Christopher J. Kempczinski: The McDonald’s global system is executing at a high level, and I’m optimistic that our Accelerating the Arches strategy offers us a long runway of growth despite the headwinds that we’ve discussed on this call. The McDonald’s brand is in great shape, and yet there’s so much more we can do. In my travels throughout our global system, I sometimes like to ask our people, what exactly does McDonald’s Corporation sell? As you might imagine, this usually prompts a lot of puzzled looks, and a brave soul or two will raise their hand and say, “Well, we sell great-tasting food or we sell burgers and fries.” Of course, that’s technically true. But as a largely franchised business, ultimately, McDonald’s Corporation is in the business of selling a brand so that others can sell burgers and fries.
And while some may see it as a trivial distinction, I see it as fundamental. As goes the McDonald’s brand, so goes the health and economic value of our company and system. Our Accelerating the Arches strategy is designed to build our brand to make McDonald’s more relevant to more people more often. Our MCD growth pillars are driving system-wide sales, and the recently announced Accelerating the Organization initiative will help us unlock further growth by enabling our system to be even faster, more innovative, and more efficient. Through Accelerating the Organization, we’ll sharpen our priorities and increase our investments against our biggest opportunities. I want to congratulate the McDonald’s system on a terrific 2022 and thank all three legs of the stool, our franchisees, our suppliers, and our company employees for their dedication and passion for our business.
A global pandemic, record-breaking inflation, a war in Europe, the McDonald’s system continues to execute and deliver no matter the challenge, and I’m excited to continue our success into 2023. With that, I’ll turn it over to Mike to begin the Q&A.
Operator: .
Mike Cieplak: Our first question is from David Palmer with Evercore.
David Palmer: Thank you. A big-picture question tied into some of the stuff you were talking about in the U.S. It’s been fascinating to see how McDonald’s traffic in the U.S. has largely declined, most years at least, even as you’ve added about $1 million in sales per unit. And your customer satisfaction scores and the external stuff that we see, it’s been stubbornly and surprisingly low. It’s almost like the consumers being more honest with his or her spending rather than these surveys. So I’m wondering, in your work, where do you see the customer satisfaction opportunity in the U.S., whether that’s in convenience and speed or food or other? And do you think the U.S. will have a different same-store traffic outcome over the next year or decade based on some of the stuff that you’re doing? Thank you.
Christopher J. Kempczinski: David, it’s Chris. Thanks for the question. Well, I think starting with — we’ve talked about on a number of calls over the last several years that guest count is a very imprecise measure, and it’s imprecise because of what we’ve seen with delivery, but also what we’ve seen with digital, where we’re now getting multiple orders. And so while it’s important for us to always be attentive to guest count, I think also recognize that the complexion of how customers are experiencing the restaurant has changed. So from that vantage point, we look at things from a relative perspective and we feel very good about our relative performance on that as evidenced by our strong traffic growth that we had in the U.S. this year.
