When applying creative thinking, it implies "image building" on areas related to digital, food, technology, and brand. In terms of labor, CMG recognizes labor can pose a problem as new restaurants are opened. It is promoting from within as seen in the following excerpts:
"...promote more than 1,500 managers to open our new restaurants..."
"Labor is unpredictable because we thought it was settling into this normal kind of mid-single-digit range, and that's what I'd like to say. And yet as we did analysis, we found these 700 restaurants. So it's about 1/4, a little more than a 1/4, a little less than 1/4 in a restaurant that we're having to take $1, $2, $3 increase in starting wages just to make sure that the restaurants were staffed. "
Further down the HLA list, abstractions on (restaurants, trends, income) shows inflation has impacted some consumer frequency.
"... In the third quarter, we continue to see a widening of trends by income level with the lower income consumer further reducing frequency."
In summary, CMG's strategy works well as long as consumer spending remains strong.