Why doesn't McDonald's have breakfast all the time?

It's a lot harder than you might think. Cooking eggs and pancakes takes up valuable grill space, and they're best prepared at a lower temperature than burgers. They're also more labor intense. One other complication: Breakfast orders are cheaper, which means lower sales. Despite all the challenges, McDonald's CEO Don Thompson says he'd like to see the morning meal served all day. As it is, McDonald's shuts down breakfast service at 10:30 on weekdays and 11 on weekends. From Bloomberg:

"There's nothing better on the menu than breakfast," says Barry Klein, a former franchisee who is now a marketing consultant in Chicago. "The value is sensational. And there's a slightly healthier halo to what they serve then." (The Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddle excepted: It has 550 calories and 31 grams of fat.) Klein and other interested observers suggest that restaurants could offer only the breakfast sandwiches all day; they're easier to make and sell better than pancakes and scrambled eggs anyway. Or they could experiment with serving breakfast until noon, suggests Tristano of Technomic. Until then, he says, there's always the (once) secret Mc10:35. Customers arriving minutes late for breakfast can often prevail on McDonald's crew to put leftover eggs from the Egg McMuffins on their burgers.