Could a New Type of McDonalds Be Coming to Minnesota?

If you are a fan of “The Golden Arches” of McDonalds, this may be exciting news. 

Get our free mobile app

The Fast-Food Chain announced this week they plan to open 10,000 new locations worldwide over the next four years. How many of those will be here in Minnesota? Well, that remains to be seen. 

McDonalds officials say they are looking to open 900 new restaurants in the United States, so the others would be placed around the world.  The locations of where the new stores here in the States will be hasn't been publicized yet. 

But that wasn’t the only news McDonalds broke this week, they are going to be testing another type of restaurant that would compete head-to-head with Starbucks, Minnesota based Caribou Coffee and other coffee and beverage brands.  

The new Mickey-D's branch off locations will be called “Cosmc’s” (cos-micks), and 9 of these locations will be test marketed in Texas. The 10th location will be placed in Chicago near the company's Corporate Office's. I guess what we think here in Minnesota isn’t that important to Ronald McDonald.  

The main reason for “Cosmc’s” is because McDonalds sees a dip in their revenue in the afternoons, when locations like Caribou and Starbucks are seeing steady business. This extension of McDonalds will feature customizable drinks and snacks targeted at those needing a pick me up in the afternoon.

According to the Associated Press, McDonalds President Chris Kempczinski says that the margins for this type of new business are really good right now and it’s a 100 million dollar a year industry that he feels McDonalds can capitalize on. These types of restaurants are a part of the restaurant industry that is growing faster than casual dining.  

Another area of testing McDonalds will do with these smaller locations will be to test a new method at their drive-thru windows. This test is said to direct the flow of drive-thru traffic based on the complexity of the orders. One would have to wonder if they’ve studied the effectiveness of “Chic-Fil-A's” drive through service? I guess we’ll see, it should be easy to tell pretty quickly.  

There is one other intent of this new business model, and that is to keep competitors from snatching up all the good real estate locations that could accommodate a business like this.  

All this works in conjunction with McDonalds efforts to switch from slower servers that serve their locations currently to working with Google Cloud which will speed up the process of ordering in the drive-thru or on one of the many kiosks that McDonalds implemented several years ago. 

This new tag-team effort with Google can also help with staffing as far as making sure during peak times there is coverage for certain stations.  

One of the big challenges I see with this idea is can they find enough employees to cover all these new duties because most restaurants are having a difficult time finding enough people to work right now.  

I am a fan of McDonalds, so I’ll be curious to see how all this works out. Plus, I hope the technology with Google will keep the ice cream machines working more regularly.