Iceland was maybe the last wealthy country to get McDonald's fast-food restaurants. Writing in the Guardian, Alda Sigmundsdóttir says they first arrived in 1993. Reykjavik has three. Now they're closing, victims of the global financial crisis, which hit Iceland especially hard. Iceland's currency, the krona, has plunged, which means the country can't afford the imports it once enjoyed. So the irresistible march of globalization and its herald, the Big Mac, suffer a setback.

As Yglesias points out, in many countries McDonald's operators reduce currency risk by buying local supplies with the local scrip as much as possible. Perhaps they could source fishburgers in Iceland, but the potatoes and beef and chicken may have been a problem.

Sigmundsdóttir blames McDonald's strict specs:

Apparently McDonald's has very stringent standards when it comes to production of its foodstuffs. For a market as small as Iceland's, it is not economically viable to invest in the equipment required to churn out, say, chicken nuggets. Hence most ingredients have had to be imported from a massive McProduction plant in Germany.