When we talked about financial and managerial accounting in class, we were told that businesses reporting their financial accounting only have to reveal a certain amount of information. They have to give their total sales, total expenses, and a whole bunch of other totals, but they certainly do not have to reveal which products and which stores outperformed others.
That is why I found it interesting that McDonald’s specifies which products in particular have driven their recent profit increases.
Take a look at this article; it’s just a few short lines:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/mcdonalds-profit-jumps-10/article1766616/?cmpid=rss1
The article specifies a few menu items that have drawn customers in to McDonald’s. The same information is presented on McDonald’s site under investor relations:
http://phoenix.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97876&p=irol-newsarticle&ID=1485461
If McDonald’s is under no obligation to highlight which of their products have been successful recently, it makes me wonder why they would do it. They may not be worried about the ability of competition to compete with these products. Or perhaps, McDonald’s is falsely stating which products did well in an attempt to throw off competitors. That may be a sinister theory, but this is a curious anomaly.
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