The Orlando Sentinel has an interesting look at how McDonald's recent earnings announcement,
One challenge for McDonald's: More Americans are packing their lunches.
Americans packed lunches and made more dinners at home this spring, leading to traffic declines across the restaurant industry. For McDonald's, the trend led to disappointing second-quarter results after months of strong growth.
A Stifel Nicolaus analyst on Tuesday downgraded his ratings on a number of restaurant companies, including Chipotle and Panera, predicting that the U.S. will fall into a recession early next year. A slowdown in the restaurant industry is one of the first indicators of an economic slowdown, because dining out is one of the first things people give up when they're feeling uncertain about the future.
