A lot I think. McDonald’s doesn’t just build restaurants anywhere. They conduct rigorous market analyses to determine where they want to buy real estate. They don’t buy unless they expect a place to be growing.

They have the benefit of all the data from their restaurants. They can compare that with publicly available data from local city councils. This is one of the reasons big companies seem to be immortal. They just have so much data, experience, and understanding of exactly how the business works at a local level.

Of course what they can’t anticipate (and few can) are global economic slowdowns and other major trends or even sudden events.