McDonald’s is one of the biggest companies in the world.
The Golden Arches sells its products at over 40,000 different locations around the globe,
and a 2012 report by the BBC found it’s the second biggest private employer in the
world with 1.9 million employees!
It's second only to Walmart.
McDonald's is huge.
Everyone in the world loves Big Macs and Quarter Pounders and Chicken Selects and Chicken McNuggets
and their particularly crispy French fries.
However, despite the fast-food chain's popularity, there are a lot of dark secrets that the company
is either hiding or people just ignore, because they love the food so darn much.
So here are 10 facts about McDonald's that just might shock you!
McDonald’s Has Millions of Employees
With 1.9 million employees, more people have a job at a McDonald's restaurant than live
in the city of Phoenix, Arizona.
It's also more than the population of Philadelphia, the population of San Antonio, the population
of San Diego - the point is, it's a lot of people.
They have a tone of employees.
Like, a huge amount.
The second biggest amount of any private employer on the planet after Walmart, actually.
McDonald's is a gigantic company.
That can't be stressed enough.
They have more locations across the globe than Wendy's, Taco Bell, Burger King, and
Arby's all combined.
McDonald's opened almost as many new locations in 2013 as Chipotle have in their entire chain.
They reportedly sell 75 hamburgers every second.
Every second!
Can you believe that?
That's 4,500 hamburgers every minute.
It's 270,000 hamburgers an hour!
And 6,480,000 a day, 45,360,000 a week, 2,358,720,000 a year - that's a heck of a lot of hamburgers!
That's how they can afford to employ more people than the population of Phoenix.
And funnily enough, the first McDonald's restaurant with the Golden Arches logo on it was in Phoenix.
It's fun how things can sometimes come full circle (or two semi-circles) like that.
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McDonald’s is the world’s biggest toy distributor
If someone asked you what the biggest toy distribution company in the world is, you
might guess Hasbro or Lego or Mattel or Playskool or something like that.
And then if someone told you that the company was not exclusively a toy company, then you
might guess Disney probably.
But you'd probably take a few guesses before landing on McDonald's.
And yet, if you did guess McDonald's, you'd be right!
This is all thanks to the toys that it gives away with its Happy Meals - to be fair, these
are just crummy little plastic things, but because they come with a meal and you don't
expect anything out of them, they can still be a whole lot of fun - Anyways, because of
this McDonald’s is the biggest distributor of toys on the planet.
There's a toy in 15% of all the sales of McDonald's food.
That means that, going off the rough estimation that they serve 69 million meals a day, McDonald's
distributes 900,000 toys every single day.
The Golden Arches logo
The Golden Arches logo is the defining image of the McDonald's brand and one of the most
recognizable symbols on the planet.
And yet, no one really knows where it came from.
Two brothers named Richard and Maurice McDonald realized in the 1950s as their business was
growing that they would need to design a really catchy logo, so that their customers could
recognize when they were passing by a McDonald's restaurant.
Brother Richard hashed out a quick sketch that involved two semi-circles.
Then architect Stanley Clark Meston was selected to turn the rough sketch into a logo design
out of a total of four interviewees.
Meston and his assistant Charles Fish developed this little doodle of two semi-circles into
what would eventually become the McDonald's logo as we know it today.
But no one knows whose idea it really was.
Architectural expert Alan Hess said that Meston and Fish turned the design into "a tapered,
sophisticated parabola, with tense, springing lines conveying movement and energy."
However, he added, "who first suggested the parabola is unclear."
So, they've got one of the most recognizable images ever created and they don't know who
to attribute it to.
Mickey D’s once owned Chipotle
It's hard to believe that McDonald's once owned the Mexican fast food restaurant chain
Chipotle, but it's true.
Back when Chipotle was starting out in the ‘90s and they only had fourteen locations,
McDonald's invested in what they saw as a "distraction" from their own business and
helped it to expand its reach to a lovely 460 locations.
Now, since McDonald's sold its 90% share of the company back in 2006, Chipotle has well
over 1,000 locations and is still going strong.
Chipotle COO Gretchen Selfridge has since opened up about the McDonald's shareholders'
input into their business.
According to Selfridge, the top McDonald's brass were basically trying to turn Chipotle
into Mickey Ds.
They wanted to implement all the features and selling points of a McDonald's restaurant
into the Chipotle restaurants, but Selfridge says that the Chipotle bosses just weren't
interested in doing any of them.
Selfridge explained in an interview with Bloomberg, "Bless their hearts, McDonald's had a lot
of great suggestions, and we were always polite about it.
They really wanted us to do drive-thrus.
They really wanted us to do breakfast.
But we just really didn't do any of that."
McDonald’s and the hot coffee lawsuit
In a highly publicized 1994 court case termed Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants,
79 year-old lady named Stella Liebeck sued McDonald's for serving her a cup of coffee
that was too hot.
Liebeck was promised $2.86 million by the original trial, but only ended up getting
$640,000 in the end.
In the media, it was used as a prime example of frivolous litigation and described by ABC
News as "the poster child of excessive lawsuits."
However, as argued by a 2011 HBO documentary movie about the case and legal scholar Jonathan
Turley, the lawsuit was anything but frivolous, since the coffee was about 190° Fahrenheit.
Liebeck spent eight days in hospital and underwent skin grafts after spilling it on herself.
You probably remember this incident being parodied on an episode of Seinfeld, but it’s
not exactly an accurate representation—we sure don’t remember Kramer needing skin
grafts!
Chicken McNuggets
This should come as no surprise, but there is hardly any chicken content in a Chicken
McNugget.
The McDonald's website claims that their nuggets are "made with 100% USDA Grade A chicken,"
but there's no accounting for how much of that is actually quality breast meat, and
one report has that figure at just 45%.
So, less than half of an innocent little Chicken McNugget is made of real, good quality chicken
meat.
Yikes.
And not only do the Chicken McNuggets contain barely any chicken, but they're also rammed
with chemicals that give you the impression that they're “fresh" pieces of chicken.
The company has to do this because they keep them in the freezer until they run out of
McNuggets out in the kitchen and someone orders some.
Seriously, imagine what Gordon Ramsay would have to say if he had a poke around in the
kitchen of a McDonald's restaurant.
He'd have a heart attack!
TBHQ is one of the chemicals used to play God and unnaturally preserve the McNuggets,
and it contains acetone, alcohol, and ethyl acetate.
Studies have found that TBHQ is totally unsafe for consumption.
It leads to, among other things, vision impairment, liver enlargement, and paralysis.
So, apparently, if you eat enough Chicken McNuggets, you'll go blind, your liver will
explode, and you will be paralyzed.
McDonald’s Fatty salads
When Mickey D’s first started out, we didn’t have the same ideas about healthy eating that
we have today.
This is back in a time where vegetables came in cans, broccoli was exotic, and potatoes
counted as a salad.
But even by those standards, the Golden Arches never presented itself as a health food spot.
It was a burger joint.
If you wanted healthy food, like a salad or some fruit, then you had to go to a different
place - a place that did specialize in those things.
But add a few decades, a bunch of marketplaces where McDonald’s is the central affordable
option, and a general movement towards health-conscious eating, and the fast-food giant was convinced
to offer some green veggie options.
But don’t be fooled—this salad dressing is pure window dressing.
The next time you're in McDonald's, if you're trying to be conscientious about health concerns
and want to go for the (slightly) healthier option, you'd be better off getting a Big
Mac than a salad.
Seriously, the salads at McDonald's contain more calories, fat, and salt than the hamburgers!
The kale salad at McDonald's literally contains more calories, fat, and sodium than a Double
Big Mac burger.
McDonald's Monopoly scam
The McDonald's Monopoly game is a lot of addictive fun.
Players head to McDonald's as often as they can in order to get their hands on as many
game pieces and prizes as they can.
They keep little collections in the hopes of winning a ton of money and stuff.
But for years, the more astute McDonald's customers have been questioning whether this
game is legit or just another marketing ploy that’s ultimately a scam.
Although the company claims to have "a rigorous and thorough security protocol in place" to
prevent Monopoly-related scams from happening, still, of course, they do.
Between 1995 and 2000, an outside contractor named Jerome P. Jacobson who worked for Simon
Marketing, the firm that McDonald's hired to help with their Monopoly promotions, took
all the most valuable game pieces from the McDonald's Monopoly game and shared the proceeds
among his buddies and co-workers.
Over the course of those five years, while McDonald's customers were falling for the
marketing ploy and buying as many meals as they could in a desperate attempt to win prizes,
Jacobson and his cohorts had already made off with all of the best ones and banked more
than $24 million.
Go to jail.
Go directly to jail.
Do not pass go.
Do not collect $200.
Big Macs are dessert
You know how there continue to be pickles on Big Macs, even though nobody likes them?
Well, apparently, that's because if they weren't on there, the percentage of sugar in a Big
Mac would technically classify it as a dessert.
There are 8 grams of sugar in a Big Mac.
The McDonald's website claims that this sugar is in the Big Mac for the bun only.
"Most of this sugar is found in the bun” it says.
“Sugar is a traditional ingredient used when making bread, providing food for the
yeast and assisting with the browning, texture, and volume of the bun.”
To be fair, this does make some sense, since a Big Mac is mostly bun.
It's not just the bun on the top and the bottom - there's a middle piece between the two patties,
too, if you recall.
Still, 8 grams of sugar in three pieces of bread?
That seems excessive.
So, imagine that.
Big Mac burgers have been sweetened so much that they are virtually a dessert.
People will still eat them with that knowledge, because they're tasty, but it’s pretty weird
that we’re having dessert for dinner.
The suggestive golden arches
The Golden Arches logo of the McDonald's fast food chain is one of the most widely recognized
brand images on the planet.
In fact, it's recognized by even more people than the cross - like, you know, that cross.
John Lennon is often misquoted as saying that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but McDonald's
- or at least its logo - might actually be bigger than Jesus.
It's kinda been statistically proven at this point.
But a clinical psychologist named Louis Cheskin has a rather unusual idea about why that logo
sticks in our minds so very very well.
He believes that the Golden Arches on a McDonald's restaurant are essentially, to the unconscious
parts of our minds, "mother McDonald's breasts" that set off "Freudian applications to the
subconscious mind of the consumer."
So, in other words, the Golden Arches on a McDonald's outlet remind us of our mom's boobs
and therefore make us feel safe about going in there and purchasing some food - we feel
nurtured by "mother McDonald's breasts" in the same way that we used to feel nurtured
by our own mother's breasts when we were babies.
That's some deep, dark stuff for a simplistic, recognizable brand image.
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