Too expensive, too slow, too dirty: McDonald’s broke its own promise
McDonald’s is putting $8.5 billion on the table by 2036 to try to halt its decline, Le Point reports. Five billion of that is due before 2030, earmarked for franchisees. The plan is called Next: renovated dining rooms, reorganized kitchens, pickup lockers for delivery, larger play areas, a reworked menu, and artificial intelligence for inventory and scheduling. In the United States, traffic fell 6 percent in July and 4.6 percent in August from a year earlier. Sales last quarter rose only 0.8 percent, while Burger King posted 8.5 percent over the same period. The stock dropped as much as 6.5 percent when the plan was announced. It is sitting about 22 percent below where it started the year, a four-year low.
The company’s diagnosis is right. It is also late. McDonald’s has become too expensive for what it is. Over ten years, the price of its signature meals has risen faster than inflation. Burgers got “premiumized” across the industry, costs followed, and the chain once synonymous with an affordable meal ended up on the wrong side of the check. In France, a full meal generally runs between 10 and 13 euros. In the spring of 2026 the chain did roll out a McDeal at 5 euros, a Best Of cut to 7.50, and a Happy Meal at 4, with a pledge to hold those prices through the end of the year. France’s largest restaurant company, with 1,629 locations, about 6 billion euros in 2025 revenue, and 1.8 million meals served a day, McDonald’s France has grasped that the ticket is driving people away. Grasping it is not the same as fixing it.
The promise of speed no longer holds
A fast-food restaurant is judged first by its name. You walk in, you order, the sandwich is on the tray. For a long time that mechanism was the brand’s only unanswerable argument: no cooking, no waiting, no ceremony. It no longer holds. In a good number of restaurants, the wait now exceeds that of a decent brasserie. You order at a kiosk, you shuffle in front of a screen, you hear your number after everyone else. It is the same reversal as with self-checkout: the human was removed in the name of flow, and the wait got longer. The drive-thru, supposed to be the temple of that flow, stalls as soon as the line builds. Arch, the artificial intelligence billed as 90 percent accurate on voice orders, and ArchIQ, said to free about fifty hours of work a week in a typical restaurant, change nothing the customer can see: a line that does not move.
The clearest symptom is not even the slowness. It is the stockout. On an ordinary Sunday, in a restaurant that was open, there was simply no meat left. Not one item among others. The core product, the one without which the chain has no reason to exist. You can pour billions into delivery lockers and play areas. If the patty is not there on the day the customer shows up, Next is a brochure.
Less on the plate, more on the check
Inflation does not explain everything. It explains a rise. It does not explain the widespread feeling of paying more to get less. Fifteen years ago, a Big Mac meal filled you up: generous fries, a large drink, a sandwich that took some effort to finish. Today the portions have shrunk in step with the rising prices. You can leave the register having spent 30 euros without any sense of having really eaten, where the same appetite once struggled to get through a single meal. The 5-euro McDeal, with its small fries and small drink, ratifies the shrink more than it corrects it. It is a loss leader, not a return to the original deal.
Modest households, the historic core of the traffic, are making trade-offs. An Ifop survey conducted for the chain in April 2026 found that 61 percent of French people reported a drop in purchasing power, and that 81 percent of them had given up family leisure. This surge in prices does not stop at the pump. It shows up on the plate. McDonald’s is no longer the reflex answer to that retreat. Sometimes it is the thing being retreated from. In the United States, the company adds a factor France does not yet know on the same scale: GLP-1 obesity drugs, already used by about 30 million Americans, cut spending on fast food, cafes, and restaurants by about 8 percent in the first six months. The CEO keeps saying those customers still like the food, and that the task is not to win a new public, only to give the old one more reasons to come back. For now, the reasons run the other way.
A dining room you no longer want to sit in
Price and wait would not be enough to explain the drop-off if the dining room still kept its promise. It does not. In a great many urban restaurants, tables are occupied for hours by groups that are no longer buying, or have not been for a long time. No one moves them along. No one clears at any visible pace. The floors stick, trays pile up, the restrooms fall apart by midafternoon. This is not a matter of mood. It is the heart of the model: a place you pass through, neutral, fast, where you do not settle in. When the place becomes a permanent hangout, and a badly kept one, it stops being a restaurant. It becomes a shelter. The customer who wanted to eat and leave no longer wants to sit down.
Next promises renovations, reorganized kitchens, coffee made where the customer can see it. American franchisees will still have to add about $800,000 in investment over time, on top of the $450,000 already budgeted over ten years for upkeep. In return, the company hopes for about $100,000 in extra annual cash flow per restaurant. The arithmetic may charm a shareholder. It does not wipe a table. A dirty dining room with new tile is still a dirty dining room.
What still holds
Not everything should be thrown out, and saying so avoids a prosecution by intent. McDonald’s France remains tied to the country’s agriculture more firmly than most of its competitors. The wheat in the buns is Label Rouge and French. A substantial share of the beef passes through French ranchers and slaughterhouses, even if the meat also comes from Ireland and the Netherlands, through two suppliers held to the same specifications. Potatoes, apples, and some of the salads follow identified supply chains. This is not a secondary marketing claim. It can be granted without turning it into an absolution, and without confusing it with what a producer does when he puts his own name on the product. A raw-milk farm tomme sold by the people who milk the cows, a pair of jeans cut within 1,083 kilometers: the contract there is legible. Here it is diluted into a specification sheet and a campaign.
The second merit is clearer, and I judge it more important. McDonald’s France does not impose halal meat on its customers. The chain offers no ritual menu. It said so again in October 2025, when a rumor of a switch spread: no community offering, the same meat for everyone, purchasing policy unchanged. In a sector where several chains have chosen to serve halal to the whole dining room, that refusal is not a detail. It is the condition for a restaurant to remain a common place, rather than the diet of part of its clientele imposed on the rest.
Then there are the hours. Open early, close late, stay open on Sundays and holidays: that availability is still a real utility, in a country where ordinary restaurants have abandoned those slots. Three merits, and no more. Without them, I would rather suck on pebbles than leave this chain so much as a cent, even very occasionally.
Billions for a dining-room problem
Precedent invites distrust. In 2003 McDonald’s had already launched a Plan to Win. Ten years later, global comparable sales had risen only 0.2 percent and traffic was down 1.9 percent. Next plays the same tune: modernize the setting, polish the perception of quality, test hand-breaded chicken, wraps, bowls, and hope the customer comes back. The customer is not asking for a bowl. He wants the burger to arrive fast, to be in stock, to hold up in the stomach against the price, and the room to be bearable for as long as it takes to eat it.
Expensive, slow, badly frequented, less filled: the decline the company measures in traffic points can be read without a spreadsheet, on a Sunday, in front of a kiosk showing a meat stockout. The $8.5 billion can renovate kitchens. It will not rewrite the contract. Until the chain becomes again what it claims to be, a place where you order and are served, Next will remain a communications plan addressed to investors, not an answer to the empty tray.
On burgers, I see no credible alternative in France that I want to hold up. The chains that exist have neither the footprint, nor the solidity, nor the price that would let them be set seriously against McDonald’s. The finding stops there. The alternative, if one is needed, is not a burger. Basilic & Co, founded in 2007 in the Drôme, runs about sixty pizzerias on French flour, French tomatoes, and appellation cheeses, including Bleu du Vercors-Sassenage. The dough is kneaded on site, the pizza comes out to order, and the terroir is named: Ardèche, Vercors, Savoie. It is not open at the hours McDonald’s still is, and the meats remain of European origin. It is nonetheless a company from here, one that feeds people, and one that has not diluted its contract into a specification sheet.