Big turnaround plan on menu at McDonald’s
‘Convenience continually gets defined’
• McDonald’s Corp. is hoping to make a difference in its future seven seconds at a time.
The company that helped define fast food is making supersized efforts to reverse its fading popularity and catch up to a landscape that has evolved around it. That includes expanding delivery, digital ordering kiosks in restaurants, and rolling out an app that saves precious seconds.
Much of the work is on display in a warehouse near the company’s headquarters in suburban Chicago, where a blow-up of a mobile phone screen shows the app launching nationally later this year.
McDonald’s estimates it would take 10 seconds for a customer to tell an employee their order number from the app, down from the 17-second average of ordering at the drive- thru, a difference that could help ease pileups. Else- where at the Innovation Center, the digital ordering kiosk shows how customers can skip lines at the register.
“Five, 10 years ago, we were the dominant player in convenience, as convenience was defined in those days,” CEO Steve Easterbrook said last month. “But convenience continually gets redefined, and we haven’t modernized.”
The push come as McDonald’s stock has hit all- time highs as investors cheer a turnaround plan that has included slashed costs and expansion overseas. Yet the asterisk on the headlines is the chain’s declining stature in its flagship U.S. market.
In an increasingly crowded field of places to eat, the number of McDonald’s locations in the U. S. is set to shrink for the third year in a row. At established locations, the frequency of customer visits has declined for fourstraight years — even after the launch of a popular “AllDay Breakfast” menu.
The chain that popularized innovations like drivethrus in the 1970s acknowledges it has been slow to adapt, and is scrambling to better fit into American lifestyles. Lots of once-dominant restaurant chains are feeling the pressure of people having more eating options.
An estimated 613,000 places were selling either food or drink in the U. S. last year, up 17 per cent from a decade earlier, according to government figures. Supermarkets and convenience stores are offering more prepared foods, and meal-kit delivery companies have been expanding.