Part of the reason to do this is for employees to know that the CEO understands their job and their concerns. The vast majority of employees will not be working at a store the CEO visits, so it makes sense to announce it internally. It sounds like that's what they did, and CNBC got a hold of that email.

The marketing department will not allow that to happen.

Any CEO doing this for the right reasons - I.e., to help ensure the product is good - would whip the marketing department right into shape and tell them to keep a lid on it.

In this case, the marketing department was not involved, at least publicly. CNBC is reporting this from an internal email they got their hands on.

This is good, right? Then a team of <trolls/activists> can all arrive at the same time and order a big pile of 'secret menu' 19-ingredient monstrosities from the CEO.

Social Media viral coefficient may have been higher with a quieter announcement and the CEO just showing up leverage social media managers.

And it really should be a week or two. You can grind through hell on optimism for a day. Doing it day in and day out is the hard part and may highlight different negative aspects of the job compared to just showing up for 8 hours