You could almost feel sorry for McDonald’s. That’s an odd sentiment when you consider that the company’s revenues in 2014 were $27.4 billion and its stock price makes it worth something like $92 billion. It’s among the world’s most valuable brands and has three times the United States market share of Subway, its nearest competitor.

Enviable. Yet for years its new products, business ventures, even social media attempts have gone wrong: It sold a 90 percent share in Chipotle, now one of its strongest competitors; it introduced products like chicken wings, which went nowhere; it created a Twitter hashtag, #McDStories, that turned into a bashing event. And it has spectacularly failed to attract or even hold on to millennial customers, who’ve fled in droves.

Meanwhile, it’s the most visible target of an alliance of workers fighting for $15 an hour (most McDonald’s workers make slightly more than the federal minimum wage, $7.25, but it varies by state), and its food is seen as anything but sustainable, fresh or healthy. A result has been a decline that includes a whopping 15 percent drop in its United States operating income in the last quarter of 2014.

The company is losing customers to higher-end burger chains like Shake Shack and Five Guys, to small but intriguing start-ups that make locally sourced, slow food appealing, like Dig Inn, to Chick-fil-A (around $5 billion in sales in 2013) and, of course, to Chipotle, which has sales in the $4 billion range.