McDonald's Just Got Some Terrible News, and Its Reaction Was Something to Watch

Let’s start with the bad news, which I first wrote about here in October: It came when the Centers for Disease Control announced that an E. coli outbreak at McDonald’s had claimed the life of at least one customer and sickened 75 others.

It’s tough enough when people’s tastes change or outside economic forces negatively affect your bottom line. But imagine a federal government agency telling the world that people who bought and consumed your product got sick or died.

A month later, I think we can look at how McDonald’s reacted and find some good lessons: an immediate response that promised “swift and decisive action,” focusing on the suspect ingredient (“slivered onions” in Quarter Pounders), and removing both the onions and in some areas even Quarter Pounders from menus.

Plus, they used language designed to keep the scope of the crisis in perspective — basically reassuring customers that this was a localized problem that didn’t affect “the majority of states and the majority of menu items.”

If you’re going to have a big crisis like this, it helps maybe for the news to have broken during the waning days of one of the most contentious U.S. presidential elections in modern history, and a during a time in which we’re so bombarded with information that idea of a “24-hour news cycle” seems quaint and leisurely.

As McDonald’s explained to me when I asked, while it seems $35 million of this fund might go to some kind of marketing campaign to reassure people that McDonald’s food is safe, “[a] total of $65 million will be invested into supporting franchisees who have lost business, targeting those in the states that were most affected.”

Yet, if you knew nothing else about McDonald’s the mere fact that they’re putting $65 million directly into relief for franchisees — maybe 900 McDonald’s restaurants, according to one account — might tell you something about priorities.

Now, with luck and some smart strategies, indications seem to be that McDonald’s won’t suffer anywhere near the hit that, say, Chipotle dealt with after an outbreak in 2015 that ultimately led to shutting down every single restaurant in order to retrain employees.

Still, if you’re running a McDonald’s franchise and you lost money as a result of a crisis like this, I can imagine you’d remember it all a lot more sharply, and look for help from the franchisor.