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McDonald's No. 2 On How It Will Sustain Its Comeback

Michael Oneal interviews Don Thompson, who took over as McDonald's No. 2 and chief of operations in January and has been on a world tour ever since because, he says, the company's business is in its restaurants and not in an office. "I wanted to get out and see our teams and understand the relevance of how they do business and what things we might do from a corporate perspective to support them," he says.

McDonald's gets 36% of its operating earnings from Europe, but Thompson cautions that it is not a monochromatic market, any more than the U.S. is. "Cross the U.S. from one end to the other and there are some very different economic circumstances," he says, so the company has "different programs for different focal points."

Thompson also talks about the ad featuring a gay man and his father that ran in France (but won't run in the U.S., he avers), the need to balance store quality and growth, the fact that value will always be part of McDonald's equation (adjusted for inflation, he says McDonald's 89-cent hamburger is actually cheaper than the 15-cent offering of 1955), and why the company is a World Cup sponsor.

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