You'll notice that I said, "For some companies there are special...". When I wrote that I was not refering to McDonalds in particular. However, the rest does still apply. It just may not be readily apparent when one is flipping burgers. It becomes very apparent when one gets into management or ownership of a brand.
You're going to have to be more specific as to what you're talking about, then. The food can be copied easily, as the equipment and ingredients used to make it are all fairly standard fair. And like I said before, its not hard to put a fake logo on a bunch of off-brand cups and cutlery, and the advertising isn't really that hard to pull off.
In fact, faking a restaurant chain would be fairly easy, as you can let the actual corporation to do all your thinking for you; all you have to do is imitate them. China does it all the time with US-produced gadgets - they had a working copy of the iPhone mere months after it came out, and in some cases it was better than the original. If it's that easy to reverse engineer a complicated piece of electronics, it shouldn't be all that hard to reverse engineer a franchise.
