No restaurant brand reaches more locations than McDonald’s. System-wide sales across all McDonald’s restaurants, franchised and company-operated, reached approximately $125 billion in fiscal year 2024, spanning more than 40,000 locations in over 100 countries. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under MCD and headquartered in Chicago, with a broad institutional and retail investor base and no controlling shareholder. Chris Kempczinski has served as CEO since 2019.
Ray Kroc began building the McDonald’s franchise network in 1955 after licensing the system from brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald, who had opened their original drive-in in San Bernardino, California in 1940. Kroc’s foundational contribution was the franchise architecture: standardized operations manuals, a training system through Hamburger University founded in 1961, a supply chain that treated franchise operators as customers for calibrated inputs, and a real estate strategy that had McDonald’s Corporation own the land under franchised restaurants rather than ceding that value to operators. Approximately 95% of all McDonald’s locations worldwide are operated by franchisees. Parent-company revenues reached approximately $25.6 billion in fiscal year 2024, derived largely from franchise royalties, rents, and owned-restaurant operations. The menu localizes by market to an unusual degree in QSR: the McArabia in the Middle East, the Ebi Burger in Japan, the Maharaja Mac in India, and the Prosperity Burger across Southeast Asia are among the most tracked regional adaptations, while the $5 Meal Deal launched in the US in mid-2024 addressed traffic pressure and drove same-store sales recovery through the latter part of the year.
As a food court and freestanding restaurant anchor, McDonald’s has few equivalents in traffic conversion: the combination of accessible price points, universal brand recognition across all demographics, and franchise-model operational efficiency makes it a reliable traffic anchor in nearly every mall context. In the US, the typical mall food-court location occupies 800 to 2,000 square feet as an inline tenant, while freestanding pad sites adjacent to power centers and retail parks reach 3,500 to 4,500 square feet with drive-thru infrastructure. In international mall contexts, particularly across the Gulf, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, the brand serves as a destination food-court anchor that generates consistent weekday and weekend footfall across all demographic groups. Within the Malls.com network, McDonald’s is tracked at US positions including Tysons Corner Center, City Creek Center, Stanford Shopping Center, and Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, at Israeli positions including Azrieli Center Tel Aviv and Seven Stars Mall, and across Qatar, Thailand, India, Japan, Estonia, and Australia.
