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.”
God, I hate the shareholder class.
Only 28,000 people on Earth worth 100 million or more. Only 28,000 of the softest, most dependent on having others do everything for them fancy lads and lasses in existence. There are a lot of sports stadiums with greater capacity than that. There’s 8 billion of us. That’s 285 thousand ants for every grasshopper oppressing us.
Just saying.
And yes, under this global economy and what it incentivizes and punishes, great net worth is about as accurate an indicator as you can get for who the self-serving, sociopathic enemies of the species are. No reasonable, empathetic person would hoard that much in a world of suffering people. It’s what makes them who and what they are.
Crazy how just a few decades ago, announcing a plan to lower prices and sell to more customers would have been seen as desirable.
Shows his the relationship has been changed. It’s no longer corporation vs corporation competing in a market for consumers.
It’s pure greed and some misplaced sense of winner-takes-all competition.
It’s corporations against consumers, but for basic needs. Oh sorry you have to eat, that will. Be your life savings
Who would have thought, consumers and investors have competing interests.
In the short term. In the long term, I believe they align. Too bad the people running most companies tend to focus more on the short term than the long.
But that’s the problem. Investors don’t have long-term interests. They don’t desire it.
Yeah and even the laws consider short term trades as something held for only a year. It should be longer than that.
Though even if the interests align and investors seek to earn money in good faith from building trust with their consumers, the investment class is still leaching off the labor of the workers.
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.
No, it didn’t. The stock’s been volatile all the time. It’s now higher than last year, higher than 3 months ago, etc… It had two small exceptional highs this month, but it didn’t “drop”.
The media sells you lies like McDonald’s sells you fries
Cold, soggy and doused in salt?
I think he meant billions served
Shut your whore mouth, there is never enough salt!
Eh, I’d say there’s something here, they beat earnings on Monday, but the stock plunged specifically reacting to that earnings call. You’re right that it’s a blip on the long term charts, but it’s worth looking into how the market reacts to things, and it clearly did react negatively to the call.
1 year chart to show it is in fact a blip.
“Stock price drops” could mean it just closed lower than the day before, or maybe it traded lower in the timeframe directly after the earnings call. Either way it’s essentially meaningless commentary
The last time my son and I ate at McDonalds it cost me 21 dollars.
Here’s what we ordered.
1 Double cheeseburger meal with a shake. 1 Big Mac meal.
21 fucking dollars for cardboard flavored food with cheese. Fuck all that noise. And a big fuck you to every single McDonald’s share holder.
I don’t eat fast food much at all, but a couple of months ago we went into a nearby Shake Shack to get 2 burgers, 2 iced teas, and a shared order of fries.
The bill was north of $30. Not surprising when, apart from the fact the burgers were about $10-ish each, the iced tea costs $3 each for a small. 8oz of Iced tea. That’s criminal.
Needless to say we learned our lesson and don’t eat out fast food anymore. I can sling a mean burger at home on the stove top in my cast iron pan.
This is the kind of shit fuckwad corpos PAY MEDIA COMPANIES TO SAY so when they go back on their promises of “lower prices” all they have to do is point at the articles (and of course never at the actual stock price records) to say “our hands are tied, we HAVE to increase prices because that’s what the people want!”
“affordability” or as I like to call it “not gouging the fuck out of people to exploit an inflationary crisis”
also known as criminal negligence and failure to sufficiently maximize shareholder revenue! these criminals ought to be locked up for even insinuating that prices could go down. don’t they know that whole industries’ worth of valuable owner-class shareholders’ beach homes and yacht upkeeps are propped up on the
mass price fixing schemefully legal free market economy we have? the only rule is to never betray your shareholders, not even for a quarter! if the orphans need to be crushed for a better YoY then, by god, not feeding them in to the machine feet-first yourself makes you a criminal and a danger to our whole society and you damn well know it!
Isn’t the reason, instead, that they admitted the weak sales?
Weak sales because people don’t want to spend so much money for often mediocre food. They don’t even have the grilled chicken any more.
If you avoid maccas like the plague it is, you don’t care.
I literally couldn’t give a shit about anyones stock prices. All my attempts at getting into the stock market have been nothing but failure so I invest in my house and property instead. I’d rather have a nice patio than a portfolio.
If you’re picking and choosing you own stocks and trading in the short-term, you’re going to fail. Index funds are the way to go long-term. But also, yes, I couldn’t give two fucks about McDonald’s share price
Housing prices have risen much more consistently and safely than even mutual/index funds. My 401k is diversified enough in foreign markets that it should steadily increase without much fuss but I only put in the max-match contribution. The rest of my money goes into savings and construction/upgrade projects. I’ve turned 200k into 600k and I’m about to buy an empty lot and build another.
Ok
If I see you whining about how people are too poor to rent your extra houses I swear to Satan…
I’m a communist. Everyone lives for free, just help with the taxes and upkeep and you’re out if you don’t. Pretty easy.
So you upgrade houses and put people in them for free, and that somehow nets you enough money to buy/build more houses? Pull the other one.
“Affordability”? No, they just noticed that people can’t or won’t pay overpriced junk food, thus leading to dropping profits in the long run.
Take a shit in a bag and then eat it. That’s McDonalds quality.
Not my share prices! Fitzroy, fetch my clutching pearls!
Give your workers a liveable wage! Give me a cheeseburger for $.99!
