Still does. I grew up near Oak Brook, IL, which used to have the corporate hq of McDonalds, and still has Hamburger University.
I believe every franchisee is required to attend Hamburger U. There are a number of corporate-owned stores in the area where the a lot of the staff is white-collar professionals in training. Those stores are always amazing.
In general stores in the Chicagoland region are way better than stores elsewhere, and I think part of this is due to the fact that corporate sends managers around for training here. I didn't understand the "mcflurry machine is broken" meme until I took a road trip. I had a number of horrible experiences, including a 20 minute wait for a mcflurry that ended up having more ice cream on the outside of the cup than the inside.
This really makes me curious about what is served at the lunch counter at McDonald's corporate headquarters.
I used to work at the corporate headquarters of a company that owns several chain restaurants. The cafeteria there didn't have any of the chain food dishes, but was very high quality as far as office cafeterias go. They had a test kitchen there also and sometimes they'd give out free meals of the stuff they were testing.
There is a free McDonald’s restaurant in the corporate headquarters, but there’s also a deli counter which has fresh sandwiches, as well as a counter for other hot meals (chilli, chicken curry (UK) etc.
