Editor’s note: The original April 2023 version of this article was lost. The Lee Daily Register rebuilt it in October 2026 from the reporting cited below.
McDonald’s closed its U.S. offices this week and told U.S. and some international corporate staff to work from home Monday through Wednesday while it delivered layoff notices, according to an internal email first reported by the Wall Street Journal and summarized by Fortune.
The email asked employees to cancel in-person meetings with vendors and other outside parties. The company said it wanted to “ensure the comfort and confidentiality of our people” during the notifications, which would be held virtually. It cited the likelihood that many people would be traveling that week.
Why now
The company had signaled the cuts in January. Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski told employees in a memo then that McDonald’s was evaluating roles and staffing levels, ABC7 reported, and said some existing jobs would move or go away, according to Fortune. On an investor call, he described the company as too decentralized and said it had often reinvented the wheel across markets, ABC7 reported.
The layoffs did not follow a bad quarter. McDonald’s had just reported $1.9 billion in quarterly net income, up 16% from a year earlier, as higher prices pushed some diners toward its cheaper menu items, Fortune noted.
Part of a wider wave
The cuts came during a broad round of corporate layoffs in early 2023. Amazon had announced 27,000 job cuts and Disney 7,000, and technology companies had cut about 150,000 jobs that year, according to Fortune.
What happened next
McDonald’s did not say how many people lost their jobs. Later that week, a source familiar with the situation told ABC7 Chicago that hundreds had been laid off, mostly in corporate offices, and that more people had been moved into new roles or promoted than had been laid off. The company declined to comment on the memo or the layoffs.
For scale, McDonald’s has more than 150,000 employees in corporate roles and company-owned restaurants, about 70% of them outside the United States, the station reported. Restaurant service jobs were not the focus of the cuts.
