Many may have their different point of views abt where McDonald's ($MCD), Starbucks ($SBUX) or other giant chain stores failed causing their loss of customer loyalty, brand reputation, operation profits, and stock price tumbling, and eventually to the fatal stop - Bankruptcy.
The cause is more than obvious, in a fact that everyone already knows their fundamental problem. But, their corporate executives choose to blind themselves. Furthermore, creating a solution only be worsening the simple problem. Bureaucracy has rooted deeply inside those corporates that there's no easy fix on that, which poisoned the company to another six foot down.
In the last few weeks, I happened to dine in different McDonalds for lunch and order latte from Starbucks, and as well, ate at Chick-Fil-A and In-N-Out for comparison. On the fast food side, three of those named restaurants has a very similar background carrying with a compelling startup story by their founders. The divergent is that now MCD is a listed public company linear on a franchise model, departed from the model they first began with. But, Chick-Fil-A has a model somewhat in between self-operated and franchise, financing the franchise's "owners" to build the operation from the beginning of the branch store establishment. And In-N-Out is fully self-operated. Both of their goal of this specific business model is for one single purpose - Quality Assurance, from the leadership to the product's quality.
People are always the root of a business problem. Inconsistent performance could be caused by various reasons.
From the perspective of customers, why would they rather choose the Chick-Fil-A and In-N-Out? Simply bc of the high quality of their food and service, but not the fancy store decoration, trendy uniform design, automated kiosk or flashy food menu.
This fundamental rule to success has never changed thru centuries. After all, business is abt well-serving consumers (people).
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