McDonald's All-Day Breakfast: Why the Delay?

In the 1993 film Falling Down, Michael Douglas enters a fast-food restaurant and orders breakfast. The worker behind the counter informs Douglas he’s a few minutes too late, and suddenly Douglas becomes totally unhinged. Twenty years later breakfast still ends too early for many people—10:30 on weekdays and 11 on weekends—at most McDonald’s restaurants. So when Don Thompson, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said on CNBC in late April that he was considering serving breakfast all day, a lot of Americans thought it was about time.

Not so fast. Back in 2006, then-CEO Jim Skinner announced that the chain was considering operational improvements that would make it possible to offer breakfast 24 hours a day. “It’s a concept for now—no specifics yet,” Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem, vice president for global communications, writes in an e-mail in response to a request for an update. (A few breakfast items are offered all day in select countries.)