Jan. 6 (UPI) — McDonald’s is planning on cutting jobs while it also accelerates its restaurant expansion, CEO Chris Kempczinski told employees Friday. The fast-food giant said that the decision would help the company innovate faster and work more efficiently. Kempczinski also said that the job losses aren’t a cost-cutting measure.
“Today, we’re divided into silos with a center, segments, and markets,” Kempczinski wrote. “This approach is outdated and self-limiting – we are trying to solve the same problems multiple times, aren’t always sharing ideas and can be slow to innovate.”
McDonald’s is planning to speed up its development plans for new restaurants.
“We must accelerate the pace of our restaurant openings to fully capture the increased demand we’ve driven over the past few years,” Kempczinski said in the memo.
The company has not decided how many new restaurants it will build yet nor how many jobs will be eliminated as part of the reorganization. Kempczinski said that the company will finalize and begin to communicate decisions on the layoffs by April 3.
Kempczinski also said that the company needed more centralisation to avoid duplication of menu items like a crispy chicken sandwich.
“We had across the globe 70 different, distinct versions of what a crispy chicken sandwich would look like,” he said. “I don’t need 70 different permutations of a chicken sandwich.”
