A conveyor belt running through a factory can speed things up, but if one section of the line screws up, the whole operation suffers. Think of the famous I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and her friend Ethel fall behind wrapping chocolates and have to turn to some non-standard practices for dealing with the deluge.
The problem of the line is a problem in other business contexts as well. During the pandemic, McDonald’s had to shutter most of its restaurant dining rooms and rely solely on delivery and drive through. Luckily, it was well-equipped for the transition and while business was not great last year (revenue fell 10% to $19.2 billion), it also was not the disaster that put so many others in the food service category out of business entirely. One problem was that drive-through lines sometimes got inefficient and overcrowded, which can scare away customers who don’t have time to wait.
My Fortune colleague Beth Kowitt investigated what’s going on under the golden arches and what McDonald’s is doing to improve the drive-through lines in a post-pandemic world under relatively new CEO Chris Kempczinski. A lot of the story is about the troubles of former CEO Steve Easterbrook, fired in November 2019 for sexting with an employee and subsequently sued by the company for failing to disclose other alleged relationships with employees at the company. Kempczinski has to clean up that mess while forging ahead through COVID-19 and beyond.
Part of Kempczinski’s new strategy is decidedly non-tech, relying on a massive expansion of drive-through capacity. Some new locations will be drive-through only; some existing locations with one lane will get one or two additional lanes. And every restaurant with drive through that currently relies on two windows will get a third window to deal with complex or delayed orders, thus attempting to resolve the old single line problem that so bogged down Lucy and Ethel.
Another part of the plan, however, relies on bolstering the MyMcDonalds app with high-tech capabilities from a loyalty program that will offer rewards while also collecting lots of data about customer habits. Think about how cleverly–or deviously–the A.I. underlying games like Candy Crush manipulates players based on their habits and style of play. With the right deployment of rewards and reminders, McDonald’s might be able to get customers to spend more and visit more using its app too.
And Kempczinski is also addressing the workplace culture and diversity issues that led to so many problems and lawsuits under his predecessor. “You can’t say your consumer brand stands for inclusion and opportunity if your corporate brand doesn’t stand for those same sorts of things,” Kempczinski told Fortune. It’s no simple task to address all the problems at once, but Kempczinski seems to be lovin’ it.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
The remains of the data. A huge cache of personal information covering 533 million Facebook users that was first stolen in 2019 is circulating once again on a hacking site. The data includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, biographical listings, and some email addresses. Facebook noted the data was taken two years ago. "We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," the company said. And in another sour note for privacy, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that it shares data from visitors to its web site with Facebook. “These relationships fly against the principles and public statements of the ACLU regarding transparency, control, and disclosure before use, even as the organization claims to be a strong advocate for privacy rights at the federal and state level,” tweeted tech consultant Ashkan Soltani.
Your winnings, sir. Speaking of Facebook and privacy, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke with Kara Swisher on the latest episode of her Sway podcast and the topic came up. The complaints from Facebook and others over Apple's new anti-tracking policies are "flimsy arguments" and Cook said he was "shocked that there’s been a pushback on this." Shocked, he is. Huh.
Representation without taxation. A report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy on Friday named 55 publicly traded firms that avoided federal income taxes completely last year, despite reporting nearly $40.5 billion in combined pre-tax profits. Tech companies on the list included Advanced Micro Devices, Akamai Technologies, HP, Salesforce, and Verisign.
The wizzing of 'Zon. I don't know about you, but I am so ready for a future where workers peeing in bottles is not a story. We'll have to wait a little longer, sadly. Amazon on Friday semi-apologized for denying that some of its delivery drivers were forced to the relieve themselves on the go, admitting its earlier denial was "incorrect." But it still tried to spread the blame, saying the lack of bathroom access for delivery people "is a long-standing, industry-wide issue and is not specific to Amazon.”
No more phones for you. Despite the Wing, the Rollable and the ThinQ, LG's innovative smartphone business hasn't been able to field a hit for many years. On Monday came official word from the South Korean electronics giant: it's getting out of phone-making to concentrate on other areas like robots, smart connected devices, and electric vehicle components.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
It was at a 2014 art and technology hacking meetup where Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy came up with the idea of tracking ownership of digital works of art on a blockchain. McCoy registered a video clip his wife Jennifer had created on the Namecoin blockchain and Dash bought it for $4. Dash recounted the historic meeting and his dismay at recent NFT developments (beep, beep, Beeple!) in an essay for The Atlantic.
But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.
We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
How a scrappy travel startup had its best month ever during the pandemic By Alyssa Newcomb
Fever-Tree, a maker of premium drink mixers, boosted sales in 2020 thanks to ‘pantry cocktails’ By John Kell
What happens after the stock market is up big? By Ben Carlson
How the best leaders help companies build deeper connection in a work-from-home world By Dov Seidman and Angela Ahrendts
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Way before there were NFTs, there was a lot of creative use of digital tools to make art. Pioneering electronic music artist Laurie Anderson is the narrator of a new documentary that has such a cool name I'm tempted to rename the newsletter: Sisters with Transistors. NPR interviewed director Lisa Rovner, who explains that women have been left out of the history of electronic music and her film is an effort to put them back in the story. It's a great way to get jolted out of complacency to start the week.