I just finished reading the book, When McKinsey Comes to Town, by journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. The book was straight out mind blowing. McKinsey & Co. is a management consultant company that's nearly 100 years old, and has advised many of the best known, major corporations, and many government agencies in the U.S., and around the world. After reading this book, I'd like to try and explain who McKinsey is, but John Oliver and the LastWeek Tonight crew does it so fucking well in this video above. Just watch the video.
"To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are the Illuminati, Lizard People, or 'globalists.' They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company."
- a former McKinsey consultant, quoted in the book, When McKinsey Comes to Town. (p.278).
For me, learning about McKinsey & Co., in the last several weeks, started with wondering why McDonald's corporate officers seem to be making so many odd decisions in recent years. As someone who eats at McDonald's a lot, I began to wonder why McDonald's seems to have forgotten that they actually run restaurants.
I started checking out some of the YouTube videos about the fast food industry and McDonald's, like this one, and this one. With the pandemic and high inflation afterwards, the last few years have been incredibly tough for fast food restaurants in general. McDonald's issues though, go back a decade or more. The McDonald's corporate officers, according to multiple reports, have been increasingly squeezing more money out of the local franchisees for several years now. This became such an issue, that McDonald's franchisees actually started a union, to collectively voice their issues to the corporate officers. As time passed in recent years, the local owners, the franchisees, have seen decreasing profits in many places, due to corporate decisions in many cases. And then, the pandemic hit, with the business shutdowns, followed by high inflation and rising prices for food items. As a business owner, that's a lot to deal with.
After a while, I came across this article, with McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski, from 2021. In it, and the embedded video, he talks about McDonald's focusing more attention on their rewards program, and delivery orders using Postmates, Uber Eats, and similar delivery platforms. He also talks about McDonald's testing out restaurants that had no inside seating at all, just drive-thru, phone order takeouts, and delivery orders.
It looks like that for three years or more, McDonald's has been looking into the cost savings of having fast food restaurants, with no actual "restaurant." I have a hunch, that if you polled 1,000 Americans, and asked them, "What is McDonald's?" their answers would say that it's a fast food restaurant where families go to eat for a reasonable price, or something similar to that. Tens of millions of current American adults played, as little kids, in the Play Places that no longer exist at McDonald's.
Somehow I don't think the idea of McDonald's being just a drive-thru/delivery business would fly with most current customers. Not for the long term, anyhow. Maybe that's just me. It also seems like it would be difficult to get the owners of the 12,775 McDonald's franchisees in the U.S. to shut down the indoor part of the restaurant, when it usually costs $1 million to $2 million to buy a McDonald's franchise. In any case, it appears there's a lot more drama ahead for most, if not all, fast food companies, for the corporate staff and franchisees alike.
In any case, that article with the McDonald's CEO is on the McKinsey & Co. website. So I asked myself, "Who's McKinsey?" That's when I found the LastWeek Tonight video above, and a bunch of other interesting posts about this consulting firm. Last week, looking for an interesting book in the local library, I stumbled upon When McKinsey Comes to Town. Since that three year old article is on the McKinsey website, it's obvious that McKinsey was consulting Mickey D's in 2021, and likely still is. After reading that book, I now understand how McDonald corporate could have forgotten that they actually run restaurants, not just phone app delivery sites.
Several weeks ago, I was wondering why my local McDonald's no longer have dedicated clerks manning the register and taking orders full time. That led to this crazy trip through learning about the current the tribulations of the fast food industry, and then to this secretive management consulting firm that literally seems like a parody of the terms "management consulting." Man, it's a weird world we live in, and McKinsey has had consulting gigs with a lot of it in 100 years.
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