McDonald’s plans to adopt a new organizational structure for the U.S. as it tries to let local operators make more of their own decisions, the company said Thursday.
The announcement comes a little more than a week after McDonald’s posted weak third-quarter results, including a continued decline in sales at long-standing locations. At that time, McDonald’s said Mike Andres, its new U.S. president, would work to showcase core items on a simplified menu and feature locally relevant options.
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“In some of our markets, the reality is that we haven’t been changing at the same rate as our customers’ eating-out expectations or, more specifically, their expectations of us at McDonald’s. So we’re changing,” CEO Don Thompson said during a conference call Oct. 21.
Andres oversees operations of more than 15,500 McDonald’s locations in the United States and Canada. He returned to McDonald’s after a two-year absence to take over the McDonald’s USA president role from Jeff Stratton.
McDonald’s said it would create four U.S. zones: Northeast, South, Central and West, allowing it to become “more nimble.”
News of the new U.S. structure was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
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