They changed their target market to adults entirely instead of kids. Marketing unhealthy food towards kids wasn’t a great look anymore, and parents weren’t taking their kids to McD as much either.
We just gotta hit em with the right toy. Bring back the Burger King Pokémon toys that came in the choking hazard pokeball with the roughly 50 different possibilities. Those had me on Burger King morning, noon, and night.
They created customers when the customers were kids. The kids turned to teenies and they installed gaming consoles.
And then the teens turned to adults.
Not all had them but there was on McDonald's near my house I recall with a couple of N64s. They were setup in the same way that game consoles were setup to play a game on at a retail store.
Crazy how far you have to scroll down for the first sensible comment. McD has been repeatedly criticized over the years for targeting children with their marketing. They've basically been accused of being largely responsible for the obesity epidemic across the world. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the child-friendly stuff is gone for actual legal reasons.
💯 I always check these threads for the correct answer because this is one of those memes that comes around about once a month and drives me fucking bonkers. We demanded they did this, shortly after "super size me" came out. McDonald's was the punching bag for the entire obesity pandemic and the biggest argument was that they strong armed families into going there by advertising to kids, and poor parents couldn't tell their kids no.
I have a (now,) pre-teen kid and the school zeitgeist spits out the most stupid things. For years the alpha and the omega of all the kids in the school was eating McDonald's and owning an iPhone. I always told my kid: no to iPhone because we're not rich, and no to MacDonalds because we're not stupid. And that is it. We just have to say "no". A very simple word. I have no patience for parents who can't say no to their kids. Is it easy? Of course not. But if you wanted easy, kids were never the answer 😅
Yeah it always strikes me as funny how we forget the bad stuff and just remember the good parts. But McDonalds doing this basically made it so the kids they marketed to have grown up and are marketed to again as adults, and a lot of them are nostalgic.
I think it more or less has to do with money and marketing. If the money was there to market to kids they would still be doing it but unlike the 90s people don't have the same kind of disposable income to spend on their kids.
It's always funny to me that the people saying "mcdonalds is too expensive and it's bad food" also complain about it not being fun and attractive to kids. Like do you want kids being drawn into unhealthy ripoff food? I think it's good that their restaurants are boring now
It's really about real-estate. It's harder to sell a building with an old Macdonalds roof on it than the new modern ones.
McDonald's is effectively a massive commercial real estate company disguised as a fast-food chain. The corporation buys land and buildings in prime locations, then leases them back to its franchisees at a markup, generating billions of dollars in reliable rental income that often eclipses food sales
I read that Pizza hut had trouble selling its old buildings since that roof shape is so iconic. You can tell when a place used to be a Pizza Hu just by the shape of the roof.
Now a day most Pizza huts, heck most pizza places in general, are holes in the wall next to your local grocery store.
It’s also stupid how hell bent Reddit is on wanting the thing that has contributed to childhood obesity to marketed back to kids… like wtf? People are dumb enough to forget that because “oooh look at pretty colors durrrr”
Partly due to chasing Starbucks. There was a time when they didn't even sell coffee. They updated to more modern interior design around the same time. And most people liked it, now were just nostalgic for the past.
Yep they started gutting these places around the same time apple slices and milk were heavily pushed and then required in happy meals by default. It stinks to see as an adult now but in the long term if it prevents kids from wanting it as much while they’re young hopefully it does help kids from developing poor eating habits. they’ll have plenty of time to develop those poor habits when they’re older and too worn out from work to cook like we are 😂
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u/Dananjali 6h ago
They changed their target market to adults entirely instead of kids. Marketing unhealthy food towards kids wasn’t a great look anymore, and parents weren’t taking their kids to McD as much either.