Running Out of Money?

The claims

On 5 June 2026, Yahoo Finance compiled cost-of-living warnings from four companies:

• Kraft Heinz — CEO Steve Cahillane: lower-income consumers are "literally running out of money at the end of the month."
• McDonald's — CEO Chris Kempczinski flagged "heightened anxiety" among consumers; CFO Ian Borden cited gas prices hitting lower-income households hardest.
• Whirlpool — CEO Marc Bitzer said the year's events "amplified consumer concerns about the cost of living"; its North America chief described "consumer sentiment collapsing to record lows."
• Planet Fitness — CEO Colleen Keating: "the consumer and economic backdrop have shifted."

The receipts: revenue and profit

Across FY2015–FY2025 (SEC 10-K figures, nominal dollars):

• McDonald's earned $8.56 billion in net income on $26.9 billion of revenue in 2025 — an operating margin above 46%. Profit has risen, not fallen, through the inflation era.
• Whirlpool's revenue has shrunk (from $20.9B in 2015 to $15.5B in 2025) on divestitures, and its profits are volatile — the one company here whose "the consumer is weak" story is matched by genuinely soft results.
• Planet Fitness has quadrupled revenue since its 2015 IPO ($331M → $1.32B), with net income climbing to $219M in 2025.
• Kraft Heinz is the outlier: real impairment-driven losses (−$10.2B in 2018, −$5.8B in 2025 ahead of its planned 2026 split) sit beneath roughly flat ~$25–26B revenue.

CEO pay vs the "running out of money" worker

In the same fiscal year the warnings describe (FY2025), each company's proxy reports:

Company	CEO	CEO total comp	Median worker	Pay ratio
McDonald's	Chris Kempczinski	$20.6M	~$19,000	1,082:1
Whirlpool	Marc Bitzer	$12.8M	~$29,800	429:1
Planet Fitness	Colleen Keating	$8.2M	$19,510	422:1
Kraft Heinz	Carlos Abrams-Rivera	$10.7M	$63,053	170:1

McDonald's median employee — a crew member earning about $19,000 a year — is a lower-income consumer of the kind its CEO describes as anxious and squeezed. The CEO made 1,082 times that. Kraft Heinz's lower ratio reflects a higher-paid factory median workforce (~$63K), not restraint at the top.

McDonald's has disclosed this ratio every year since the rule took effect: it peaked at 3,101:1 in 2017 and has run between roughly 1,000:1 and 2,100:1 since — a structural gap, not a one-year spike.

Layoffs while returning cash

The "consumer is out of money" message has coincided with these same companies cutting their own workers. McDonald's laid off hundreds of corporate staff in its 2023 restructuring. Kraft Heinz has filed repeated WARN notices (1,628 workers across four states) and announced ~1,000 more cuts in early 2026 around its split. Whirlpool eliminated 1,700+ positions between 2024 and 2025 — including hundreds at its Amana, Iowa plant — even as its North America chief blamed "consumer sentiment collapsing to record lows." The workers being cut, and the consumers said to be tapped out, are largely the same people; the cash, meanwhile, keeps flowing to shareholders.

Buybacks, dividends, and McDonald's negative equity

"Running out of money" is hard to square with the cash these firms hand to shareholders. McDonald's returned $7.2 billion to shareholders in 2025 alone ($2.1B buybacks + $5.1B dividends). It has bought back so much of its own stock that its shareholders' equity has been negative every year since 2016 — −$8.2B at the 2019 low. Kraft Heinz cut its dividend in 2019 (from ~$3.6B to ~$1.9B a year) after its impairments, and only resumed modest buybacks in 2021.

Notes and caveats

All dollars are nominal (not inflation-adjusted). Financials, shareholder returns, and market cap are reported SEC values (FY2015–FY2025; market cap = SEC cover shares × Yahoo year-end close). Pay ratios are proxy disclosures (MCD full decade; KHC/WHR/PLNT partial); median-worker pay is as disclosed or computed from the disclosed ratio. Layoffs are announced figures from WARN notices and press. CEO net worth is intentionally left blank — these are non-founder professional CEOs with no reliably-sourced net-worth figure; we will not publish an estimate that isn't cited. Remaining coverage gaps (early-year pay ratio for KHC/WHR, pay components, C-suite totals for three firms, PLNT market cap) are documented in the data dictionary.