Read the text about the McDonald's corporate makeover.
Add any missing information you can to your table in 1 above.
2 Why was the company in trouble at the end of the 1990s? Summarize the reasons in one
3
In what ways has McDonald's recently changed the following?
the way the restaurants look the menu the corporate values A KHAKI GREEN cafe restaurant has quietly materialized in Hemel Hempstead.
Under subdued lamp light, with the indie rock playing in the background, s a lunching doctor sits on a curvy chair modelled on Arne Jacobsen's modernist classic. He could have chosen Rainforest Alliance-certified freshly ground coffee, with British organic milk, or a free-range
• egg. delivered by a lorry powered by biodiesel from recycled cooking oil, and a bag of carrot sticks or fresh fruit. (He couldn't have had a salad because Hemel has sold out.) But he has plumped for a s Filet-o-Fish, fries and a fizzy drink.
Under its golden arches, and under our very eyes, McDonald's has been transforming itself. And today it announces the fruits of its labours:
a financial results for 2007 that are expected to be excellent around the globe and, in Britain, a triumph. The US-based chain is now selling more burgers than at any time since it arrived in Britain 34 years ago.
Sales are growing almost as quickly as in the 80s boom, and this year will help fund a 52bn expansion around the globe.
Its popularity and profits signal a remarkable comeback. At the end of the a 1990s, the company - founded when Ray Kroc teamed up with Dick and Mac McDonald to open the Des Plaines restaurant in 1955 - was in trouble.
Following the McLibel case, in which two as environmental activists were sued by the corporate giant and (in the end) won, its golden arches had become emblematic of all that was rotten in capitalism; an obesity crisis in the western world loomed a large; there was disdain for the dead-end McJob; and Britain's BSE scare recruited an army of vegetarians. From 1999, annual UK sales stagnated at £1bn. In 2005, its profits collapsed by almost two-thirds, 45 from £96.6m to £36.9m. Its restaurants seemed tired and its dwindling band of customers appeared embarrassed to be there. McDonald's was dying.
Two years later, it is hard to see what, in so the wider world, has changed. Last year's headlines are a litany of potential PR pratfalls: 'Fast food "is almost as salty as the sea", Prince says McDonald's should be banned, 'McDonald's accused of ss "piracy" by chair firm' are just three. Then there are the stories about a knife scanner fitted at a McDonald's in Tottenham, £125 parking fines for folk who don't finish their drive-through meals within 45 minutes, and news from the US that McDonald's was offering Happy Meal coupons on school report cards while scientists found that preschool children preferred the taste of food in McDonald's es packaging to identical, unbranded meals.
But there was also an unobtrusive drip of positive stories. Last year it was reported that McDonald's now only sold sustainably farmed coffee certified 70 by the international environmental charity Rainforest Alliance; it launched free, unlimited Wi-Fi in hundreds of its restaurants; it is turning its cooking oil into biodiesel to power its fleet of 155 75 lorries; is voluntarily raising what it pays for beef and pork by 5% above the market rate to help British farmers; and it only sells organic British milk (accounting for 5% of all supplies bought in Britain). Then there are the new McDonald's replacing the old. Gone are the garish red signs, the strip lighting. the tacky plastic seats and sinister clowning Ronald. An appealing dark green log cabin-style as building has popped up as a drive-through in Enfield's business park. From Eltham High Street in south-east London to Camberley in Surrey are sleek green McDonald's, all colourful retro modernism go inside. By the end of last year, 140 outlets had been 'reimaged'. This year, another 200 will be given what McDonald's calls the less is more' treatment.
What is going on? Has McDonald's os become a green-on-the-outside, green-on-the-inside modern restaurant, its record profits a sign that it has won back our trust? Or is its apparent reinvention one of the cleverest corporate scams of our time? 100 A young accountant from Watford and father of three, who loves cricket. Watford FC and quarter-pounders with cheese (in roughly that order), has some answers.
Steve Easterbrook became chief executive
105 of McDonald's UK in April 2006. He is widely credited with their change in fortunes and chuckles at the suggestion that McDonald's was like the Conservative party in its desperation to neutralize the 10 negative perceptions clinging to its name.
'The business did stall at a time when the society around us was changing as fast as it has ever done,' he says. We had begun to look tired. We hadn't read all the signals us that had been sent to us, that to do business in 2007, or more importantly in 2010 and 2020, you've got to act in a different way; you've got to be more approachable.
Traditionally, McDonald's bosses
120 have been as likely to engage publicly with their customers as to open their suppliers chicken sheds to the world, but Easterbrook has done both, marching on to Newsnight to debate fast food 125 and allowing ordinary customers to t
inspect the company's supply chain. We haven't wanted to be too in your face with the communication of it, he says.
Hammering big corporate messages to 130 people is boring. We've tried to have a more conversational tone ... [customers] don't want to be lectured or preached at, but they are interested."
Easterbrook says McDonald's success
135 is because of both its green moves and a back-to-basics focus on burgers. He argues that the restaurant has attracted more customers by extending its opening hours (to 6am in many places), improving core san food (chicken breast in its chickenburgers and nuggets), switching from filter to freshly ground coffee and only using Rainforest Alliance-certified beans and British organic milk. 'At our core we're a 145 burger business. But also we're a modern, contemporary business, he says, and
"reimaging" the restaurants is the most visible way to show customers that you are 'with it'.
150
Back in a sleek 'reimaged' McDonald's in Chancery Lane, central London, young diners are both cynical and untroubled by their burger meals. Darren Collings, 20, is impressed by the new, 'Starbucksy' iss image. He and his friends are concerned by Jamie Oliver's exposé of battery
m chickens and want McDonald's to do more about its waste, but are still seduced by its convenience - and its burgers. 'The 160 whole concept of McDonald's is burger, chips and Coke. That's what it is, he says. No one is eating a salad, although Alex Roberts, 17, a student from Luton, reckons that McDonald's has moved with
16s the times with its green initiatives.
They
are changing, but they are going to sell the
?
stuff that sells, like Big Macs,
he savs. "It
still makes you fat, doesn't it?"