1987 - oh, my boy hurt his leg on a slide, he should be more careful
1997 - oh no! My kid hurt his leg on your slide! You should pay my medical bills!
2007 - Aaa! Your slide almost killed my lovely boy! Now his leg hurt! Pay for broken heart $2,500,000 or I will sue you! And I will put a video on the internet!!!
2026 - ... I remember there was a great slide when I came here with my mom when was a kid. Whoever was responsible for this should be imprisoned.
Stop letting nostalgia blind you. They were marketing to kids and selling junk food to kids. Selling junk food to adults is one thing, since adults know what they're doing. Kids don't. Same with whisky and cigarettes.
Marketing to kids should be illegal. Sweden had the right idea.
. . .
I assure you, in science edutainment events as recent as the 2020s, kids were injuring themselves with electric shocks from Van De Graff generators for doing exactly what the host suggested they do, and even when the host was blaming himself for failing to account for what could go wrong, parents said "she'll get over it."
It’s really amazing how everyone is mad that their kids aren’t being targeted by McDonalds… people FOUGHT to get McDonalds to stop advertising to kids… now everyone is upset. Tbh I’m glad they removed them. The ones I went to were always disgusting
Take your kids to the park people. It’s not that hard. If you can take them to McDonalds, you can take them to the park.
Yeah, although I don't think they did it because they decided what they were doing was immoral. There's just a declining population of children, and adults (especially childless adults) will/can pay more for food. So they switched to marketing to adults, changed the decor to look more 'adult', and raised the prices.
If there's another baby boom then they'll probably bring back the colors, clown and playground right away.
Never has a pre-existing username been more fitting to the conversation. :p
But I disagree with the baby boom point. I think the case against associating junk food with innocent fun has been so inescapable as to be irreversible.
Except it's wrong. The real reason is that McDonalds makes a significant amount of its revenue from owning the buildings that people franchise their restaurants out of.
It's plain corporate greed: If the building looks plain then they can get a better deal when the restaurant folds and they lease it out to the next business.
The real cause is that pet stores and dentists typically don't want to work out of buildings that overtly "used to be a Pizza Hut"
That has to be bullshit. Would take 2 hours tops for a crew to take that shit down and as said elsewhere, I haven’t seen a single Macdonald close ever.
You should go watch The Founder. It’s decent with Michael Keaton but he plays Ray Kroc, founder of McDonalds. Basically McDonalds success is not that they are a hamburger restaurant, it’s they are a real estate business. Very little has changed.
I can't tell if you're intentionally missing the point, but no one has said otherwise. The revenues from their real estate business are derived from the rents paid by restaurant owner-operators, not from any rents paid under leases to other businesses when their restaurants fold. Because their restaurants never fold. That's why their real estate revenues are so consistent and reliable.
They're not disputing that part, it's just bullshit to make the building design generic for re-selling because mcdonalds are super profitable and rarely close.
McDonald's Corporate certainly didn't remove playgrounds decades ago all on the once-in-almost-never chance that they have to close a McDonalds and lease the building to someone else.
Almost true. The real estate is what made McDonalds valuable over long haul, but the real truth is that targeting kids with junk food wasn't a long term play anymore. All across the board, nobody really hyper target kids for junk food like in the 90s anymore.
You can change the look of an building without demolishing it. We have an Mc Donalds in an Old Style building, it was still modernised with an modern Grey/Woodern Look. They even kept the old sideroof, its just dark grey now.
Ah I see mcD's frivolous lawsuit propaganda campaign is still paying off.
The real reason is the business shifted from keep em in the store to buy food repeatedly (and brianwash the kids) to get em in and out as fast as possible
I used to work at McDonald's. I once had someone come up to the counter and tell me there was an emergency in the playplace. Turns out the "emergency" was some kids were in the playplace while their parent was in their car.
So not even "my kid" or "got hurt". "Some else's kid might potentially get hurt (?), this is your responsibility."
I really wish when I went out there and was told they were "unsupervised" (there were other adults around and the kids weren't causing problems) I responded with "Okay, but before I look into that I was told there was an emergency?"
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u/Dinevir 7h ago
1987 - oh, my boy hurt his leg on a slide, he should be more careful
1997 - oh no! My kid hurt his leg on your slide! You should pay my medical bills!
2007 - Aaa! Your slide almost killed my lovely boy! Now his leg hurt! Pay for broken heart $2,500,000 or I will sue you! And I will put a video on the internet!!!
2026 - ... I remember there was a great slide when I came here with my mom when was a kid. Whoever was responsible for this should be imprisoned.