It’s hard to believe that McDonald’s was surprised by the backlash against its AI-generated Christmas advert. It only had to look at the reaction to the Coca-Cola Christmas ad for a taste of what to expect. Unlike Coca-Cola, the fastfood giant has quickly pulled the advert, but it’s already unleashed a demon. A satirical video that uses AI to replicate a character from the controversial McDonald’s ad has gone viral, and it’s more cutting than anything Burger King has come up with in the so-called Burger Wars……..Continue reading….
By Joe Foley
Source: Creative Bloq
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Critics:
McDonald’s owns the land on which many of its restaurants are situated, which is valued at an estimated $42 billion. The company earns a significant portion of its revenue from rental payments from franchisees. These rent payments rose 26 percent between 2010 and 2015, accounting for one-fifth of the company’s total revenue at the end of the period. In recent times, there have been calls to spin off the company’s U.S. holdings into a potential real estate investment trust.
The company announced at its investor conference on November 10, 2015, that this would not happen. CEO Steve Easterbrook discussed that pursuing the REIT option would pose too large a risk to the company’s business model. McDonald’s trains its franchisees and management at one of the Hamburger Universities. As of 2015, the Hamburger Universities reside in Oak Brook, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Munich, São Paulo, Shanghai, and Moscow.
In other countries, McDonald’s restaurants are operated by joint ventures of McDonald’s Corporation and other, local entities or governments. QSC&V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness & Value) is a corporate motto adopted by McDonald’s to describe the company’s philosophy for operating restaurants. The motto is codified in the procedures McDonald’s uses to evaluate its franchisees. According to Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2001), nearly one in eight workers in the U.S. have at some time been employed by McDonald’s.
Employees are encouraged by McDonald’s Corp. to maintain their health by singing along to their favorite songs to relieve stress, attending church services to have a lower blood pressure, and taking two vacations annually to reduce the risk for myocardial infarction. Fast Food Nation states that McDonald’s is the largest private operator of playgrounds in the U.S., as well as the single largest purchaser of beef, pork, potatoes, and apples. The selection of meats McDonald’s uses varies to some extent based on the host country’s culture.
On June 13, 2016, McDonald’s confirmed plans to move its global headquarters to Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood in the Near West Side. The 608,000-square-foot structure opened on June 4, 2018, and was built on the former site of Harpo Productions. The McDonald’s former headquarters complex, McDonald’s Plaza, is in Oak Brook, Illinois. It sits on the site of the former headquarters and stabling area of Paul Butler, the founder of Oak Brook.
McDonald’s moved into the Oak Brook facility from an office within the Chicago Loop in 1971. McDonald’s has become emblematic of globalization, sometimes referred to as the “McDonaldization” of society. The Economist newspaper uses the “Big Mac Index”: the comparison of the cost of a Big Mac in various world currencies can be used to informally judge these currencies’ purchasing power parity. Switzerland has the most expensive Big Mac in the world as of July 2015, while the country with the least expensive Big Mac is India (albeit for a Maharaja Mac—the next cheapest Big Mac is Hong Kong).
The northernmost McDonald’s restaurant in the world is located in Rovaniemi, Finland (after the restaurant in Murmansk, Russia was closed in 2022), from January 2024 this had changed again as McDonald’s opened a new restaurant in Tromsø, Norway. And the southernmost in the world is located in Invercargill, New Zealand. Thomas Friedman said that no country with a McDonald’s had gone to war with another. Since the late 1990s, McDonald’s has attempted to replace employees with electronic kiosks that would perform actions such as taking orders and accepting money.
In 1999, McDonald’s first tested “E-Clerks” in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and Wyoming, Michigan, with the devices being able to “save money on live staffers” and attracting larger purchase amounts than average employees. In 2013, the University of Oxford estimated that in the succeeding decades, there was a 92% probability of food preparation and serving becoming automated in fast food establishments.
By 2016, McDonald’s “Create Your Taste” electronic kiosks were seen in some restaurants internationally where customers could custom order meals. In 2017, McDonald’s launched an app in the United States that allows customers to skip the ordering line inside or drive through and order online. Many McDonald’s locations have special parking spaces for such orders.
In September 2019, McDonald’s purchased an AI-based start-up, Apprente, to replace human servers with voice-based technology in its US drive-throughs.In early 2023, McDonald’s opened its first largely automated restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas. The restaurant in question would de-emphasize human contact when ordering, with employees available if there were problems but who would otherwise be absent from the ordering process (along with others working in the kitchen or other back-of-the-house roles). There was no seating in this restaurant.
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