This year, McDonald's plans to refurbish – or re-image – 2,000 outlets globally. About 1,400 of them are in the US, where a quarter of restaurants are more than 25 years old. The rest are in Europe, where the re-imaging concept was first tried in France in 1996.

The campaign, which has seen 5,000 outlets re-imaged since 2002, will absorb 53 per cent – or $940m – of this year's total company annual capital expenditure.