Mac Backfire - Despite Arch Support

Eric Ellis San Francisco

07/28/1997

McDONALD'S must wish all its customers were like Don Gorske.

The Wisconsin native may well be the world's most practised exponent of the Big Mac. Gorske had his first "Mac Attack" in 1973 and since then has downed 14,837 all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun combination.

Gorske, whose car number plate is SZME CB1, can be so precise because he's counted every one he's ingested. He liked his first one so much, he vowed to count them.

If he loses count, all he has to do is clear out the empty cartons from the back seat of his car. He counted 250 the first, loving, month in 1973 and he hasn't looked back.

Or looked down either. No competitor to Tom Cruise, Gorske is so enamoured of Big Macs that he measures his life in McMoments.

He met his wife "somewhere around 1,500 Big Macs" and proposed to her in a McDonald's car park.

Gorske claims to have missed just seven days of the past 25 years without downing a Big Mac.

He keeps an emergency horde in the freezer, in case of bad weather, and when he holidays, he brings along a national directory of McDonald's.

"I don't eat to break records. I just eat these because I love them," he told The Chicago Tribune.

If everyone was like Gorske, or even just a little bit like him, McDonald's Corporation would not be in such turmoil.

Unfortunately for the global fast food behemoth, its shareholders and long-suffering franchisees, not all Americans share Gorske's view that you can't have too many Big Macs.

Chicago-based McDonald's, by many polls the world's most admired and recognised company, is in crisis.

Its management has been in disarray, its competitors are munching into its market share and the marketing efforts to arrest the slide have left customers cold.

In an attempt to squeeze growth out of a saturated market, McDonald's had arm-twisted its 12,500 outlets into accepting the ill-conceived Campaign 55.

That was a marketing ploy built around a US55cents hamburger and devised to head off the inroads competitors Burger King, Wendy's and others are making into McDonald's once indisputable market leadership.

Campaign 55 was, in part, an attempt by McDonald's to cement itself further into the American consumer psyche, by evoking the prices of 1955.

Customers were encouraged to pay just 55cents for a burger if purchased with french fries and a drink. In selling the idea to Wall Street investors as much as Joe Public, McDonald's management virtually staked their jobs on this ploy being the way to arrest slumping sales.

But punters didn't wear it, in part because franchisees didn't.

McDonald's is in the midst of a "mid-course correction" - a rare admission for a company whose history and ethos is built around unhindered growth.

The past few years have been tough for Ronald McDonald and the proselytising team that market him.

Campaign 55 was supposed to be the antidote to six consecutive quarters of faltering sales.

But despite slightly improved results in the first months of 1997, analysts expect this year's second quarter to be poor.

Something had to give and it did. Earlier this month, McDonald's announced a massive shake-up of its management.

Long-time McDonald's hand Ed Rensi, the head of the main US operations who had worked his way up from the grill 31 years ago, was unceremoniously dumped. Into his place goes Jack Greenberg, the new chairman who will try to make good a massive corporate realignment by which McDonald's will also realign its US business into five geographic divisions.

Group president Mike Quinlan says the move is to peel away layers of the bureaucracy between management's ivory tower and customers like Gorske, and franchisees at the coal face, who have been seriously alienated by a confusing marketing campaign.

Not content with Rensi's head on the proverbial platter, McDonald's also removed chief operating officer Thomas Glasgow and the executive vice-president, Thomas Dentice, both close Rensi allies.

In many companies, "retirees" drift off to golf heaven. At McDonald's, Glasgow and Dentice will become franchisees. Maybe then, management will see what it's really like out there beyond the golden arches.