Starbucks And McDonald’s Open For Holidays

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Starbucks And McDonald’s Open For Holidays

© Walking the line (CC BY 2.0) by Jerry Huddleston

Many retail outlets, grocery chains, and food chains close for Christmas and New Year. These include retailers as large as Walmart and Costco. McDonald’s and Starbucks will ignore the holidays, at least as far as their employees are concerned.
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Except for what their management knows about holiday revenue, why Starbucks and McDonald’s stay open is a matter of conjecture. The two days out of the 365 that make up the year are less than half a percent of the total. However, this is hundreds of millions of dollars of sales for Starbucks and McDonald’s, based on their annual revenues,

Presumably, some people would like to buy consumer electronics and food on these two holidays but will wait. People want their coffee and hamburgers every day, particularly if they are part of a ritual, which for millions of people, they are.

The Starbucks and McDonald’s decisions are part of the business schools’ “airline” theory. Every time a plane takes off with even one empty seat, that seat can never be sold again. The chance to sell that seat is an opportunity lost. The plane still needs to operate on its route. needs the same number of crew members, the same amount of jet fuel, and the same number of ground personnel. A plane with unsold seats is an aircraft that operates short of its maximum financial margin.

Perhaps the people most affected by the Starbucks and McDonald’s decisions are the workers at their retail outlets. But, a dollar is a dollar, at least as fair as their executives are concerned.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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