This is from the weekly restaurant finance newsletter The Bottom Line. To get this in your inbox every Monday morning, click here.
Only 2.5 weeks are left in 2025, which means you are about to be subjected to a flurry of year-end stories. The Restaurant Business website will be no exception, because we need headlines to carry us through an otherwise slow news period.
But we can sum up the year in one word: Weird.
For our evidence, we simply look to the past couple of weeks. McDonald’s Grinch Meal performed extraordinarily well, far better than expected. Burger King’s Spongebob meal also did well. And then McDonald’s wrote value into its franchising standards, a sign that the company remains concerned about the state of the overall consumer.
We noted this dichotomy last week. But this is something that has played out repeatedly in 2025: Customers will flock to chains for special events, but they will not flock to them during other periods. We see chains like Chili’s doing 20%-plus same-store sales while other brands file for bankruptcy.
The contradictions don’t end with the restaurant business, as the stock market continues to soar even as a large number of consumers gripe about prices and the state of the economy.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and 2026 will be less contradictory. It certainly can’t get less weird. Or maybe it can.
This week’s financial news
Hardee’s is warring with another large franchisee. This one is ARC Burger, a 77-unit operator that bought its restaurants two-plus years ago and is owned by the same private-equity firm as Church’s and Quiznos. This has been a brutal few years for Hardee’s.
Pieology filed for bankruptcy. The company did so after buying out a large-franchisee for nothing but forgiven debt and then an investment fell through. Just another chapter in the downfall of fast-casual pizza.
If whoever engineered the bot campaign against Cracker Barrel was hoping to kill jobs, they succeeded.
Restaurants are worried that the latest government decision could hurt their penny profit.
We are officially at the “1% down is worth a 14% stock price increase” portion of the restaurant recession.
Number of the week
Hardee’s unit volumes are $400,000 per store less than the next lowest fast-food burger chain, at least among the very biggest such brands. That explains the chain’s challenges as much as anything else.
Quote of the week
“The Grinch promised a holiday treat, and our fans jumped to their feet. His spirited socks have brought so much delight, that The Grinch Meal is selling left and right.” -the first half of the statement McDonald’s sent to me about the Grinch Meal’s performance.
On the blog
I wrote about consumer spending, fast-casual pizza, Hardee’s and McDonald’s strange year. Check out all my blog posts on The Bottom Line.
On the podcasts
On A Deeper Dive we continued our look at the impact of AI in restaurants, this time with marketing. On The Week in Restaurants we talked Cracker Barrel, Hardee’s and Pieology.
For questions, comments or story ideas, send me an email at jonathan.maze@informa.com. And follow me on Twitter at @jonathanmaze. And also LinkedIn. And TikTok.