It’s not just you: McDonald’s really was everywhere this year

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — 2024 may not have been the best or worst year ever for McDonald’s — but it was certainly a memorable one.

It seemed no matter where the news spotlight landed, the golden arches were always shining somewhere off to the side, at times an unwitting set piece on the global stage (and at times, a reluctant main character).

That was true during the Republican and the Democratic presidential campaigns, with Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband both trumpeting their working-class roots as former employees, and President-elect Donald Trump following up with a brief and carefully staged appearance at the fry station and drive-thru of a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Another Pennsylvania McDonald’s became the backdrop for the culmination of a massive manhunt this week, when an employee at an Altoona location alerted police to a patron who resembled the suspected gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in Manhattan last week.

(The scene had an echo of an April 2022 subway shooting in Brooklyn, New York, in which the gunman eluded capture for 30 hours before calling in a tip on himself from inside, you guessed it, a McDonald’s.)

Even Major League Baseball had a McDonald’s subplot this year, when Grimace became the lucky charm who (briefly) gave the Mets hope for a world championship and New Yorkers hope for a Subway Series (but then the Mets lost to the Yankees in the playoffs, of course).

The ubiquity of McDonald’s in American life makes it an almost unavoidable backdrop for not only consumer behavior but also cultural engagement, says Marcia Chatelain, a professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.”

“McDonald’s is the main character in any story of the 20th and 21st century because of its incredible impact on our life … whether or not you eat there or like it, you have a sense of it,” Chatelain told me. “It’s one of the few institutions that everyone has a reference point for.”

Of course, at times, that main character energy is less leading man and more anti-hero.

Early this year, the company had a PR problem as angry customers raged online about higher menu prices.

And while it was true that prices had gone up — McDonald’s executives even boasted on earnings calls about their ability to upcharge — much of that anger appeared symptomatic of consumers’ broader frustration with inflation across the economy. But it was easy for folks to point to a McDonald’s receipt for $3 hashbrowns, which everyone can be appalled by, post it on TikTok and enjoy the influx of support.

In that way, McDonald’s became a kind of scapegoat for people who were exhausted of stretching their budgets to afford food and suspecting (not without reason) that corporate greed was at least partly to blame.

That outrage had a real impact, and McDonald’s saw US and global sales take a hit in the spring and summer, confirming that it pushed its “pricing power” too far. Executives quickly rolled out value meals and promotions to try to win people back, especially lower-income consumers who’d long been the company’s base.

It seemed to be working. Sales were ticking back up thanks to the success of its $5 meals and some limited-time souvenirs that won people back.

And then in October, just days before McDonald’s reported third-quarter earnings, an E.coli outbreak linked to onions in its Quarter Pounders sickened more than 100 people. The stock sank, and an earnings call that should have been about bouncing back from a rough quarter was instead overshadowed by a health crisis that is costing McDonald’s $100 million in marketing and help for franchisees who lost business during the outbreak.

It’s not just McDonald’s omnipresence in America that makes it a seemingly constant newsmaker, Chatelain notes. It’s also partly because there are fewer and fewer non-commercial public spaces where people can gather.

“When a restaurant like McDonald’s becomes a third space — places where people can meet up, for kids to go after school, a place for senior citizens to sit and drink coffee — it starts to play so many different roles that the likelihood it will be the setting for something of significance just goes higher and higher.”

McDonald’s is always in the frame, Chatelain said, because of the way Americans’ tax dollars subsidize big business, and because the company’s scale gives it outsize influence. “We’re always living in some way with McDonald’s,” she noted. “And I think in a lot of ways, we’re all working for McDonald’s — whether we work in a restaurant or not.”

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