Older McDonald's restaurant being torn down and replaced

[Brian Lutz]

http://bellevue.komonews.com/news/busin ... es-phoenix

For the last couple of years McDonald's has been significantly remodeling a number of older locations (but keeping them in operation during the remodel) around here to update them to their current restaurant style, but this is the first time I've heard of one being completely torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. According to the article, the rationale behind the complete teardown was to get rid of the basement storage (which I've seen on a number of older McDonald's restaurants) and move everything to a single level to lower costs. Aside from needing to haul supplies out of the basement on a regular basis, I'm not quite sure how eliminating that is supposed to reduce costs significantly enough to justify the extra costs of completely tearing down the building and rebuilding from scratch.

[KingU8ol0Soopers]

That same thing happened to one of the McDonald's in my area: they completely leveled the old restaurant and built a new one from scratch:

Before:


After:


I bet that another reason why they would completely build a restaurant is because the new designs probably get more business. They look a lot cleaner and nicer than the previous design, thus more people will want to eat there.

[Brian Lutz]

I think that McDonald's does have the advantage of a largely built-in market for their products in just about any given area, and I suspect that as long as the place is recognizable as a McDonald's from the outside and doesn't look too dodgy people are going to go there one way or another. On the other hand, the restaurant interiors are going to have a bigger influence on people's buying habits in the long run, and I've found that a lot of McD's tend to update their interiors roughly every five years or so. Especially given the fact that they're directly competing against Starbucks on fancy coffee these days, they seem to have borrowed quite a few ideas for interiors from them, with stuff like TVs, WiFi and more cafe-like seating areas. Another trend I've seen with these remodels/rebuiilds is that they seem to be getting rid of the Playplaces in the process as well, which combined with the other factors mentioned above seems to be showing an attempt to try make a more business-like setting than they would otherwise have (well that, and probably removing a big source of potential liability in the process.)

I still don't see see where they're getting enough cost savings out of the deal to justify completely tearing down an older restaurant and replacing it with a new one (unless the fixtures were horrendously inefficient or something like that, and even that's kind of dubious) when they could probably get 90% of the benefits (at least in terms of customer experience) out of a good interior remodel on the existing building.

[StoreLiker2006]

The McD's restaurant at 11000 SE Oak St. in Milwaukie, just outside the Milwaukie Marketplace strip mall, also witnessed a remodeling job as of late. One time when I was with my parents, we drove by this restaurant and saw signs witnessing its remodeling job, such as "DRIVE THRU OPEN DURING REMODELING."

~Ben

[Super S]

I recently drove by the Kelso, WA McDonalds which was closed and fenced off. I have been told that this location, built in the 1970s, is going to be leveled and rebuilt on the same site. I have recently noticed a number of McDonald's, including two other local locations, doing extensive remodels and completely eliminating the mansard roofing that was a McDonalds trademark for years.

[Alpha8472]

The franchises have agreements to periodically remodel their restaurants. McDonald's only cares about remodeling to their newest restaurant templates. They don't care about the fact that some of those old McDonald's are almost historic.

I have seen McDonald's get remodeled inside of Walmart stores. Even those restaurants are required to remodel from time to time or else they could lose their franchise agreements.

The old Walmart location had a really tacky decor featuring burger seats where people sat on plastic hamburger seats. The new location is more stylish, but still the decor seems somewhat fake looking. There is faux dark wood and random wall decor with colorful stripes.


Burger Seats:

[StoreLiker2006]

Speaking of McD's, I wonder if any of my fellow Portland observers here might like to observe the 15870 SE McLoughlin Blvd. location in Milwaukie (Oak Grove)? It still has the mansard roof they were still using in 2000 (the year this store originally opened, replacing the McD's at 15114 SE McLoughlin Blvd. that originally opened in 1963).

~Ben