McDonald’s Sales Jump 2.4% After They Revived This Old School Strategy
How the Golden Arches landed back in the Franchise 500 Top 10.
This story appears in the January 2026 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
To view our entire 2026 Franchise 500 list, including category rankings, click HERE.
McDonald’s entered 2025 with a clear mission: Deliver value to customers.
With its consumer sentiment on the decline (and a U.S. sales dip of 1.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024), the fast-food giant refocused its efforts on offering more choices at affordable prices.
In January, McDonald’s launched McValue, a new menu and platform that offers popular $5 Meal Deals along with exclusive and local discounts, as well as a “Buy One, Add One for $1” offering, available all day.
“When it comes to value, we know there’s no one-size-fits-all,” Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, said in a press release. “We’ve worked closely with our franchisees to create a new platform that will let our customers define value on their own terms.”
Throughout 2025, the Golden Arches doubled down on that idea, bringing back the $2.99 Snack Wrap over the summer and, in September, reintroducing Extra Value Meals, which served customers a $5 breakfast or an $8 Big Mac meal. The announcement spurred celebration among many diehard McDonald’s fans who had mourned the bargain meals that were discontinued in 2019.
Related: McDonald’s Is Hiring Hundreds of Thousands of Employees. Here’s Why.
All of this has played out well. McDonald’s returns to the Franchise 500 Top 10 for the first time since 2020, when it was No. 3. (Last year, it was No. 22.) In the third quarter of 2025, U.S. sales jumped 2.4%. The company credits its affordability focus.
The year’s menu changes happened in tandem with McDonald’s ongoing tech initiative, “Digitizing the Arches,” a global strategy to make restaurants simpler for franchisees to operate while creating a better customer and crew experience. Mobile-ordering options and self-serve kiosks are already commonplace in restaurants; more recently, some stores introduced AI-powered “accuracy scales” that compare the actual weight of an order to the target weight, flagging potential missing items to crew members.
Additional upgrades at some stores include geofencing technology to alert crew members to start prepping a digital order as the customer approaches the restaurant (which can reduce wait times by more than 50%), improved experiences for loyalty program members (all 185 million of them), and cloud-based support to streamline restaurant operations. All of these decisions and rollouts are a collaborative effort, according to Brad Bogan, vice president of strategic franchising for McDonald’s USA.
“We’re in constant collaboration [with our franchisees],” he told Entrepreneur via email. “Franchisee leaders work alongside McDonald’s teams on marketing, supply chain, and operational excellence — ensuring we move forward together.”
Related: 5 Financial Strategies Your Business Can Learn from Top Franchises
Sign up for our weekly Franchise newsletter to get the latest franchise news, advice and opportunities. Get it in your inbox.
To view our entire 2026 Franchise 500 list, including category rankings, click HERE.
McDonald’s entered 2025 with a clear mission: Deliver value to customers.
With its consumer sentiment on the decline (and a U.S. sales dip of 1.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024), the fast-food giant refocused its efforts on offering more choices at affordable prices.
