Customers Are Flocking to McDonald's New Chain CosMc's, But We Were Not Impressed
The first location of McDonald's highly-anticipated new restaurant chain, CosMc's, has only been open for business for a little over a month. However, a new report indicates that the fast-food giant's exciting new venture is already turning out to be a huge hit with customers.
McDonald's opened its very first CosMc's pilot location in Bolingbrook, Ill., in early December 2023, months after the company initially announced the new restaurant brand in July 2023. The name was inspired by a six-armed alien who appeared in McDonald's commercials in the '80s and '90s.
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While CosMc's does offer a limited selection of food items, including pretzel bites, hash browns, egg sandwiches, and ice cream sundaes, the main focus at the chain is drinks. The menu is absolutely packed with all sorts of lemonades, flavored cold brews, slushes, frappés, and iced teas, many of which can be customized with popping boba, flavor syrups, energy shots, or Vitamin C shots. It is so beverage-heavy, in fact, that some have speculated CosMc's is designed to compete with Starbucks.
Soon after the Bolingbrook CosMc's began serving customers, local media outlets reported that the drive-thru-only restaurant was seeing hours-long lines. I visited the location myself a couple of weeks after it opened and ended up waiting nearly two hours in a queue so massive that several police officers were on site to help direct cars. On that visit, I was quite disappointed with the items I tried, and found that the food was better than most of the drinks, which were packed with too much sugar. But if you need further proof of CosMc's popularity, look no further than a new report from Placer.ai.
The foot traffic platform's data suggests that CosMc's saw more than twice the number of guest visits in comparison to a typical McDonald's restaurant in 2023, the report said. It also revealed that CosMc's, which is smaller than a traditional McDonald's, saw more than triple the number of visits per square foot.
"However, it's also worth noting that CosMc's visitation numbers would likely have been much higher if the location had additional capacity to satisfy the overwhelming demand," the report added.
Placer.ai noted that it's difficult to say after just a few weeks whether CosMc's is a true success. But the data shows that—at least for now—customers are flocking to the restaurant in droves.
The Bolingbrook location is the first of 10 planned CosMc's in the United States. McDonald's intends to open approximately nine more pilot locations in Texas' Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio metro areas by the end of 2024. Whether CosMc's will expand to even more areas of the country in the future likely depends on how those test locations perform.
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