Random thoughts about McDonald’s
T was out of town for a long weekend, and I didn’t want to use up vacation days just to sit around at home, so the boys and I went up the road to Baltimore overnight. We had a good trip, including visits to Port Discovery, the Aquarium, a real submarine, and a high school friend of mine. So when I asked the boys what their favorite parts of the trip were, D’s immediate answer was getting to go to TWO different McDonald’s. Great. At least N’s pick was the dolphin show.
The two McDonald’s were a study in contrasts. One was the shiny one that’s attached to the atrium of Port Discovery, the other a somewhat rundown one in downtown Baltimore. We got happy meals at both places, having surrendered to the cult of the cheap plastic toys. The current boxes have PollyWorld on two sides, Hummers on two. At the shiny McDonald’s, the boys got toy Hummers in them. I assume that there’s also a Polly toy, but we weren’t offered that option. (Please tell me that there weren’t gendered versions of the Pirates of the Carribean and Cars toys we’ve previously received.) At the rundown one, the boxes were the same, but the boys got a Lightning McQueen and some weird rocket-propelled dragon. I have absolutely no idea what that’s a tie-in to. But at the shiny one we were charged separately for the chocolate milk, while at the run-down one, they included it with the happy meals, and threw in free ice cream as a bonus.
I hate going to McDonald’s twice in two days, but I’m just not up to taking the boys to a real restaurant by myself. I have to spend too much energy keeping them sitting and quiet, and they’re probably going to wind up ordering chicken fingers anyway. I brought string cheese, crackers, yogurt, and muffins with us, which covered breakfast and snacks. Away from home, on my own, just isn’t the right time to draw a line in the sand on the nutrition battlefront. (And yes, it often feels like a battlefront.) And I’m willing to eat their salads, which is precisely why McDonald’s sells them — it makes fast food an acceptable fallback for people for me.
The friend I visited has a 2 1/4 year old. They’re pretty crunchy — cloth diapers, a hybrid car, and the kid has only had ice cream twice in his life. I felt sort of bad bringing my kids with their love of sweets and Happy Meals toys into their house. At least their son is young enough that I don’t think he quite understood what my guys were so excited about.
August 13th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
No time to write a long post detailing our extensive research on happy-meal toys right now, but probably the store without the current promotional toy had run out. Some stores/franchises seem to get more of the promotional toy than others, or have different franchise deals, and if you’re actually collecting a particular set of toys (good lord, am I admitting to this? yeegads, it appears I am), you learn which stores to avoid.
Now, whether there might be a demographic pattern to all of this is another, equally interesting question. But one I have less experience with, since we haven’t noticed a particular breakdown along racial or socio-economic lines.
As for the gendered toys, I know: yuck. It seems to happen only when the big movie tie-ins aren’t being offered. When they’re forced to come up with regular old toy tie-ins, sometimes the gendering thing happens. Again: yuck.
August 13th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Sadly we have had many McD’s visits in the last 2 weeks. The convenience won out. The Polly toy was bad bad bad. (I have a girl and a boy). The Hummer truck was better than I expected; my daughter agreed and wanted one the second time we went.
I am hoping the McD’s visits will be less frquent, but I am ready to try (again) the plan from a mom I met in yoga. Offer them a dollar if they don’t get the happy meal. (The dollars get saved by mom to buy something of actual value in the future.) No Happy Meal in my family means no fries and it often costs me more because they want grilled chicken sandwiches. But the grilled chicken seems healthier and with no toy in plastic, no incentive to stop eating to play. And no crappy toys to later feel guilty for throwing away.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:26 am
Wow – where you are hybrid cars are considered crunchy? That sounds a bit dismissive. Here in Los Angeles hybrids are considered a responsibility – the right thing to do for multiple reasons: a) showing the governement and the automotive industry there is a demand for these cars, even if it is just a stop gap, so that they will funnel more money into R&D for alternatives so we can stop buying gas guzzling cars which dump pollution into our air contributing to the high rate of asthma, cancers, and global warming. b)they cut harmful emissions by 80% so even if it is a perfect technology we are doing something TODAY to lesson the air pollution. c) the whole dependence on foreign oil/going to war to secure it – you know the drill on reason c – and it’s true.
Have you seen the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?” – put it on your Netflix queue.
My son and I make a habit of counting all the Prius we see. In a short drive of ten miles today we stopped counting at 35. I cannot wait for the time when hybrid cars aren’t considered crunchy -and I hope the way things are going with the horrific air pollution and greenhouse gasses that it is sooner rather than later. I long for people to stare when people purchase an enviromentally irresponsible car the way they do when they see people putting their children into cars without child safety seats.
When you drive around your neighborhoods how many hybrid cars do you see? or is it really just a novelty?
August 14th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Re hybrid cars & Mieke’s point:
Hybrid cars are definitely not a novelty in the metro DC area – at least on the VA side.
This is completely anecdotal, but I do remember hearing that the per capita hybrid car ownership is actually higher in Northern Virginia than anywhere in California . . . because having a hybrid car means that you could ride the HOV lanes into downtown DC, regardless of whether you actually had HO in your V. The legendary DC traffic means that HOV lanes cut down commute time significantly. Obviously, the time savings is greater the further out in the suburbs you go, so a lot of folks whose commutes would be 1.5 hours without the hybrid in the regular lanes get the hybrid to cut their commute to 50 minutes or so in the HOV lanes.
The state decided to end the program in June – primarily due to the HOV lanes starting to get too crowded and the danger of losing the incentive – meaning that if you bought your hybrid before the end of June, you could still get the plates and ride the HOV lanes, but if you bought your hybrid after June, you were out of luck. I heard about people who paid a few thousand dollars over dealer price for hybrids to get in under the June deadline.
One of those weird alignments of immediate (commuting time) self interest with enlightened self interest – I wonder how the demand and ratios will (or won’t) change now that the commuting time incentive has gone away.
Sluglines are another interesting spontaneous response to traffic and HOV lanes in DC – people basically hitch rides with strangers from commuter parking lots to get into the HOV lanes. Check out http://www.slug-lines.com/.
August 14th, 2006 at 9:49 am
My friends (both the ones we visited and others) refer to themselves as crunchy, so I don’t think of it as a putdown. I really don’t notice cars very much, so can’t comment on how common they are around here.
August 14th, 2006 at 11:34 am
We have the same incentive program here regarding HOV lanes but most of the people we were counting didn’t buy them for that reason (our HOV lanes are virtually non existant). There were federal and state tax breaks to cover the extra cost of the vehicles (since hybrid technology costs about $3,500 more), but they are not even CLOSE to the tax breaks people got when buying Hummers ($100,000 tax break makes the $100,000 car virtually free)-strange priorites to be sure.
The biggest incentive for people to buy hybrids is that they are actually doing something to lesson the terrible air pollution in Los Angeles. If every family in Los Angeles decidede to have one hybrid car the effects would be instant. My lease is up in a year and I will definately be getting a hybrid -hopefully the Toyota Hybrid plug-in (if they have perfected it by then) which will get 125 miles to the gallon.
I really encourage everyone to check out the movie WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR – it’s a powerful movie. The answer to the question is of course big oil and the American automakers (who are now suffering because they gave up on alternate fuel sources while the Japanese kept moving forward).
August 14th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Last time I saw any data, I believe the overall emissions from electric cars are similar to gas-powered vehicles … it’s just that the emissions are coming from the electric generation facility, not the individual car. Anyone know how well we’re doing as a nation in getting rid of all the coal-powered electric plants?
August 14th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Is anyone besides me concerned about the values being taught to our children by giving them HUMMER toys? Do we really want our children thinking that Hummers are a good thing to desire or to aspire to? We don’t go to McDonalds but if we did I would ask for a different toy besides the Hummer, and I would make sure they understand my reasons why.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
To be honest, I’m not worried about it. I don’t think my kids have any more (or less) desire for a real Hummer than they do for a real dump truck or digger.
August 14th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
Out shopping with my 2-year old, in an effort for convenience, I broke down and went through the McD’s drive through. I haven’t had fast food like that in 3 years – since reading Fast Food Nation and some other book about the horrible aspects of the beef industry. We don’t eat beef, so I went with chicken. I wonder if parents went the drive-through route and ate in the car or outside one can avoid the happy meal advertising. Needless to say the salt was extensive and we engorged ourselves on water the rest of the day. Not planning on visiting fast food anytime soon.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Jen,
Hybrid cars generate their own electricity and with regard to electric cars there’s this:
“It’s much easier to clean up one large stationary smokestack than millions of tiny mobile ones. In fact, where power is generated primarily from hydro sources, EVs are 98%-99.9% cleaner than equivalent internal combustion vehicles. Even where power comes primarily from coal, EVs are 55%-92% cleaner, depending on which gasses you are measuring.
And by the way, if you want a fair comparison to gas cars, you really need to include the pollution from the oil refineries, tanker ships, and tanker trucks.”
August 15th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Jen,
Hybrid cars generate their own electricity and with regard to electric cars there’s this:
“It’s much easier to clean up one large stationary smokestack than millions of tiny mobile ones. In fact, where power is generated primarily from hydro sources, EVs are 98%-99.9% cleaner than equivalent internal combustion vehicles. Even where power comes primarily from coal, EVs are 55%-92% cleaner, depending on which gasses you are measuring.
And by the way, if you want a fair comparison to gas cars, you really need to include the pollution from the oil refineries, tanker ships, and tanker trucks.”
August 15th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Thanks for the info, Mieke. I think I may have been confusing straight electric with hybrid.
I’m not against hybrids, just making the point that they’re still not necessarily using renewable energy. A total of only 12% of US energy comes from renewable resources such as wind, hydro, or solar. (Shameful.)
Being ecologically aware is maddeningly difficult right now, IMO. Because there are weak regulations on emissions from power plants, buying a hybrid may just be moving the pollution problem farther down the supply chain. It’s difficult for me not to start ranting about the Bush administration’s disdain for science at this point …
August 15th, 2006 at 10:14 am
I’m really interested in seeing how well the hybrids’ batteries hold up. If they only last 5 years, I don’t think they’re a sustainable solution to the energy problem (both because the gas savings will only pay for the additional cost for heavy drivers, and because of the environmental issues involved in disposing of them). If they last 10 years, I think they’ll be dominant within my lifetime.
August 15th, 2006 at 10:24 am
“To be honest, I’m not worried about it. I don’t think my kids have any more (or less) desire for a real Hummer than they do for a real dump truck or digger.”
It’s not so much about them wanting one. It’s that having Hummer toys in Happy Meals sends a signal to kids that ADULTS think Hummers are cool and desirable. Not all adults feel that way about Hummers. Hummers have come to symbolize an unhealthy obsession with materialism and greed. Just like I wouldn’t want my kids to have toy cigarettes, because I don’t want them to get the impression that adults think cigarettes are okay.
August 15th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
The biggest issue for me about hybrid or EV is that by purchasing/leasing them we sending a message to the “decision makers” that there is a demand for cars that don’t dump green house gases into the environment. Since the federal government is beholden to large oil they won’t listen to us, by creating a demand, industry will take respond and take the lead, producing better and more efficient vehicles -then government will follow (when of course they should be leading).
August 27th, 2006 at 5:04 am
Hmmm… There may be no point in me posting on this subject at this late date, but what the heck. I went to this post because I thought it might spark a conversation about kids and food. Interesting that it turned into a discussion about cars and their impact on the environment. It just goes to show you that a group of thoughtful, intelligent people can take a topic anywhere.
But, in case anyone out there is listening, I just wanted to comment on the food thing. I am now a step-mother to a seven-year-old who eats very little. It is an ongoing battle, partly because my fiance and I only have him every other weekend, and we can’t seem to make any progress in getting him to try new things. McDonalds is one of the few things he will eat, so he’s allowed to have it once during the weekend, although sometimes we don’t get there. When we do go, I can tell from his comments about the number of Happy Meal toys he already has that he goes quite often.
I know adults are supposed to be in control of what their kids eat, but it really is hard. And try explaining it to a friend who doesn’t have kids. It’s almost impossible to explain without coming off like you’re a wimp or you just don’t care. And I really don’t believe either are true. It’s just so hard to describe the many tiny compromises and adjustments that are made every day when dealing with kids. You make the best decision at any given time and move on from there. You let the kid go hungry, or you say, fine, you can have cereal for dinner. Sometimes it seems even more potentially damaging to make such a big deal about what the kid eats or doesn’t eat. Sometimes, you just want everyone to stop talking about food and its significance, before it becomes such a dominant issue.
The good thing is that everyone is finally getting tired of the bad eating habits and we are all going to sit down (biological parents, steps and grandparents) to discuss an action plan. It’s about time! We should have done this sooner, but better late than never. No matter what plan we come up with, though, it will always be difficult to get a kid to eat what they don’t want to eat, especially if they were not brought up from day one being encouraged to try everything.
That’s my two cents.
August 28th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Spunky, your post brought back some memories about my stepson and soda. This story is from 10 years ago. His mother is a dentist and ofcourse restricts alot of sugar dominant foods and drinks. We saw him about every 2-3 weeks on the weekend. My husband would buy his son what he wanted – which was soda. My husband did not communicate with his ex, but commonsense should be clear here. Needless to say, after polishing off an entire 2 liter bottle of sprite in one day this 5 year-old was bouncing off the walls. We asked him if he was allowed soda at home and no surprise, he said no. That was the last time he was allowed to drink that much.
August 29th, 2006 at 12:50 am
By the way, did anyone read that NY Times magazine article on the South Beach diet doctor and Florida schools in their effort to change the diet/health of children?