McDonald’s Over-Reach: Blending a Restaurant and a Coffee Shop

In spite of essentially flat sales in the U.S. in February 2013 from the same month in 2012, McDonald’s CEO, Don Thompson, said he was confident that the people at the company had sufficient experience to “grow the business for the long term.” Even assuming that a business can be grown as if it were a geranium plant, the claim can be critiqued both in regard to the underlying assumption regarding “growth” and that of long-term viability. Fusing a restaurant with a coffee shop can be said to be an over-reach that had blended the company too much, at least at the store level.

The full essay is at "McDonald's in a Changing Environment."

Bad PR and Bad Banking: BOA

How to do bad PR: Announce plans to raise fees effecting low-income customers, then pull back, wait a year, then announce such plans again, then pull back yet again. This sort of PR strategy gives rise to headlines such as, “Bank of America Backs Down on New Fees.” The Wall Street Journal could have added, “yet again.” Besides the obvious PR downside to announcing unpopular fees—and on one’s least well-off customers—is the implication of weakness or vulnerability in repeatedly backing down. In the animal kingdom, Bank of America would not exactly be the alpha male lion. Rather, the bank would be one of the other males, which may or may not get to reproduce.

                                          
The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available at Amazon.com.