On McDonald's, Iceland and the Definition of Being Everywhere

Is McDonald’s really everywhere? Well, it’s no longer in Iceland. That story has attracted a ridiculous amount of media attention, but it looks like Lyst, the franchise owner there, made a pretty logical move. Apparently the three Iceland locations had “never been this busy before… but at the same time profits have never been lower.” Lyst had to import ingredients from Germany in order to create official McDonald’s menu items, which was ridiculously expensive given the state of Iceland’s currency.

But Lyst isn’t shutting down the McDonald’s restaurants; it’s just rebranding them so it can change up the menu and source more local food. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

The Iceland story did get me wondering about where McDonald’s is and isn’t, so I did some poking around. The McDonald’s location map above shows that within the United States, McDonald’s really is everywhere, if one defines “everywhere” as “within 107 miles of anywhere” (or 145 miles by car).

On the global scene, however, there are huge areas untouched by the Golden Arches, as this map of global McDonald’s and Starbucks locations demonstrates.

Furthermore, the Iceland incident is not the first time a country has decided McDonald’s is not sufficiently profitable (or that McDonald’s has made this decision about a country). Wikipedia lists Jamaica, Bolivia and Barbados as three other places where McDonald’s didn’t bring in enough dough to justify sticking around.

And on a somewhat related note, it’s not true that no two countries with McDonald’s in them have ever gone to war.