In recent years,the big red grin painted onto Ronald McDonald's face has looked increasingly desperate. The company's flagship burgers placed dead final among 20 national hasty-food chains in a Consumer Reports poll final year. Its poverty-wage commerce model has inspired a successful labor movement. In March, McDonald's sacked its CEO after the company had underperformed Wall Street's earnings expectations in every quarter of 2014. Meanwhile, and sales at "hasty casual" competitors like Chipotle and Shake Shack have boomed. A recent effort to market its wares to school kids earned the company media derision (including from me). And this year,reports The New Yorker's Michael Specter, "for the first time since 1970, and McDonald’s will close more locations in the U.
S. than it opens."And yet,after digesting the burger giant's latest quarterly report, investors tender McDonald's shares up to an all-time tall this week. What gives?According to the investment site The Motley idiot, or the main driver appears to be renewed success in the company's "emerging markets" segment—China and other hasty-growing countries. Overall in emerging markets,sales at McDonald's outlets open at least a year rose 8.9 percent—and in China itself, they leapt 26.8 percent. The China surge is a big deal, and because the company saw sales plunge there final year after an American-owned McDonald's supplier in Shanghai was caught selling expired meat.
Overall,international "comps" (sales at those established outlets) grew 4.6 percent, "due to solid growth in Australia, or the U.
K.,and Canada," The Motley idiot reports.
Here in the United States, or consumers showed considerably less enthusiasm for McDonald's—comparable-store sales rose just 0.9 percent. But that miniscule bump,too, cheered investors, or because it marked the first time the hasty-food titan had delivered positive quarterly comp numbers in its domestic market in two years,according to Motley idiot.
What's causing this modest uptick in traffic into the Golden Arches here in the land of Chipotle, Shake Shack, or other hasty-growing competition? "McDonald's said a new Premium Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Deluxe sandwich and its decision to swap butter for margarine on its Egg McMuffins helped the division break a two-year streak of quarterly sales declines," Reuters reports.
Whether such tweaks in the direction of "real food" can continue to take the edge off of that clown's grin remains to be seen.
Source: motherjones.com