Nope. Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit. McD's has been chasing modern fashion and trying to distance themselves from your childhood's nascent obesity crisis, with salads on the menu and apple slices instead of fries in happy meals. Hence you get this "McCafe" look so they can camouflage themselves next to the Starbucks next door.

That said, the article is good at highlighting a huge cultural trend. Resale value might be only partially a driver of it. A lot of my monochromatic purchases will never be resold to anyone.

> Nope. Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit.

This kind of blanket statement is almost always wrong about anything in the messy real world.

But it's especially wrong in this case. McDonald's is effectively a real estate company[0] that has been growing over ~80 years.

[0] https://thestrategystory.com/2020/09/24/mcdonalds-real-estat...

> But it's especially wrong in this case. McDonald's is effectively a real estate company[0] that has been growing over ~80 years.

I don't think this contradicts the contention that McDonald's is too short-term in its thinking to be worried about resale value.

Yes, they're a real estate company. But most of that real estate is never sold or rented to anyone other than McDonald's franchisees.

I think they designed the stores this way because they believe -- and probably have troves of data to support them -- that this style of architecture is better for their restaurants too.

> McDonald's is too short-term in its thinking

It's not credible that a corporation that grows from one restaurant into world dominance is guilty of "short-term" thinking.

It's equally un-credible to pretend the people who were making decisions 30 years ago are the same people making decisions today. Or to pretend that the type of thinking required to grow a restaurant into a juggernaut is the same type of thinking that maintains the juggernaut. Or that a corporation beholden to the desires of shareholders won't change behavior as the desires of those shareholders change.

Why would the shareholders want short term thinking? Stock valuations are based on future expected profits.

Short term thinking leads to a crashing stock value, followed by bankruptcy.

Investors don't want that.

...are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?

If I do something today, and the corporation benefits in 10 years, I don't get the credit for that. Whoever has my role in 10 years gets the credit.

I completely agree that corporations SHOULD think long-term. But I fail to see much evidence of that.

If you want to argue that Ray Kroc had a long-term vision, you'd probably be right. But I very much doubt today's management thinks that far out.

> But I fail to see much evidence of that.

Every large company on the stock exchange is evidence of that.

> are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?

Have you ever seen companies beat their quarterly earnings estimates, and yet their stock drops? That's because the shareholders were suspicious that those results were short term, and the long term outlook didn't look so hot.

Any shareholder that is suspicious that a corporation has sacrificed the long term for short term profits, is going to dump that stock. Wouldn't you?

Investors are not a single unified hive mind. Some people don't care about long term profitability - they are just in a relatively short-term position and want profits now in the form of dividends and increased price. Some people want the valuation and/or price to go down because they hold short positions. Some people want the company to forego dividends in favor of investment into long-term expansion while other people are hoping for those dividends as part of their retirement income. This is true for institutions too - they have all sorts of reasons to prefer short term gain as much as they want long term gain.

Haha, the stock will tank on bad future prospects faster than you can sell. Being a short-termer in a stock only works if the other stockholders are in it for longer than you are, and believe in the long-term prospects.

Dividends are not a sign of short term investing. When the company's profits decline from short term thinking, the dividends disappear.

BTW, if you identify a company that is short-terming, and the other investors haven't caught on and tanked the stock, you can make a mint by shorting the stock. Got any success stories at that? Have you made money shorting McDonald's?

Maybe just cheaper to build and only loses 5% of the brand recognition when the giant arches are still on a sign out front.

> Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit

This is a commonly repeated trope that is just wrong. Corporations are very forward looking. Consider the price earnings ratio of the S&P500. It's been on a general upward trend since the 80s, only disrupted by recessions and stock market crashes [0]. That means stock holders are willing to invest more money for future earnings. Discount rates are also very low historically which means future earnings are discounted at a lower rate.

Similarly the number of companies that earn no profit is very high:

> Of the largest 1,500 companies by market capitalization today, around 200 weren’t profitable during any of the last three years. But instead of punishing them, investors have rewarded them with a total market value of more than $2.3 trillion. Wall Street hasn’t been willing to attach such high market values to unprofitable companies since the late 1990s (and even then, the total market valuation of the unprofitable companies wasn’t even half of what it is now). [1]

Private R&D spending is also on an upward trend since the 50s as a percentage of GDP, displacing much of federal spending in R&D. [2]

Everywhere you look you'll see long term thinking is rewarded. The only place you hear complaints about "short term profit" is corporate managers that want cover for bad results. They can always say they're "investing for the future" and their investments will take a decade to pan out, but conveniently they won't be around by then.

I doubt you can find any Excel valuation template that's used in business school that does not include resale value. You can bet the people in charge of purchasing McDonald's real estate look very closely at resale value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclically_adjusted_price-to-e...

[1] https://money.com/stock-market-companies-no-profits/

[2] https://cglife.com/blog/recent-trends-in-rd-spending-the-lan...

> Of the largest 1,500 companies by market capitalization today, around 200 weren’t profitable during any of the last three years. But instead of punishing them, investors have rewarded them with a total market value of more than $2.3 trillion. Wall Street hasn’t been willing to attach such high market values to unprofitable companies since the late 1990s (and even then, the total market valuation of the unprofitable companies wasn’t even half of what it is now).

Please stop posting this. It only makes Marx's falling rate of profit[1] look correct.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...

I don't get it. Is this some kind of ideological self-censorship? We're not supposed to talk about this even though it's true because it might make Marxists happy?

What exactly are we supposed to be gaining by burying our heads in the sand and refusing to talk about high-valuation unprofitable companies?

Dont just open your argument with 'Nope'. It makes you sound like an ass. Like the people who start with 'sorry' and then go on to demonstrate that they're not in fact sorry.

You could say, 'Ive always thought' or 'I have evidence that demonstrates that your point isn't totally correct' or something that respects the original poster a bit more than outward dismissal.

Nope is more attention-grabbing, the real question is whether it is better to optimize for civility or attention.

It's also possible they're both correct.

You understand that the operators of the McDonald's don't own the building? The owners of the building have obvious incentives.

It's not even a long-term vs short-term thing.

The boring building increases your capitalization as a holding more, allowing you to financialize it more.

Salads are gone. https://fortune.com/2022/06/09/mcdonalds-is-scrapping-parfai...

Here in Spain they've never gone.

The breakfast menu has been cancelled here though since Corona and never returned :'( I miss my sausage and egg muffin.

Ah, that explains it. We went to Mallorca last year (from Iceland where I've lived for a few years after leaving the US) and I was SUPER excited about McD's breakfast, only to find they sold nothing but burgers :(

Yeah it's sad, I agree. Their breakfast is lovely, and it was one of the few places to get something like this, most places serve more Spanish style stuff like a sandwich with a potato omelet in between. In fact McDonald's even had their own version of this one too. But they also did the usual ones.

Gone entirely or just no longer served all day?

In America, Covid killed the "all day breakfast," which is a shame. Sausage and egg muffin is better than all their lunch/dinner food.

Meanwhile in Canada we got to keep all-day breakfast, but lost out on a handful of only-at-breakfast items. McGriddles were gone, but came back around January of this year. Breakfast McWraps were also taken away but haven't yet returned (far superior to Tim Horton's farmers wraps, IMO). Otherwise I don't think the lunch/dinner menu changed at all.

Gone entirely. Here in Spain it was never served all day. Until 10:30 or so they served only the breakfast menu and after that only the regular one.

So now it's the regular menu all day. Big mac for breakfast? Hmmm. No.

In fact I've never seen all-day breakfast at any McDonald's in Europe and I've traveled a lot for work (so a lot of hit & run breakfasts at airports)

We still have all day breakfast out in Seattle, just not the full menu. My go to is sausage patty, round egg, yellow cheese.

Yum yeah... That's the one I miss!

I always wondered how they get the eggs so round but one time I saw them make them.. They fry the egg on the burger plate but in a metal ring. Cool idea.

what the hell does COVID have to do with the all-day breakfast though? How does cancelling it in any way mean anything for COVID policies or spread?

It doesn't. For a while the Mcds near me had a reduced menu, probably because they had less business and a reduced menu was easier to maintain. But it's back to normal now, including all-day breakfast (Canada).

Happy meals have both fries and apple slices. Source: have children.

Red Delicious?

I think they are Grannies. Taste pretty good. But there is an option for fries and apples or double fries. So pretty much it's almost always double fries.

Good.

My friend grew up with a hatred for apples because her school cafeteria served only Red Delicious.

Best apple I ever had was a Pippin.

Could be worse, they could have been the cardboardy golden delicious.

You see this with auto dealerships, etc. as well. There's a real tendency to stock the neutral white, silver, black, grey colors rather than brighter colors which I assume are more polarizing. If someone needs a car, stock cars that pretty much everyone will live with given the need, as opposed to cars that some may love but others wouldn't be caught dead in.

In the last few years I've seen a lot more of these "flat-ish" paint colors on new cars. They've got a gloss finish, but the color coat reminds me of a battleship, truck, tank, or other military vehicle. Initially they really stood out to me because they were different than the usual car paint colors / formulations (lacking any metallic element and being much less "shiny").

I know I report my car's paint color to the DMV when I registered it. (Paint colors are also encoded in many manufacturers' VINs, I believe.) It would be neat to make some kind of visualization of car paint color popularity over time using DMV data.

Indeed, the flat colors are just non-metallic and non-pearl coats. Its a sign of changing fashion trends -- flat coats used to be far more popular in the era before all paints had metallic flake (basically glitter). They only stand out because metallic paints became very common as opposed to being once rare.

Matte finish cars are almost always wraps, and the finish is often times very difficult to keep clean. They're popular with expensive sports cars specifically because they are "exclusive".

The article has a chart showing car paint color over time.

Below is the direct link to that chart. I thought the small surge of brown cars starting in 2010 was interesting.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

They'll stock the reds and yellows, but usually in the convertible, and the one parked out on the corner of the lot where it catches your eye.

The vast majority of the vehicles are ordered in colors that will sell. Some auto companies assign vehicles to dealers, others let the dealer pick the options on the ones they're getting, and the dealers know what will sell (and upsell).

Plus it's a huge computational problem, there's huge worth in having the car the customer wants configured just right for her, the day she walks into the dealership. It's an easier sell that much is true, but it's a better sell for her because she gets everything she wanted when she wanted it, which is worth more to her in money. End up splitting the difference. Otherwise it's like, order it (I think there's a paper options menu you tick boxes off of) and wait, wait two weeks, and maybe it won't even arrive in two weeks because of delays (more common now in the twenties) so it's a huge CPU-intensive task. Then also they rent a lot of GPUs to get real-time pixel-something...like rendering a car with all the options the tire-kicker wants so he can see the whole car when buying online. That's cool, that's tech, that's computationally difficult.

>wait two weeks

You wish. The situation is slowly improving but I had to wait 6 weeks for a car earlier this summer that was "in transit" (which I guess was to say it existed in the manufacturer's database someplace). This wasn't even a build to order vehicle. I suspect that would have been months.

I'm not sure where computational power enters into it. It's just that dealers want to mostly have cars on their lot which are acceptable to the greatest number of buyers who want/need a car right now which the model in hot pink isn't going to be for a lot of people.

Yeah I've never been to a dealership, let alone during covid. Yeah the wait times I have heard are super super long. Two weeks is like the best case these days. So mostly it's about uh...not getting a chargeback frankly. Something. Keeping you waiting.

An allegory.[1]

................

A random finds a fifty-dollar bill on the streets, exclaims, "Oh I'll go to a restaurant!" She gets there and is like "OK that chicken á la" squints "no not the French...the Adobe uh..." then waiter says "Adobado. That'll be $23.99." "Up front? Wait wai--" "Need the money to go buy the ingredients in the first place!"

.................

Yeah so they gotta mask that.

[1] Not claiming I'm any special anything, sticking to the true story I'm a slave of GOD, but that's irrelevant, anybody can say allegories. Maybe the parables are the ones that are for prophets only...maybe I'm thinking of that. Oh well. Best I can do. Used every other literary device by this point, in my attempt of elevating hn posts to an art form.

> There's a real tendency to stock the neutral white, silver, black, grey colors rather than brighter colors which I assume are more polarizing.

i think it's further up the chain than the dealership. when i've taken a look, most of the manufacturer colors were fairly neutral. there might be blues and reds, but they're muted. the dealership couldn't buy something bright unless they're selling kawasaki motorcycles.

Also, the more expensive cars get, the more boring the color options become. Small cars are sometimes available in fun colors, but big cars are only available in shades of grey.

I see a lot of teslas with crazy flat bright paintjobs, i assume aftermarket?

Significant numbers of commercial buildings like that simply get razed to the ground when the tenant leaves. It's cheaper for the new tenant to build the building they want than adapt to the older one.

Which is why you only find "reused iconic buildings" in parts of the city that are now more run-down.

> Which is why you only find "reused iconic buildings" in parts of the city that are now more run-down.

This isn't true at all - city centres often have protection for their historic iconic buildings. In somewhere like central London the majority of buildings are reused iconic buildings. You'll find McDonalds locations in Georgian town-houses for example.

Isn't your example the opposite situation? You're talking about an active McDonalds in a non-McDonalds structure, you replied to a comment talking about a non-McDonalds in a visibly McDonalds structure.

In your example, the McDonalds had to make do with the existing building which they aren't allowed to change. In the other example, non-McDonalds have to make do with an un-renovated McDonalds structure which they can't afford to change. You aren't providing a counter example, you're just talking about something different.

I don’t think any purpose-built McDonalds could be described as ‘iconic’ architecture?

Iconic as literally being an "icon" of the company - the same as the Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc "unique building silhouette".

Things as documented by: https://twitter.com/utbaph?lang=en

A McDonalds that is built into Westminster Abbey may be part of an iconic building, but the McDonalds isn't Iconic (nor is the one on the Champs-Élysées).

Give it 100 years so that there's enough people nostalgic for it around.

Or, even, you don't have to! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_McDonald%27s_restaurant "Along with its sign, it was deemed eligible for addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, although it was not added because the owner objected"

>Commodification incentivizes regression to some mean.

I'd frame it alternatively: optimization incentivizes uniformity. Inefficiencies are ruthlessly filtered out of the system. A wacky color scheme reduces might reduce profits by x%, so all fast food restaurants will tend towards the same boxy boring structure.

Another example of this for me is sports. Take baseball for example: in the past, you had so many different styles of players. Pitchers had unique and funky delivery types. It gave the game character. Now? If you're not optimizing your style of play to deliver the highest value according to the stats, you're costing yourself tens of millions of dollars. All the character of the game is slowly being wrung out.

This pattern is obviously being played across every domain in every part of life. It's pretty sad but entirely rational from every individual actor's point of view. And furthermore, it seems like an issue that's impossible to fix in a world of infinite information.

Your framing is a piece of the general principle as far as I am aware. It's a multipolar trap that is hard to see because we're embedded in it, and in the short term a lot of actions appear rational, but have externalities that are only felt in the long term.

SSC's Meditations on Moloch is one of the best (and longest) essays I've read on this maximization issue.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/parastellis/a/multipolar-trap-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I don't know. Even things that won't be resold arnt colorful anymore. All the parks near me with children's playground equipment in Ohio, city/school all of them, are now a olive green, tan, and gray color scheme. The actual quality and variety of the installments are leaps and bounds ahead of what I had as a kid, but they look more like military obstacle course training than a place for preschoolers to run around in

McDonalds is more of a real estate company these days, so that might actually be their plan.

https://thestrategystory.com/2020/09/24/mcdonalds-real-estat...

> Commodification incentivizes regression to some mean.

Ironically, one of the places where you can reliably find colourful stuff is Ikea, which commoditised furniture and household items in general.

I agree with this. If a rental doesnt have white walls wood floors or dull tiles I wont rent it. White walls makes a place feel spacious and I want my white furniture to match.

re: Housing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies) In San Francisco there's the tradition of painting your home as a "painted lady" which means you painted the home using 3 contrasting colors. Also there are some that have painted in this matte black painted as well which are definitely a striking appearance

Nothing says adequate dining like that big beige M.