Launching in One Week!

🍔 Get ready for HBR season 2!

Hello Hamburger Friends!

I’m very excited to announce that we are launching season 2 of HBR on Friday, November 15th. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen, and of course we will be sending out the podcast here with all the additional information, links, and updates that create a value meal of hamburger business information.

Season 2 will run for 6 to 8 episodes and we already have case studies chosen for the first few episodes:

• McDonald’s Corporation: Managing a Sustainable Supply Chain

• McDonald’s China: The Expired Meat Scandal

• McDonald’s 55 Cent Promotion

• Obesity and McLawsuits

With the help of our new producer Chris Higgins, we’ve really paying attention to how these academic topics relate to all the things happening right now in the world. It’s another way of exploring our thesis that there is nothing in the world that McDonald’s doesn’t touch.

We will also have our frontline reporting from Mike working at his hamburger restaurant. You can read about how he gets ready for his 7am start time, and in the first episode we’ll dive right into what it’s like to work at a modern hamburger restaurant.

Zach will be taking us on his third attempt at visiting every McDonald’s on the island of Manhattan in a 24 hour period. Zach’s been actively training for the event this year, both physically and mentally.

The nearest neighbour (NN) algorithm (a greedy algorithm) lets the salesman choose the nearest unvisited city as his next move. This algorithm quickly yields an effectively short route.

His work to determine the optimum route is a version of the traveling salesman problem complicated by the limited hours of some McDonald’s locations.

His mapping of all the locations in New York has led Zach to the archives of the yellow pages at the NYC public library. He has now started to map all the locations of past McDonald’s in the city, allowing us to see the slow migration of the franchise across the city.

Guests!

Last season we our entrepreneurial business advisor Marcus Estes on to discuss deep finance and we look forward to booking him again to help us understand the quarterly and annual reports of McDonald’s.

We are also working to book Cabel Sasser on the show, who gave an absolutely incredible presentation at XOXO this year about going maybe a little too deep into something (spoiler, it’s McDonald’s) and finding all the beauty and wonder along the way. Honestly we couldn’t recommend this more:

The Friends We’re Meeting Along the Way

As we mentioned before we have a podcast producer joining us this coming season. Chris Higgins is not only making sure we sound better but is joining us on the podcast to make sure we don’t drift TOO far into the weeds.

We have a new theme song from Jona Bechtolt. We’re working on a new logo with Kriss Knapp. We even have a social media manager! Colette Wacker has joined the team and will be helping us spread the word.

Mike has been absolutely amazed at how many people have reached out to him about their own past jobs working at hamburger restaurants. You may not realize it, but someone you know definitely worked at McDonald’s. That’s kind of insane but the 1-in-8 statistic that McDonald’s turned into a marketing/recruitment slogan is true and mind-blowing. Almost as mind-blowing as the $185 1 in 8 Alumni Jacket:

Mike would have to work more than 9 hours to afford this.

And with Substacks fun financial tools we’ll be keeping at eye on the MCD 0.00%↑ share price with embedded charts like this:

Created with TradingView

Support and Thanks

And lastly, we’ve activated subscriptions as of today! We are an entirely self-funded operation! We hope to support ourselves with sponsors in the future (reach out if you’re interested) but greatly appreciate listener support.

We’ve set our subscription rate to equal a Big Mac a month ($5.69 according to the Big Mac Index). You can also support us with a one-off contribution via the Buy Me a Burger page. We also will have some merch to announce once the new logo is finished!

Thanks to everyone who signed up for season one. We are really excited for the new season which is going to sound better (thanks Chris!) and dive into all the ways we can learn about the complexities of our world via the hamburger business.

Yours,
Mike, Zach, Chris, and Colette