I’ve been a traveling consultant a long time. There are some things you learn and when you ignore that learning you pay that price. Today I ignored that learning and paid a high price.
It’s the first warm weekend after record cold in Minnesota so I went out to eat breakfast at Bakers Square then find an open car wash. Sadly, the cheap drive through gas station ones weren’t open. At least the few I went to weren’t and I didn’t feel like driving the entire state looking for one which was. I ended up getting another $40 car wash at Mister Car Wash because they won’t clean your floor mats unless you buy their highest priced car wash.
Once you get you spend that kind of money on a car wash you really notice the assholes who don’t put mud flaps on their vehicles. They just let the slop spray all over the windshield and hood of the vehicle behind them. No, you aren’t saving money on your new vehicle, you are being an asshole. I’m amazed at the people who do not know you need to wash the undercarriage as soon as it warms up if you have driven when DOT was putting down salt/de-icing chemical or something else to keep the roads clean. You have to get that stuff off because it will rot your ride. If you don’t, you will be driving something which looks like this in a few years.
So I’m driving real careful like, avoiding the big splashy puddles to pick up my prescription at CVS. It’s now about noon (everyone seems to know about road salt in Minnesota) and I wanted to pick something up for lunch rather than cook something at the apartment. There were only two drive up choices on the way back, McDonalds (MCD) and Burger King (BKC). Neither choice is great, but I had been to McDonalds earlier in the week and their parking lot was looking up at trashed. It must have had about six inches of ice with big holes which would be pure slop and splash today. Besides, the twin lane drive up had a line which wrapped clear around the place. Burger King was a ghost town.
I don’t like either chain. McDonalds is always a zoo and Burger King has shit food. Lazy duth brought about stupidity. I turned into the Burger King drive up, completely forgetting about their worthless glasses with even more worthless lids. In the history of fast food in America I can think of only one chain which has worse glasses and lids and that would be Wendys(WEN). Sure enough, they hand my medium iced tea out to me and sploosh the lid pops off. Iced tea all over me and the inside of the car I just paid $40 to have cleaned. Thank God I don’t order soda at drive ups!
I was beginning to think fast food was the last great bastion of Keller MBAs but then I looked up the CEO of Burger King. Daniel Schwartz isn’t even an MBA, according to Wikipedia.
Schwartz holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University.
An economics major. The one degree where you can be wrong 99% of the time and still hold a job. A degree where common sense is not only a requirement, it is scorned. You run a fast food business where the vast majority of locations have drive up windows and you buy the most worthless cups on the market. No wonder McDonalds, despite not having significantly better food, is trading at roughly 8 times Burger king.
This also explains why Wendy’s, which does have better food than both of the others, is trading below Burger King. People don’t go to the drive through windows because their glasses suck and the lids are so bad they make the glasses look rock solid.
I didn’t dig through the Board of Directors at Restaurant Brands International Inc which owns Burger King and others. Feel free to do that yourself and see if even one member has a degree where common sense is a requirement. Thank God I don’t knowingly hold stock in any of these companies. Until there is a complete and total purge of upper management, replacing them with individuals possessing common sense, they don’t have a prayer when it comes to surviving. It’s not the trend toward healthier food which is putting them out of business, but the lack of common sense.
