Let’s start with the bad news, which I first wrote about here in October: It came when the Centers for Disease Control announced that an E. coli outbreak at McDonald’s had claimed the life of at least one customer and sickened 75 others.

Honestly, if you’re running a business, it’s hard to imagine anything worse.

It’s tough enough when people’s tastes change or outside economic forces negatively affect your bottom line. But imagine a federal government agency telling the world that people who bought and consumed your product got sick or died.

A month later, I think we can look at how McDonald’s reacted and find some good lessons: an immediate response that promised “swift and decisive action,” focusing on the suspect ingredient (“slivered onions” in Quarter Pounders), and removing both the onions and in some areas even Quarter Pounders from menus.

Personally, I thought they should have worked some kind of apology into their initial statement, but Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, eventually rectified that.

Plus, they used language designed to keep the scope of the crisis in perspective — basically reassuring customers that this was a localized problem that didn’t affect “the majority of states and the majority of menu items.”

And then, life moved on.

If you’re going to have a big crisis like this, it helps maybe for the news to have broken during the waning days of one of the most contentious U.S. presidential elections in modern history, and a during a time in which we’re so bombarded with information that idea of a “24-hour news cycle” seems quaint and leisurely.

So let’s look at what happened afterward because I think there’s another key lesson.

Last week, McDonald’s announced that it’s going to spend $100 million as part of its ongoing effort to recover from the bad news.

While many observers characterized this as an effort to “bring customers back,” there’s a detail in the not-so-fine-print that tells me McDonald’s knows who its key stakeholders are.

As McDonald’s explained to me when I asked, while it seems $35 million of this fund might go to some kind of marketing campaign to reassure people that McDonald’s food is safe, “[a] total of $65 million will be invested into supporting franchisees who have lost business, targeting those in the states that were most affected.”

This brings us to one of my favorite business games, which we could call something like: “What Business Are You Actually In, Anyway?”

• As an example, some analysts insist that big airlines aren’t just in the business of moving people from point A to point B. Instead, they’re currency traders, who enter into very lucrative agreements with banks and credit card companies over frequent flyer miles.
• Or else, consider Costco — a success story by any definition, but one that is in the membership business as much or more than it is in the retail business.
• And McDonald’s? Are they in the quick-service restaurant business? Or are they really in the real estate and franchising business? (There’s a very good movie starring Michael Keaton that makes the case for the latter, in case you haven’t seen it.)

Of course, McDonald’s has many stakeholders: customers, employees, shareholders — and of course, franchisees.

Yet, if you knew nothing else about McDonald’s the mere fact that they’re putting $65 million directly into relief for franchisees — maybe 900 McDonald’s restaurants, according to one account — might tell you something about priorities.

McDonald’s is facing tough challenges in general, but a lot of that (hint: inflation and changed consumer spending) was already happening long before the E. coli outbreak.

Now, with luck and some smart strategies, indications seem to be that McDonald’s won’t suffer anywhere near the hit that, say, Chipotle dealt with after an outbreak in 2015 that ultimately led to shutting down every single restaurant in order to retrain employees.

We’re less than a decade later, but people’s attention spans seem a lot shorter now. We’ve moved on to other things.

Still, if you’re running a McDonald’s franchise and you lost money as a result of a crisis like this, I can imagine you’d remember it all a lot more sharply, and look for help from the franchisor.

It appears McDonald’s understands that as well.