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McDonald's sells fast food like burgers, fries, and chicken through tens of thousands of restaurants around the world.
McDonald's is the world's biggest fast-food chain. You almost certainly know it from the golden arches, the Big Mac, and the fries. But the company you'd invest in doesn't actually cook most of those meals. It mostly sells the right to run a McDonald's restaurant. Of the roughly 43,000 restaurants worldwide, the vast majority are run by independent franchisees, and McDonald's main job is collecting rent and royalties from them.
Here's how that works. A franchisee puts up the money, hires the staff, and runs the store day to day. McDonald's owns or leases the land and building underneath many of those stores, then charges the franchisee rent on top of a cut of sales. That real estate layer matters: it makes McDonald's look less like a restaurant company and more like a landlord with a burger brand attached, earning steadier, fatter margins than the people flipping the patties. Customers who walk in the door are the ones paying for the food, but the franchisees are the ones paying McDonald's. They choose the brand because it brings in customers and comes with a proven system: menus, supply chains, marketing, and training all handled for them. In the remaining company-owned stores, McDonald's takes on the full risk of running the restaurant itself, but that's a smaller part of the picture.
The business is huge and geographically spread out, which is both its strength and its vulnerability. Growth lately has leaned heavily on opening more restaurants and on value menus as customers watch their spending, and the company has promised investors it will keep building toward roughly 50,000 stores. It generates piles of cash, which it returns to shareholders through dividends (it has raised the payout for decades) and share buybacks. The risks are real too: franchisees have complained about rising costs and slim profits, wage and labor fights keep coming, and health trends have pushed it to add salads and other lighter options. The core bet, though, is that a cheap, reliable meal plus the best-known brand in food is a machine that keeps working almost anywhere on earth.
Saved answer · last researched 21 Oct 2026