I t wasn't all that long ago that American journalist Thomas Friedman was making headlines with his so-called Golden Arches Theory of conflict prevention: No two countries that both had McDonald's, he wrote in 1996, had ever fought a war against each other. Around the same time, McDonald's was drawing more unfavorable but equally (in its way) deferential attention from protesters all around the planet who saw the fast-food chain as a symbol of America's suffocating cultural dominance. Admire it or deplore it, you had to acknowledge it: The "McDonaldization of everything" was a fact of late-20th-century life. More than 100 countries boasted a McDonald's, and most of the rest, it seemed, wanted one. "Mickey D's" appeared invincible.

Then came the recent announcement of the U.S. corporation's first quarterly losses since going public in 1965. Mr. Matthew Paull, executive vice president and chief financial officer, admitted, "This has been a difficult year, and our financial performance has been below expectations." The reaction was, almost uniformly, surprise bordering on shock. As a commentator for one major U.S. newspaper eloquently put it, "This is unsettling, as when a river burns or a diamond shatters."

This sense that a cultural milestone had been passed was underscored for local burger-lovers by the coincidental announcement that McDonald's Japan unit was also about to lose money for the first time in 29 years. As a result, the company is reportedly planning to shut 176 unprofitable outlets around the country next year. True, that still leaves almost 4,000 restaurants in operation, but it remains the company's biggest number of closings in a single year since McDonald's first opened in Japan in 1971.