McDonald’s says it’s not political after Trump visit

McDonald’s says it’s not political after Trump visit

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Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump works behind the counter during a visit to McDonalds in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, U.S. October 20, 2024. 

Doug Mills | Via Reuters

Though President Donald Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonald’s location on Sunday, the fast-food giant is trying to stay neutral in the presidential race.

“As we’ve seen, our brand has been a fixture of conversation in this election cycle. While we’ve not sought this, it’s a testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans. McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President,” the company said in an internal message viewed by CNBC and confirmed by a source familiar with the matter.

Trump learned how to operate a fry cooker and work the drive-thru line during his short shift at a Feasterville, Pennsylvania, restaurant. He used the stunt as an opportunity to take more shots at his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump often accuses Harris of lying about working at McDonald’s for a summer in her 20s, but has offered no proof backing up the claim. Harris has denied the accusation. McDonald’s and its franchisees don’t have all of their employment records for workers dating back to the early 1980s, when the 60-year-old Harris would have worked there, the company said in the Sunday memo.

“Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches,” McDonald’s said.

Both McDonald’s and the franchisee who operates the location emphasized that the chain opens its doors to “everyone.”

The photo shows a letter outside the McDonald’s verifying it was closed to the public at the time of Trump’s visit.

Lauren Mayk | NBC Philadelphia

“As a small, independent business owner, it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community,” franchisee Derek Giacomantonio said in a statement. “That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”

Although McDonald’s publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, it has tried to portray itself as an apolitical brand to avoid alienating customers. It follows a broader shift in Corporate America away from politics or initiatives perceived as ideological.

A number of companies, including Ford, Lowe’s and Harley-Davidson, have walked back their diversity, equity and inclusion policies and practices this year.

And that’s a change that many Americans want; only 38% of U.S. adults believe that businesses should take public stances, down from 48% in 2022, according to a Gallup-University of Bentley study conducted this spring. 

But McDonald’s has already been involved with another controversy this election cycle.

In late May, several viral social media posts criticized the burger giant’s affordability, citing everything from an $18 Big Mac meal at a Connecticut location to charts that alleged the chain’s prices had more than doubled over the last five years. Republicans latched onto the controversy, tying a jump in McDonald’s menu prices to Biden’s economic policy in a bid to win over voters fed up with inflation.

To quell the controversy, McDonald’s U.S. President Joe Erlinger wrote an open letter and released fact sheets about the company’s pricing.

— CNBC’s Kate Rogers contributed reporting.


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Spirit Halloween to open 10 new ‘Spirit Christmas’ stores

Spirit Halloween to open 10 new ‘Spirit Christmas’ stores

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A family exits a Spirit Halloween store operating in a former Best Buy. 

Paul Weaver | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Some Spirit Halloween locations will be busy for longer than usual this year.

Spirit Halloween will operate 10 stores through the entire holiday season as “Spirit Christmas,” a spokesperson confirmed with CNBC.

Instead of the company’s usual strategy of renting abandoned storefronts only long enough to host the Halloween-specific retailer, 10 stores around the Northeast will open through the end of the year. The company’s flagship store in Mays Landing, N.J., will open on Oct. 18, while the other nine locations will open in early November, the spokesperson said. Not all stores will be converted from existing Spirit Halloween locations.

“Spirit Christmas is a new concept for us, and we’re hopeful it will resonate with our customers,” a spokesperson for Spirit Halloween told CNBC. “Our goal is to create a festive retail experience that captures the spirit of the season, much like we do for Halloween.”

Each store will have holiday inflatables and decor, but they will not all have the same experiences. The new stores won’t just replace fake skulls and costumes with wrapping paper and stockings, they will also have activities like photographs with a real-life Santa and letter writing to the North Pole.

The first 10 locations will act as a test to see whether customers will stay invested through the holiday season.

Holiday sales are a lucrative space, but not certain bet for the company. Spending grew 3.8% year over year to $964.4 billion in 2023, according to the National Retail Federation.

Deloitte estimates that holiday retail sales will increase 2.3% to 3.3% in 2024, but expects a higher jump of 7% to 9% for e-commerce, which the Spirit Christmas test stores will not support. Amazon is already sizing up for the holidays with plans to hire 250,000 workers for the season, the same number as last year.

Holiday spending could also be affected by a tense presidential election in November and a historically tumultuous season of hurricanes in progress.


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Green Bay Packers stock ownership team valuation

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Jeff Robinson | Icon Sportswire | Getty Images

Only one National Football League team has an ownership structure that resembles a publicly traded company.

The Green Bay Packers, who are the 12th most-valuable NFL franchise at $6.3 billion, according to CNBC’s Official 2024 NFL Team Valuations, are the only publicly owned team across the four major North American professional sports leagues. The franchise is completely owned by stockholders, many of them Packers fans, in a structure established more than 100 years ago.

The Packers have had six stock offerings — which kicked off in 1923, 1935, 1950, 1997, 2011, 2021 — resulting in more than 5.2 million outstanding shares owned by more than 538,000 people, according to the team’s 2024 media guide.

The shares pay no dividend, are nontransferable outside of passing to a child or relative and do not have any intrinsic market value. Shareholders get to attend the team’s annual meeting and vote for a board of directors, but the team says owners do not make any financial gains from ownership. The only way a shareholder receives any money is by selling their stake back to the team, and even that is for a percentage of the original share price.

For 2023, the team took in $638 million in revenue, and its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were $128 million. The Packers are a nonprofit, and the only member of the team’s seven-person executive committee who gets compensation is the president.

The Packers’ annual revenue goes toward paying players, maintaining Lambeau Field and marketing, among other expenses. The share offerings throughout the years have been used to pull the team out of rocky financial situations and do larger renovations of Lambeau Field.

The unique structure puts the Packers among the teams that newly approved private equity investors will be least interested in. Even deep-pocketed investors cannot use their funds to generate a return.

There is a 200,000 share per person ownership cap — less than 4% of the team’s outstanding shares. Current rules allow approved private equity firms to own up to 10% of a franchise, but even if the Packers wanted a firm to own that much of the team, it is unlikely to entice private equity investors.

Since the stock offerings are so infrequent, the biggest barrier to Packers fans owning a piece of the team is not money — it’s timing. 

In the first offering in 1923, one share cost $5. Even though the price has increased throughout the years to as high as $300 for an offering that started in 2021, it is still a tiny fraction of the $6.49 billion average valuation of an NFL team today.

The unique ownership structure is one of several ways the Packers stand as an outlier in the NFL. Green Bay is the smallest television market of any of the 32 teams, and it does not have the high level of tourism that other cities with NFL teams such as Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Los Angeles receive.

It also often draws the ire of other fans and organizations because of its long-term stability at quarterback as the team transitioned from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers to Jordan Love.

The Packers kick off their season Friday against the Philadelphia Eagles led by Love, who recently signed a four-year, $220 million extension with the organization. 


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