March 3, 2009

March 3, 2010

Fast food is not only recession-proof, it’s recession-enabled. From an AP news story last year, during the heart of the downturn:

But no matter what your financial situation, you might want to think twice (or thrice) before you use fast food as a way to stretch your budget. Why? Well take, for instance, Nonna’s Happy Meal Blog, from Baby Bites, an ezine for parents of picky eaters. Nonna purchased a Happy Meal in 2009 to “see if the claim that (it) will last for years is true.” Selected entries from this year-long relationship below:

March 3, 2009

My newly purchased Happy Meal smells yummy and it’s very colorful. I receive a PetShop virtual pet dog in a yellow plastic doggie carry-case, along with my child-size hamburger, small fries, and a soft drink. On one side of the cardboard box the meal comes in are cutouts for a pet shop window and door. What little girl wouldn’t absolutely love it? The boy’s side of the box has a Spider-Man scene. The Spider-Man side states, “Meet the spectacular Spider-Man in McWorld at HappyMeal.com and go on your own superhero adventure!” WOW what fun. As colorful as my Happy Meal is, the food is mostly colorless. French fries are made from starchy white potatoes and a hockey puck-size brown hamburger is served on a mini-white-bread bun. There’s no lettuce, cheese, or otherwise healthful topping, just a dab of ketchup and a slice of pickle.

March 4

Happy Meal greets me as I walk into my office this morning. It’s perched on a shelf behind my desk and there is a faint smell of French fries as I enter the room. My husband is concerned about the odor. I ask, “What do ya mean?” After all it smells yummy. He says, “What about when it putrefies, decomposes, and turns rancid?” I answer, “That’s the point of my experiment. It’s NOT supposed to decompose, only a natural food would do that! If it does, I’ll move it into a glass container, to control any unpleasant smell. Then, I’ll have more to report.

March 5

Day three, my cheery Happy Meal’s yummy smell is hardly noticeable as I come into my office. I can’t help but think about the hidden ingredient in much of McDonalds’ food. It’s even in their fries …MSG. MSG is an excitotoxin, which over-stimulate brain cells to the point that they die. Many people experience headaches when this occurs. MSG is an excitatory neuro-transmitter or “excitotoxin.” Excitotoxins are chemical transmitters allowing brain cells to communicate. Unfortunately, excitotoxins over-stimulate your brain cells and they die. It’s a toxic substance. As you would guess, children are most at risk from ingesting MSG in Happy Meals. It can pass the blood brain barrier and even the placental barrier, affecting unborn children. Morgan Spurlock, from the movie SuperSize Me, experienced extreme headaches on his McDonald’s diet. In his movie and book, he says his health team was at a loss for the reason. It’s a shame they missed the connection to MSG.

March 6

YIKES, I’m becoming a regular McDonalds’ costumer! Yes, I went back there today and purchased a second tiny hamburger. Yesterday, I realized my experiment hamburger had ketchup and a slice of pickle on it. I was afraid these two toppings would alter the result, so I went back and purchased a PLAIN tiny burger. It cost me another 89 cents, plus 6 cents tax. Now, I have a control burger without toppings, albeit three days fresher. While I was there, I checked out what it would cost to purchase a small order of fries: $1, plus 7 cents tax. That means that the FOOD and PAPER portion of my original Happy Meal cost me $2.02 and the toy $1.00.

March 8

It’s day five, and somehow I don’t feel consoled by McDonald’s website reassurances: “McDonald’s offers a range of menu options to help meet your family’s nutrition needs. When it comes to eating with your kids at McDonald’s, you can feel good knowing that our Happy Meals and Mighty Kids Meals contain important nutrients that growing kids need. Many of the foods we serve at McDonald’s are the same trusted brands you might purchase for your family at your local grocery store.

My Happy Meal looks pretty much the same as the day I purchased it. The only difference I can tell is the ketchup and the pickle are being absorbed into the mini-white bun. Of course, the plain burger I purchased looks the same, so do the fries. If this were real food, there should be some decomposition…

Could the lack of decomposition be because of trans fat? I thought McDonalds said they no longer use trans fat, but according to the McDonlds website their French fries are prepared in hydrogenated soybean oil, corn oil, or canola oil. Any hydrogenated oil is a trans fat!…

March 10

Today, is day 7. My Happy Meal still looks happy. The fries haven’t changed a bit, although the French fry smell is faint. The hamburger itself looks like it did on day one. The ketchup and slice of pickle have dried. The mini-white bun is now hard and has split. If you look closely at my original photo at the top of this blog, you can see a vertical crease in the bun. It looked as if it had been squished or bent before the patty was placed on it. The split is in the crease. (My second PLAIN Burger, purchased three days after is still perfect.)

March 16

My Happy Meal is 12 days old. I’m taking it off my shelf, just for a little peek to see how it’s doing. Ya’d think that there would be some sort of decomposition going on by now. I don’t see any…nope none at all. My Happy Meal still looks perky.

March 19

It’s too bad that even in the midst of the recession, parents are finding the financial wherewithal to keep their kids supplied with Happy Meals. February’s sales were up 5.4 percent above last year. January’s global comparable sales leaped 7.1 percent. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if parents cooked whole foods at home? Not only would they save during these tight financial times, but their kids would be healthier, too.

March 31

I’m taking my Happy Meal on its first field trip. It’s going to be my show-and-tell for tonight’s presentation to preschool moms in Littleton, Colorado. No one will believe my Happy Meal is one day shy of four week’s old! It looks as good as it did on day one.

April 29

Since I began this blog, I’ve written another post about Monosodium Glutamate. MSG is a common ingredient in McDonald’s food. Click Here to read “Hidden Toxin in Food.” Unappetizing as it is, my Happy Meal is just as perky as the day I bought it, nearly two months ago!

December 14

I wish I could say that my Happy Meal has changed in some way. But it looks pretty much the same nine months after I purchased it. The bread is crusty. That’s all!

March 3, 2010 – Happy birthday to my Happy Meal

I know it’s hard to believe. Time flies, doesn’t it? My eyes tear when I think today, March 3, is my Happy Meal’s first birthday. They grow up so fast, don’t they?

I purchased a Happy Meal, not to eat, but to observe and blog about. Yes, I bought a Happy Meal and then placed it on my office shelf, right behind me and my computer. It sat on my shelf for a year as a silent witness to our fast food industry.

It smelled delicious for a few days. I’d get a whiff of those yummy French fries every time I walked into my office. After a week or so, you could hardly smell it. My husband worried that when the food began to decompose, there would be a terrible odor in our home. He also worried the food would attract ants and mice. He questioned my sanity.

NOPE, no worries at all. My Happy Meal is one year old today and it looks pretty good. It NEVER smelled bad. The food did NOT decompose. It did NOT get moldy, at all.

This morning, I took it off my shelf to take a birthday photo. The first year is always a milestone. I gave it one of my world famous Nonna hugs as we’ve been office mates for a year now!

…Because Colorado has an arid climate, over the year the moisture has been slowly pulled from the Happy Meal. The bread is crusty and if you look closely, you will see a crack across the top. The hamburger has shrunk a bit and still resembles a hockey puck. Yet, the French fries look yummy enough to eat. I never had an odor problem, after a couple of weeks, I couldn’t even smell the fries.

Picky eaters universally love junk foods. They won’t touch veggies and sometimes refuse to eat the food their moms prepare. Out of desperation, parents give in and purchase the food their picky eaters will eat…junk food.

The next time you’re tempted to purchase a Happy Meal for your child, think about these photos. Food is SUPPOSED to decompose, go bad and smell foul…eventually. When I was a kid, I remember our garbage pail for the left over food scraps was kept by our back door. After a couple of days, flies deposited their larvae (maggots) in the meat. When I would lift the lid, I would see the recently hatched maggots wiggling on the putrid mess. A fly never bothered to land on the tiny hamburger patty on my office shelf.

Food is broken down into it’s essential nutrients in our bodies and turned into fuel. Our children grow strong bodies, when they eat real food. Flies ignore a Happy Meal and microbes don’t decompose it, then your child’s body can’t properly metabolize it either. Now you know why it’s called “junk food.”

I think ants, mice and flies are smarter than people, because they weren’t fooled. They never touched the Happy Meal. Children shouldn’t either.

I was in CVS the other day – looking for Good ‘n Plenty, if you must know – when my eye was grabbed by a bright blue box that held a fish plaque that plays the McDonald’s “Give Me Back That Filet-o-Fish” jingle.

Only $19.99!

If people are back to frittering away good money on objects like this, then perhaps The Great Recession is over.

Yay!

Around the world, though, the Golden Arches is still a golden goose. September sales were up 5% as “consumers sought low-cost meals,” according to Forbes.

But we don’t need a quarterly report to tell us that McDonald’s is still going strong in the U.S. We know that from this post from the blog Weather Sealed:

…just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead. To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.

So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and…

Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!

So where, exactly, in the U.S. would you be so far away from a Quarter Pounder with Cheese that you’d be in no danger of succumbing to the temptation to buy one? (Note: Vegetarians and Michael Pollan fanatics excluded from this thought experiment.)

Well, seems like your best best is in South Dakota.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

145 miles? That wouldn’t stop some people…

McDonald’s Talk, hosted on LiveJournal, provides a forum for those who toil under the golden arches to grouse about their employer. Complaints of poor pay, unfair managers, grueling working conditions, and most of all clueless customers are all served up in supersized helpings, complete with a side of nonplussed, WTF attitude.

McSampler:

Holiday pay…or lack thereof

I had to work for nine hours on July 4th this year and as a result, I missed seeing much of my family…(and) it turns out that in Texas, no employer is required to compensate employees with Holiday Pay…So basically, the owner of the store I work at stated that she offered other benefits which is why she doesn’t offer holiday pay. However, those benefits aren’t so great in my opinion.

1. Free uniforms. (Are you serious? All we get is one shirt, and we have to buy the pants and shoes ourselves….so no that’s not a benefit.)

2. Free meals during your shift. (This isn’t anything special, either. Let’s say I don’t want to eat fries. The policy is posted on the wall in the back and it states specifically that we may have any three menu items as long as the third item is a drink and ANY two food items as long as it doesn’t add up to 6.50….but when I tried to get a big mac and a sundae, I was told I couldn’t. Not really fair, eh?)

yeah that’s it. Seriously — how does that qualify as benefits?

counterfeit money

On Monday, My store manager got a call from the bank that there was a counterfeit $100 bill in saturdays deposit. After she gave a call to the manager who closed that night … I am told that he said it came from MY drawer. I worked saturday and was off on monday,tuesday, and wednesday, and came in on thursday and have not yet seen my store manager.. They told me that she is going to make me pay it…

grill

we’re a 24/7 mcdonalds, my shifts range anywhere from 2-10 6-10 5-10 along those lines…well almost every night i work i am in grill and it takes its toll…tonight i worked 5-10 and my other grill people left at 7 so it was me from 7 to 10 by myself and if anyone does grill by thereselves they know why im complaining. between dropping food making food cleaning and everything you have absolutley no time to even rest for a second…i feel i had to rant about this because im exhausted and have never done grill by myself before today…

I think an O/O is breaking the law…

…(the owner/operator) recently made a change to the T-Red policy…T-Red stands for “Total Reduction” and is caused when an employee takes the total and then removes an item, resulting in a smaller total… (The owner) has changed the definition of T-Red to mean ANY change in the order whether it’s been totaled or not… He has rigged the computer to track these “T-Reds” and he displays them publicly in the crew room for everyone to see. It’s a sham because even if a worker rings up 20 doubles he isnt losing any money because the worker fixes it right then and so the grill does not make them….His service crew are in constant fear of losing their jobs because he has told the managers to aggressively write up any employee that gets allot of these “T-Reds”. Today he fired a girl for this….Further, he is using this fabricated rule to create documentation with which he can conveniently fire anyone he wants because every crew person gets written up (two long time employees have been suspended for this that I know of and have confirmed) because it is the customers that change their order all the time and ultimatly they who create these new T-Reds….

I emailed McCorp but did so anonymously (I tried to call but they said that if its about a specific store they would pass it to the O/O so no help there)

Charging for sauces?

My store charges for sauces if people want an insane amount… We’re only supposed to give two sauces for 10 piece nuggets and one sauce for 4 and 10. I have no problem giving an extra sauce or two if asked, but some people are nuts with what they want. Typical scene: EIGHT sauces for a ten piece. Do you baste your nuggets for crap’s sake? A woman today came through and got a 10 piece and two 6 piece Happy Meals, and tells me FOUR sweet n sour, FOUR honey mustard and FOUR bbq. Me: No freaking way, sweetheart.

Ugh

So, one of my managers has been treating me like hell lately. We used to get along really well, I don’t know what happened…(One) saturday morning… it was pretty slow. and she was yelling at someone because their shirt was wrinkled. then she came over to me, and out of nowhere, she was like, “You have facial hair.” and i said i knew, and i forgot to shave (it was barely visible, i don’t grow much facial hair), and then she said “I’m going to have to send you home to shave.” she didn’t send the other guy home to iron his shirt… i never have any trouble with any other managers.

newbie to McDonald’s

I’m new to McDonalds ( I’ve worked like 4 days. ) Once on front counter, Once in presenting, and once half in counter half in presenting. I’m horrible with the register. Finding everything they want then adding the coke or what ever drink, they don’t want that take it off… special orders, im super slow.

But right now I’m only getting a 3 hour shift like 3 times or 2 times a week, will I get more? They seem to like me

Finally, an exchange between one of the U.S. McDonald’s workers and one from Finland:

Finland: Is the work atmosphere in the stores in the US of A so different from what it is here? Because I’m used to being able to either confront the manager in question, or just bitch to the GM about it. Or is it because our jobs are more secure here? Can you get fired from McD’s there if you complain about a manager being out of line? Because here, it seems no one has problems with snapping back if a manager is being unreasonably aggressive/catty/whiny/whatever.

U.S.: pretty much yeah your jobs are more secure, and well maybe you all have more respect for other human beings…here you CAN get fired or transfered or lied to if you do not agree with the way your managers say and do things… i pretty much had to learn to keep my mouth shut just so i can keep my job…

Finland: Wow :/