Quick and cheap are two of the first words that come to mind when thinking about fast food. But some McDonald’s customers have criticized the restaurant giant over recent higher menu prices, prompting the CEO to address the issue of affordability during the company’s latest earning call.
McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski spoke to analysts on Monday morning about the fast food chain’s mixed fourth quarter results, as well as the global market impact with ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Muslim communities, and ultimately about how to re-engage lower-income customers.
After the earnings results were posted, McDonald’s shares tumbled nearly 4% on the New York Stock Exchange by closing.
While global same-store sales – meaning stores that have been open for at least a year – were up 3.4%, short of Wall Street’s expectations, Kempczinski said those earnings results were impacted by the war in the Middle East.
Domestically however, same-store sales were up by 4.3%, which was more closely aligned to previous quarters and company expectations for what the CEO called “normalized growth.”
The stock market is broken, and is only getting more so with new AI trading models being coupled with existing High Frequency Trading.
The goal of this, is basically to skim a veeery small percentage of the price delta between buyers and sellers as a stock/bond/instrument moves up or down. The fund might make a fraction of a penny on each trade, but if they push thousands of trades on each stock, each time the price moves, the money flows in
And because the computer is making 100% of the buy/sell orders without human intervention, it uses these kind of low-effort “business journalism” reformatted corpo press releases to make buying decisions according to human defined limits
So it doesn’t necessarily matter if the company is actually doing well, or has a solid growth plan, wants a stock split, etc because it’s a lot of computers trading thousands of times each second, all trying to out-scalp each other based on perception
You can’t play that game, let alone win. Value investing and holding long is the only way left for regular people
Proof that if you can make your crimes convoluted and opaque enough, people won’t care. That money is coming from somewhere, they didn’t earn it, and they’re not entitled to it.
It isn’t a crime unfortunately
In some way, it’s a bit like what Russia and others have successfully done in the U.S. socially. They only care about the tumult–the ups and downs. What causes it is irrelevant. The instability is key.