The news: McDonald's named a new president for its US business, Skye Anderson, saying the move will bring "focus and urgency" to efforts to reignite growth in its largest market.

The announcement followed second-quarter results showing US same-store sales growth slowed to just 0.8%, the slowest rate in over a year, which the company attributed partly to a difficult comparison against last year's Minecraft movie promotion, one of its most successful marketing tie-ins.

Why this matters: The slowdown goes deeper than a tough YoY comparison. Visits to McDonald's fell 4.5% YoY in Q2, according to Placer.ai, even as the chain leaned on its value menu to court budget-conscious diners. That reflects the company’s greater exposure to lower-income consumers, whose capacity for discretionary spending has been crippled by rising gas prices and food costs. Some 36.1% of McDonald's visitors came from trade areas with median household incomes below $50,000, compared with 17.5% from areas above $150,000, per Placer.ai.

Implications for QSR chains: McDonald’s sluggish quarter suggests that its value menu is delivering diminishing returns, despite consumers’ continued fixation on getting a deal. That's pushing the company to look beyond price alone. It's investing in higher-quality menu items to boost check sizes and position its restaurants as destinations for family occasions, adding high-margin, on-trend products like refreshers to its lineup, and leaning on pop-culture tie-ins to give customers more reasons to visit.

The lesson extends across the category. Chains with heavy exposure to lower-income households, the group most likely to view fast food as a luxury rather than a routine purchase, should expect value pricing to lose its pull as a traffic driver when those same customers are also absorbing higher costs at the pump and the grocery store. Layering in occasion-based marketing, menu innovation, and cultural relevance, as McDonald's is now attempting with its protein and beverage push, offers one way to reduce that exposure.

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