McDonald's Pulling Out of Iceland

I have recently had an intense interest in learning to design and test small algorithms that act as predictors of certain events or phenomena. The reason for this is to attempt to see whether through modest number crunching, these models would predict sports, political or business outcomes with any degree of accuracy. Taking forward those assumption, I would have considered that the income levels of a country, the degree of urbanization and locations north of the equator and the structural composition of the GDP would be a crude but passable predictor of the existence of a McDonald's restaurant in any country today. And while trying to be clever, I would not consider the predisposition of a nation's citizens towards the consumption of beef in that model because as I posted here a while ago, there are several McDonald's restaurants in Indian cities where beef is neither easily available nor widely consumed.

I am most surprised by this story in the Guardian that the McDonald's restaurants in Iceland will be closing down in a few weeks in spite of the fact that the country meets most of the criteria that I have enumerated above. The stated reason only makes sense to me by hindsight. It's become far too costly to Icelandic consumers to buy burgers when the Icelandic Kronor has lost value in relation to the Euro. These consumers therefore feel that difference in the cost of their burgers while the franchise loses opportunity for profits.