would pose too large a risk to the company's business model. McDonald's trains its franchisees and management at one of the
Hamburger Universities. As of 2015, the Hamburger Universities reside in
Oak Brook,
Tokyo,
London,
Sydney,
Munich,
São Paulo,
Shanghai, and
Moscow. In other countries, McDonald's restaurants are operated by joint ventures of McDonald's Corporation and other, local entities or governments.
QSC&V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness & Value) is a corporate
motto adopted by McDonald's to describe the company's philosophy for operating restaurants. The motto is codified in the procedures McDonald's uses to evaluate its
franchisees.
Workers According to
Fast Food Nation by
Eric Schlosser (2001), nearly one in eight workers in the U.S. have at some time been employed by McDonald's. Employees are encouraged by McDonald's Corp. to maintain their health by singing along to their favorite songs to relieve stress, attending
church services to have a lower
blood pressure, and taking two vacations annually to reduce the risk for
myocardial infarction.
Fast Food Nation states that McDonald's is the largest private operator of playgrounds in the U.S., as well as the single largest purchaser of beef, pork, potatoes, and apples. The selection of meats McDonald's uses varies to some extent based on the host country's culture.
Headquarters On June 13, 2016, McDonald's confirmed plans to move its global headquarters to
Chicago's West Loop neighborhood in the
Near West Side. The 608,000-square-foot structure opened on June 4, 2018, and was built on the former site of
Harpo Productions. The McDonald's former headquarters complex, McDonald's Plaza, is in
Oak Brook, Illinois. It sits on the site of the former headquarters and stabling area of Paul Butler, the founder of Oak Brook. McDonald's moved into the Oak Brook facility from an office within the
Chicago Loop in 1971.
Board of directors , the board of directors had the following members: •
Chris Kempczinski; chairman and CEO of McDonald's • Anthony G. Capuano, CEO of
Marriott International •
Kareem Daniel, former chairman of Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution • Lloyd H. Dean, president and CEO of
Dignity Health • Catherine M. Engelbert, commissioner of the
Women's National Basketball Association •
Margo Georgiadis, former CEO of
Ancestry.com • Mike Hsu, chairman and CEO of
Kimberly-Clark • John J. Mulligan, executive vice president and COO of
Target Corporation • Jennifer L. Taubert, Executive Vice President and Worldwide Chairman, Innovative Medicine, Johnson & Johnson •
Paul S. Walsh, executive chairman of
McLaren Group • Amy E. Weaver, President and Chief Financial Officer of
Salesforce •
Miles D. White, chairman and CEO of
Abbott Laboratories Steve Easterbrook was CEO and president of McDonald's from 2015 to 2019, replacing the old CEO Don Thompson. McDonald's board of directors voted to remove Easterbrook as CEO since he had violated corporate policies on personal conduct by entering into a relationship with a company employee. He was replaced as CEO by
Chris Kempczinski, who had been president of McDonald's USA. In August 2022, McDonald's announced significant changes to its board. It said that existing director Sheila Penrose, chair of
JLL Inc., would retire and that Anthony Capuano, CEO of
Marriott International, executive vice president and worldwide chairman of pharmaceuticals Jennifer Taubert of
Johnson & Johnson, and Amy Weaver president and CFO of
Salesforce would join. The changes were unrelated to an effort by
activist investor Carl Icahn.
Ownership Global operations building in
Subotica, Serbia
International influence McDonald's has become emblematic of
globalization, sometimes referred to as the "
McDonaldization" of society.
The Economist newspaper uses the "
Big Mac Index": the comparison of the cost of a
Big Mac in various world
currencies can be used to informally judge these currencies'
purchasing power parity. Switzerland has the most expensive Big Mac in the world as of July 2015, while the country with the least expensive Big Mac is India (albeit for a
Maharaja Mac—the next cheapest Big Mac is Hong Kong). The northernmost McDonald's restaurant in the world is located in
Rovaniemi, Finland (after the restaurant in
Murmansk, Russia was closed in 2022), however from January 2024 this had changed again as McDonald's opened a new restaurant in
Tromsø, Norway. And the southernmost in the world is located in
Invercargill, New Zealand.
Thomas Friedman said that no country with a McDonald's had gone to war with another. McDonald's suspended operations in its corporate-owned stores in Crimea after Russia annexed the region in 2014. On August 20, 2014, as tensions
between the United States and Russia strained over
the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the
resultant U.S. sanctions, the Russian government temporarily shut down four McDonald's outlets in Moscow, citing sanitary concerns. The company has operated in Russia since 1990 and, in August 2014, had 438 stores across the country. On August 23, 2014, Russian Deputy Prime Minister
Arkady Dvorkovich ruled out any government move to ban McDonald's and dismissed the notion that the temporary closures had anything to do with the sanctions. Some observers have suggested that the company should be given credit for increasing the service standard in markets it enters. A group of anthropologists in a study entitled
Golden Arches East looked at McDonald's impact on East Asia and Hong Kong, particularly. When it opened in Hong Kong in 1975, McDonald's was the first restaurant to consistently offer clean restrooms, driving customers to demand the same of other restaurants and institutions. On June 20, 2006, McDonald's partnered with
Sinopec to open drive-throughs at its Chinese petrol stations, tapping into the nation's rising car culture.
Global activities In
Beijing, China, McDonald's restaurants are
state-owned enterprises operating according to franchise agreements. Beijing Capital Agricultural Group owns these franchises. The company opened
vegetarian-only restaurants in India. The first one opened in 2012 at
Amritsar, India. On January 9, 2017, 80% of the franchise rights in mainland China and Hong Kong were sold for US$2.08 billion to a consortium of
CITIC Limited (for 32%). Private equity funds managed by
CITIC Capital (for 20%) and
Carlyle (for 20%), which CITIC Limited and CITIC Capital would form a joint venture to own the stake. outside McDonald's in
Exeter, England on February 10, 2024 On the river
Elbe in Hamburg, Germany, is the world's only "McBoat", a float-through service (similar to
drive-through) for people on the river. In Sweden, Happy Meal boxes can be used as goggles, with the game
Slope Stars. They sold the restaurants to a Russian buyer under the condition that the locations would not use the McDonald's branding. The new stores were rebranded as
Vkusno i tochka, beginning to reopen in June. Later in 2022, the 25 McDonald's restaurants in Belarus rebranded as Vkusno i tochka and operations were suspended in Kazakhstan due to issues supplying minced meat from Russia. They rebranded the following year. During the
Gaza war, McDonald's branches in Muslim countries were boycotted after McDonald's branches in Israel provided free meals to the
Israel Defense Forces, who had been accused of committing
war crimes. McDonald's in some countries distanced themselves from the actions of McDonald's Israel. As a result, McDonald's bought all 225 Israeli franchise-owned restaurants. ==McDonald's employee relations==