McDonald's

McDonald's acquired Dynamic Yield in 2019 to personalize the drive-thru, then sold it to Mastercard, booking a $271 million pre-tax gain. It looked like a tech retreat. It was really a company learning it never needed to own the tech at all.

The royalty was only 1.9% of sales — too thin to fund anything. The real flywheel was a 1956 real-estate model that owned the land under every franchise and subleased it back at a markup. Today that property is worth $37.7 billion on the balance sheet.

In 2022 Carl Icahn owned about 200 McDonald's shares, roughly $50,000 worth, when he launched a proxy fight over pig crates. His nominees drew about 1% of outstanding shares. McDonald's still spent an estimated $16 million to beat him.

To enter a country where the cow is sacred and the pig is forbidden, McDonald's spent five years building the first beef-and-pork-free menu in its history. The 50:50 joint venture that pulled it off later ended in a courtroom — and, at the peak of the dispute, 43 of Delhi's 55 outlets dark.

The McAloo Tikki and the Maharaja Mac get sold as cultural sensitivity. They're really the output of a ~95%-franchised model where local operators carry the risk - and with risk comes the authority to change the menu. Of 41,822 restaurants in 2023, about 95% weren't owned by McDonald's at all.

The $5 Meal Deal looked like a bold value reset. It was a perception patch its own franchisees voted down until Coca-Cola chipped in roughly $4.6 million—and the sales miss it was meant to prevent had already landed before launch.

Everyone read the Dollar Menu as McDonald's giving customers a deal. It was really corporate seizing the price gun: a Stanford study found franchisees had been charging a 12.5% premium on the Big Mac, and the menu cut it to 3.6% by 2006.

When Jim Cantalupo died of a heart attack on April 19, 2004, McDonald's board named a new CEO the same day. Seven months later it did it again. Two sudden losses, no strategy wobble — because the plan was never a name in an envelope. It was the bench.

The Arch Deluxe is remembered as McDonald's $100M flop. The number matches none of the documented line items - analysts at the time cited $100M, but the ad budget alone was $70M at launch, ballooning past $200M in total. The real failure wasn't the spend. It was a focus group that told McDonald's exactly what it wanted to hear.

The legend says one CEO came back in 2003, launched 'Plan to Win,' and quadrupled profits. The plan was real. But the man signed his own 10-K and died 16 months later, the 'first-ever loss' was mostly an $810 million write-off, and gains from divesting a burrito chain did some of the heavy lifting.