McDonalds corporate and its franchises are not real estate businesses. I understand there are insight porn Substack writings saying so. The locations of a McDonalds doesn’t change but same store sales fluctuate a lot. They suck because the food sucks, and it got too expensive for its audience of people who eat shitty food. This is not at all an unorthodox opinion. The real estate idea is the unorthodox one.

I am not sure which subsidies specifically you are talking about but you are probably right that the fact that they pay their workers so poorly relative to others in hospitality, and that the services their people need are paid for by taxpayers in their communities instead of McDonalds, is a subsidy that is relevant to their bottom line. But, since I don’t know how comparable they are to SMB hospitality, it’s really hard to say. One POV is that McDonalds is the addictive thing that competes against alcohol, and maybe it has gotten less addictive, or it faces cultural headwinds like smoking did.