Customers & shareholders: An examination of McDonald’s performance towards health issues.

Essay by humain123University, Bachelor'sB-, March 2012

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Customers and shareholders: An examination of McDonald's performance towards health issues.

McDonald is one of the largest fast food company in the world, it serve approximately 45 million customers daily (Feldstein, M. J. 2001) and operates over 31,000 fast food restaurants worldwide in more than 119 countries (McDonalds. 2006). It also employs more than 1.5 million people around the world (McDonalds, 2006). With the increase in affluence, education and awareness, society's expectation towards businesses rose. The growing expectation towards businesses performance increased the gap between the actual social performance of businesses and the desired performance from society. This can be seen as an implicit social contract between society and businesses. McDonalds being a very big organization with a lot of influence has a lot of social responsibilities further than political or legal performance. The essay will be looking at the social performance of McDonalds towards two important stakeholders; customers and shareholders and how McDonalds is implicated with the health issues.

Being aware that the company has much more stakeholders and issues the report will not be focusing on these as they are beyond the scope of the essay.

McDonald's most important products are mainly fried in vegetable oil (McDonalds. 2009) which contains a lot of trans fat which are not essential for the body (Wikipedia contributors. 2010). Trans fat promote coronary heart diseases by increasing the level of bad cholesterol and decreasing the level of good cholesterol (Healthcastle nutrition Inc. 2010). While McDonalds did advertise on the change of oil and reduction of trans fat in their fried products in 2002, they did not do so by 2003 and did not mention to the public about their operational issues which caused them to cancel the oil change (Trans fat cause more problem for McDonalds n.d). Due to the lack...