Understanding McDonald's as a commodities broker with a restaurant sideline: the McRib →
Willy Staley’s “A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage,” is a lyrical, insightful conspiracy theory about the appearance and disappearance of McDonalds’s McRib sandwich. Staley argues that the McRib’s appearance correlates with falls in the pork futures market, and represents a way for McD’s to cash in on cheap pork, representing a kind of triumph of restaurant automation, logistical acumen, and financial engineering. In Staley’s view, McDonald’s is only secondarily a restaurant, and primarily conducts the business of a commodities brokerage.
