For a company that specializes in food, folks, and fun, it's pretty amazing how shady McDonald's
actually is.
You might think it's no big deal to walk in, order a burger, get it in two minutes, and
then leave.
But apparently such a thing can only be accomplished by bending (or outright breaking) every rule
in the book.
So grab a seat ‘cause take a look at the top things that McDonalds doesn’t want you
to know.
Chicken Abuse
According to 2015 footage released by activist group Mercy For Animals, McDonald's works
with farms that openly, brazenly, and possibly gleefully abuse their chickens before turning
them into almost-food.
The farm that Mercy For Animals targeted, T&S Farm, was recorded beating chickens to
death with spiked clubs, with the occasional curb-stomping just for variety's sake.
The workers knew full well what they were doing, with one outright asking the cameraman,
"you don't work for PETA, do you?"
like a kid caught with his hand in an extremely bloody cookie jar.
Since the video, McDonald's has disavowed the chicken-killing farm, giving the usual
PR responses to assuage as many disgusted customers as possible.
But not even the slickest press release can answer three burning questions: how long has
this happened for, why did it take this video for a major company to realize bludgeoning
food to death for fun is evil, and since it's been over a year already, are they secretly
working with that farm again?
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Worker Overtime at the Golden Arches
For a long time, McDonald's understood what Thanksgiving and Christmas meant, and so they
allowed their workers to enjoy both the holidays and all the turkey they can stomach.
But in 2012 the food giant started opening on the holidays.
This was always a thing company-owned stores did, but now they were "urging" (really forcing)
franchisees to do the same.
And yes, if you've hit McDonald's either of these days, you're officially part of the
problem.
Commence feeling bad…now.
That's pretty sucky of them, but at least franchise owners can pay holiday overtime.
Workers at the company-owned stores, unfortunately, are fresh out of luck—McD's flat-out refuses
to pay them extra for working on a day that most of us believe only emergency responders
should work on.
They hide behind the excuse that, because workers volunteer to work those days, they're
not entitled to overtime pay.
Ya, because when you're dirt-broke, struggling to raise a family, and living from minimum-wage
paycheck to minimum-wage paycheck, you definitely have the option of not volunteering to get
paid for something.
Unhealthy healthy options at Mickey D’s
For some reason, enough people hit McDonald's with their health in mind for the company
to make mad bank selling food meant to trim your waistline on the cheap.
That sounds great, except that it's wrong in every conceivable way.
The chicken kale Caesar salad, for example, clocks in at a cool 730 calories, 53 grams
of fat, and 1,400 milligrams of sodium—numbers that absolutely should not be attached to
a bunch of leaves.
For comparison's sake, a Double Big Mac has 680 calories and 1,340 mgs of sodium, meaning
they're touting a healthy salad that's unhealthier than their unhealthiest hunk of cow.
But don't worry, you can skip the dressing, eat a plain dry salad, and save 200 whole
calories, so now it's only unhealthier than a single Big Mac.
Small victories are still victories.
Ronald McDonald the tax cheat
According to the wonderfully titled Golden Dodges: How McDonald's Avoids Paying Its Fair
Share of Tax, between 2009 and 2013, McDonald's avoided paying over $1.8 billion in taxes.
The company used a series of barely legal loopholes to shift profits from whatever country
they earned them in, to low-tax havens in countries they didn't.
This seems to be especially true overseas, where McDonald's is looking at charges that
they stole a billion euros from the European Union by sending their profits through Luxembourg,
a country barely big enough to physically store all of that money.
McDonald’s trademark lawsuits
Once you get greedy enough, any threat to even a dime of your profit must be fought
tooth-and-nail, even if it means losing more money to lawyers than you ever would've to
the "competition."
It's the principle that counts.
In this case, we have McDonald's going after literally any small business that uses "Mc"
or "Mac," because that's their thing, and they don't customers getting confused by seeing
it anywhere else.
The customer is apparently both always right, and the dumbest people on the planet.
Sometimes, they sue fast food joints, like McJoy in the Philippines or Mac Dooglas in
Colombia (which was destroying McDonald's bottom line obviously with their three whole
restaurants in a tiny village no one outside the tiny village had ever even heard of.)
But other times they just get petty, like when they sued a coffee shop called McCoffee—which
had that name for 17 years—until they finally agreed to change their name and stop leeching
the tens of dollars from poor little McDonald's.
Though probably the stupidest case was when they went after a hot dog stand called McAllan.
Like, a single hot dog stand, which is a product McDonald's doesn't even serve.
That's like Budweiser suing some kid's lemonade stand.
McDonald’s lost that case, after the judge returned with a verdict of "really?"
But usually, McDonald's wins hands-down in these setups, valiantly beating back the evil
little guy with the almighty power of Unlimited Wealth.
Minimum Wage and McRobots
Does McDonald's food actually taste good?
Who cares?
It's cheap!
One of the primary ways that McDonald's pulls that off is by paying the majority of its
employees the least that it's legally allowed to do so.
In most places, that's right at, or close to, the federal standard of just $7.25 an
hour, an amount economic experts refer to as "a complete tease."
However, many cities and states have recently opted to raise their local minimum wages,
in the hopes that workers can finally afford more than a closet inside a studio apartment.
In Arizona and Colorado, it's to $12 an hour, Washington $13.50 per hour, and for LA workers
to 15 bucks an hour.
These states that have the audacity to pay workers a living wage could severely cut into
McDonald's bottom line, so the company has responded by threatening to replace its employees
with robots: specifically, self-service kiosks.
Robots work for free!
At least, until the Uprising.
Anyways, Here's how it works: Customers come into a McDonald's, enter their order on a
touchscreen, the company CEO buys another 500-foot yacht and vacations in Bermuda.
RoboClerk then sends the order to the kitchen, where an actual human—for now—puts the
food together.
They'll roll these kiosks out nationally and internationally if they prove to be efficient
and cost-effective in test runs.
What a golden time the future will be, when a screen instead of a human will ask "do you
want fries with that?"
McDonald’s burgers do not decompose
Burgers taste best when they're hot and freshly prepared, but if you order those things at
Mickey D's and for some reason can't get to them for a while, like say, a few months,
don't worry about it: they're still "fine."
Or at least, they look fine.
Eerily, McDonald's small hamburgers don't seem to rot at a regular pace.
Or much at all, really.
In 2008, a health blogger named Karen Hanrahan posted a photo of a McDonald's hamburger … that
she'd bought in 1996 and saved, just to see what would happen.
What happened is that, after twelve years, it looked the same as it looked in 1996, and
it also looked the same as a brand-new McDonald's hamburger.
Hanrahan argued that the immortality of the burger must be due to the vast array of preservatives
in the burger, which rendered it "chemical food" that lacked any sort of natural nutrition.
But according to food scientist J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, writing for Serious Eats, regular McDonald's
hamburgers don't decompose normally because they don't — and can't — dry out.
A typical McBurger is a non-perishable food on the level of dried beans, saltines, and
other pantry staples.
Paranoid of the apocalypse?
Buying a fallout shelter?
Install a McDonald's.
Wasteland be damned, you'll never starve.
How is this possible, though?
Simple — there's nothing to dry.
A small McDonald's hamburger is thin but flat, making for a high surface area-to-volume ratio.
Then, it's cooked until well-done on a hot grill, sucking out all the tasty, delicious,
mortal moisture.
No moisture means no bacteria—decaying agents—can propagate.
Ever.
And thus, the food lasts forever.
Basically, you're eating a mummy.
McDonald’s tax breaks
The 2015 launch of all-day breakfast at McDonald's led to two things: the meaningless of time,
with regards to breakfast being a morning thing, and increased sales at McDonald's nationwide.
During the last quarter of that year, the company raked in a whopping $6.22 billion,
attributable largely to the novelty of being served an English muffin with eggs on it just
in time for Jeopardy! That being said, it's much easier for a company to rake in the profits
if they're getting free money from the government so it can play with its menu and experiment
with late-evening hash browns.
And they do — between 2003 and 2013, McDonald's got subsidies from 42 state and city governments
totalling nearly $4 million.
McDonald's even got a piece of the big federal "bailout" package in 2008 and 2009: a $203
million piece to be exact.
McDonald's: Too big to fail, and as long as government fatcats get literally fat off of
midnight snack McGriddles, it never, ever will.
McDonald's ground beef
McDonald's store signs claim "billions and billions served," which means the number of
burgers sold as much as it does the customers who have eaten those burgers.
To serve that many burgers, McDonald's has to slaughter and prepare an incredibly high
volume of cattle in incredibly large and sophisticated meat-processing facilities.
McDonald's calls this burger creation the "blending process," and it somehow gets more
appetizing when you learn the step-by-step process.
In a nutshell, just so, so many cows are slaughtered.
Their meat gets mixed together, and then formed into patties, but it's done so haphazardly
that a single beef patty may contain the meat of up to 100 different cows.
A Bessie is a Bessie is a Bessie, apparently.
But hey, even if you eat nothing but McDonald's burgers, you're still eating a wide variety
of food from all over the globe.
McDonald's and the Hot Coffee Lawsuit
It's the case most associated with "frivolous lawsuits" or an overly litigious society:
the woman who successfully sued McDonald's after she went and spilled a cup of their
coffee on herself.
The reality of the case, however, is quite complex, and, frankly, horrifying.
In 1992, 79-year-old Stella Liebeck went through a McDonald's drive-through and ordered some
coffee.
Once she was back out of the drive-through, she pulled up on the lid to put in some cream—which,
you know, cools it down a little bit—and wound up dumping it all over her sweatpants-covered
lower half.
But coffee, especially McDonald's coffee, is hot: Even with clothes on, the brown stuff
caused third-degree burns on over 16 percent of Liebeck's body, including her thighs and
genitals, burning the skin away completely in some places.
During her eight-day hospitalization Liebeck underwent painful skin graft surgery.
Liebeck sued McDonald's, initially wanting just $20,000 to cover medical costs and lost
income during her recovery.
That's not so bad, but as we've made perfectly clear thus far, McDonald's is both cheap and
petty.
The company offered $800 (roughly 800 cups of McDonald's coffee), which was so insulting,
Liebeck's lawyers took them to court.
Ultimately, she was awarded about $3 million bucks by a jury who did find her partially
responsible, because she pulled up on the lid too hard, but McDonald's mostly responsible,
for serving coffee way too hot for human consumption or handling.
Among the information that came out in the trial: McDonald's required its restaurants
to serve coffee at 185 degrees, which is way hotter than what Mr. Coffee produces.
In fact, a thermodynamics expert testified a liquid that temperature can burn through
human skin in as little as two seconds.
Even more shocking: In the decade before the Liebeck case, McDonald's had received more
than 700 complaints from people who had burned themselves on the coffee—and yet the company
still refused to lower the temperature.
They could've lost no money, then could've lost just 20 K, but they lost 3 million, all
because they were stubborn.
Food, folks, and fantastic stupidity.
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