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On a typical morning, Mark Brownstein walks into one of his 16 McDonald's restaurants in Orange County, California. He turns off the alarm and switches off the lights. Then he flips on the computer and logs in to the corporate management system. There, he checks to see how well he did yesterday, compared with the benchmarks supplied by the home office.
On his screen are a series of numbers that show how much he spent in his two largest expense categories: food and paper products, and labor. Drats! His ratio of sales dollars to crew labor hour was way too low--yesterday, he had crew members sitting around doing nothing.
Then he leafs through the stack of mail and finds a bill from his local power company. His mood nosedives. "Boy, I wish I had a benchmark for energy usage too, " he grumbles to himself. "As it is, I have no way of knowing how much energy I'm using in a given month until I get the bill."
Like Brownstein, McDonald's and its franchisees have long considered energy to be an unpredictable, uncontrollable expense, something akin to "bowling without being able to see the pins." It was an unfamiliar feeling for McDonald's, which issues its franchisees such exacting guidelines for all the other aspects of running a quick service restaurant, including frying time, how long food is held before being purchased, and even how much time cashiers spend waiting on customers.
And it was anathema in a penny business, where profits--and just about everything else--are measured in pennies, or fractions thereof.
In fact, energy is the third-largest cost involved with running a McDonald's restaurant, after two other categories of expenses: food and paper products, and labor. "You've got a lot of things going on in a restaurant that have energy impacts," explains Bob Langert, Director of Environmental Affairs and Energy Management for McDonald's. "You've got freezers at subzero temperatures, coolers refrigerating food, cooking in the kitchen with high-temperature grills and fryers, and [35 million] consumers in and out each day. All that requires energy."
What the franchisees really need is an energy benchmark--such as a kilowatt hour per sales dollar figure--that would allow them to compare their energy usage to stores their size, age, sales volume and weather conditions, says Joe Megacz, the company's Corporate Energy Manager. Ideally, this benchmark would be accompanied by suggestions for improving that performance.
Right now, though, there is no such benchmark.
"Right now," says Langert, "we've got this meter, and all it does is go to the utility company. Part of our bill is based on peak demand, but we don't even know which day we set it. It doesn't tell you why your demand was what it was, or what you could do to better that. There's nothing there."