At UWB, Graphics Alone Just Don’t Sell

The numbers don’t lie…right?

Considering my semi-obsession with food documentaries, particularly ones like Food Inc. and Fast Food Nation, Julie Jargon’s “At McDonald’s, Salads Just Don’t Sell” article in the Wall Street Journal immediately caught my eye. On the surface, Ms. Jargon seemed to logically explain the issues surrounding McDonald’s sales fluctuations by noting that its business has floundered since it failed to introduce a blockbuster product since its McGriddles in 2003. She also mentioned external (competitor product introductions, criticism from the documentary “Super Size Me” and the recession) and internal factors (a crowded menu and longer drive-thru performance times) that directly affected McDonald’s past 11 years of sales and included the following graph to visually describe the company’s percentage change in global sales.

Closer inspection, however, quickly revealed holes in the article that eroded its informational credibility – especially due to the meaninglessness of the supporting graph. In the meat of her article, Jargon stated that salads comprise only 2-3% of the company’s U.S. sales – yet the graph displayed global sales? The only time Jargon mentioned global anything in the article was when “McDonald’s Chief Executive Don Thompson warned in July that the shaky global economy would continue to pressure McDonald’s growth” ¹, and yet she explicitly illustrated global sales as the only chronological demographic in her graph.  Since the rest of the article was centralized around American consumer behavior, shouldn’t the graph have been a measurement of U.S. sales? Jargon also named specific healthy menu options in her graph but neglected to explain how much influence on sales or percentage change each of the listed products accounted for. Was she prevaricating their impact on sales, or did she simply not know? What relevance, then, did her graph even have to the article as a whole? Wouldn’t the graph make more sense if it included an additional section below the healthy options timeline that chronologically noted other items McDonald’s introduced over the 11-year time span (such as the premium coffees program) and the aforementioned external and internal factors so that the reader can better understand how and why McDonald’s sales fluctuated?

So many questions.

In short, the graph was just a pretty but useless picture of meaningless statistics. If this graph was literally analyzed by a layman without support of Jargon’s article, he or she would only deduce that McDonald’s global sales were directly and only affected by the sales of those particular products…nothing more. Post-analysis, I was disturbed that this article was published on the front page of the Business & Finance section of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. That’s prime real estate! Sure, the numbers didn’t lie…but in this case they didn’t mean anything.

¹ Jargon, Julie. "At McDonald's, Salads Just Don't Sell." WSJ.com. Wall Street Journal, 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304384104579139871559464960>