Don Thompson

On July 1, Don Thompson finishes his first 12 months as CEO of McDonald’s, the $27 billion fast-food Goliath based in Oak Brook. How did the year go? He declined repeated interview requests by Chicago, so I decided to size up some of his recent public statements—and found one or two, well, whoppers.
 

HE SAID
TO
TRUE?
“We’re excited about chicken.” Carl Quintanilla of CNBC’s Squawk on the Street on April 26 Yes. In 2012, for the second year in a row, Mickey D’s sold more pounds of chicken than beef. Thompson helped: He brought back Mighty Wings!
McDonald’s had “mixed first-quarter performance.” Wall Street analysts on the company’s quarterly earnings call on April 19 Yes, if “mixed” means “bad.” In the first quarter of 2013, same-store sales were down 1 percent globally compared with the year-ago period. That’s the first such decline in a decade
It doesn’t “target people of color with subversive tactics.” An activist at the company’s shareholders’ meeting on May 23 who complained about the company’s “predatory” marketing to “children of color” You be the judge. In April, McDonald’s signed the teenage gymnast Gabby Douglas as the latest in a long string of athlete endorsers, mostly black.
“We do not sell
junk food.”
A nine-year-old girl who questioned him at the shareholders’ meeting Ha! In Japan in May, McDonald’s unveiled the Mega Potato: a pound of fries with 1,142 calories, 57 grams of fat, and 800 milligrams of sodium.