“I think overall, we still feel confident in our ability to kind of get to about 50,000 restaurants by the end of 2027.”

In context

“plined in how we make those decisions, looking at what's best for the overall system. I think in regards to new restaurants, what I would say is we still have a lot of confidence in our ability to grow. But again, it's -- as we've emphasized for the last couple of years, our primary decision matrix is based on delivering a strong return for McDonald's and a strong return for the owner-operator that's going to own and operate that individual restaurant. And if we can't deliver a strong return and certainly, we're seeing more inflationary pressure, I think, with what's going on in the war, in the Middle East, and kind of the ancillary impacts on that. If that means that an individual restaurant no longer meets the right return threshold, then we're going to make those decisions accordingly. I think overall, we still feel confident in our ability to kind of get to about 50,000 restaurants by the end of 2027. Christopher Kempczinski: Yes. And I would just maybe underline a couple of points that Ian made. One is on McOpCo, frankly, it's any restaurant in our system. We're always looking to put the restaurants in the hands of the best operator. And so I think certainly, the performance in the U.S. right now relative to franchisees would indicate it's not being run as well as it could be. And so it's either on us to fix that or we're going to find franchisees who can run the restaurant better. And if you look at the margins that our franchisees, the restaurant level margins that they're earning on their own restaurants, clearly, there's a lot of upside versus what the McOpCo performance was in the quarter. And you think about development, I would just say to build on Ian's point, we are relooking”