Maybe the company just got sick of reporting bad news.
McDonald’s will stop releasing monthly sales reports, Steve Easterbrook told investors today (May 27) at a conference in New York. Easterbrook said the decision was part of an effort “to focus our activities… around the strategic longer-term actions we’re taking,” and that it would be effective July 1. That means June 2015 will be the last month the data will be made available, a McDonald’s spokeswoman confirms.
Easterbrook said the move is “consistent with nearly all retailers,” and that it—and other changes, like accelerating cash returns to shareholders—would be “liberating for our system.”
The company’s recent monthly sales reports have not been encouraging and have generated bad press for the Golden Arches. Even when it beat expectations for April—with a smaller-than-expected sales decline of 0.6% at locations open at least a year—the USA Today headline still read, “McDonald’s monthly sales better, still negative.”
McDonald’s quarterly numbers don’t give the company much to brag about either, but at least these announcements will be fewer and farther between. In April, the company reported that total sales for the first quarter were down 11% compared with the same quarter a year earlier.
